How They Met Read Online Free PDF

looking forward to the day that a man walks on the moon,” I replied. “Don’t take it personally.”
    “I try not to take anything personally, Antonia’s Sister.”
    I had looked at her eyes for a split second, but now I was looking at her arm. The light from the window was hitting it and I couldn’t stop staring. I’ll admit it—I have a thing for a little hair on a girl’s arms. Not head hair or anything like that—just that soft, translucent hair that looks like a spider wove it. She had that, and some freckles, too.
    “You’re new here,” I said. I mean, duh.
    “It shows?” she said in a dumb-little-girl voice. She tilted her head to the rest of the class. “Do they always stare like that?”
    “I’m not sure they’ve ever seen a nose ring before. They probably think you’re from MTV.”
    I don’t think Ashley was expecting me to joke. Her laugh caught even her by surprise. She kinda laughed like a barking seal. It wasn’t very cute, but it was definitely sexy that she didn’t care.
    “I’m starting to see why Mr. Ancient up there thought I was you.”
    If she’d asked me to jump her right then and there, I swear I would’ve. It’s like my mind and my body had the same voice, and they were both yelling,
Hell, yeah.
The only difference being that my mind, which knew a little better, added,
Oh shit. Trouble.
    “So do I get your real name?” she asked as the bell rang and we had to head to class.
    “Lucy,” I told her.
    “I’ll be seeing you around, Miss Lucy,” she said.
    That sealed it. I was completely in danger of falling in love.
    Nobody’d ever called me Miss Lucy like that before.
    Only a certain kind of girl could make
Miss Lucy
sound tough.
             
    There’s some history here.
    With all due respect to my mother (although I’m not sure how much respect she’s truly due), Lucy has never been the right name for me. The role models were all wrong. Like Lucy from the
Peanuts
comics. Okay, so she was probably a lesbian. I mean, her brother’s gay (thumbsucker!) and Schroeder, the boy she pretends to have a crush on, is so gay it hurts my teeth. Plus she’s friends with Peppermint Patty and Marcie, whose relationship has lasted longer than my grandparents’. But even if she was a lesbian, I wasn’t going to be like Lucy. I didn’t want to be. You get a sense from watching her that she’s going to end up being somebody’s evil boss.
    And then, of course, there was Lucy Ricardo from
I Love Lucy.
I wanted to love Lucy, really I did. I kept waiting for the episode where Lucy and Ethel finally ran off together and made out. But eventually I realized that wasn’t going to happen. Lucy was scatterbrained like me, all right, and I could definitely relate to the way everything she touched turned into a complete mess. But I knew I’d last a whole five minutes with a guy like Ricky. Maybe not even that. I understood that deep down he was supposed to love her and all, but most of the time I found him to be a whining prick. I’d been there—thank you, Lily—and I had no intention to go back again.
    That left me with the only famous Lucy remaining: the one who had a steamboat. She came into my life in the same way she comes into most girls’ lives—at recess. I was in second grade, and the second-grade girls were sharing the pavement with the fourth-grade girls—the fourth-grade girls being, in my second-grade eyes, girls of infinite wisdom and certitude. I never would have gotten close enough to hear a single word the fourth-grade girls said, but Mrs. Shedlow, the recess supervisor, was a firm believer in democracy, so she’d lined us up second-fourth, second-fourth for the jump-roping. She took one end of the rope and Rachel Cullins’s older sister, Eve, took the other. My friend Grace was the first girl to jump, and the rhyme she got was a familiar one:

    Strawberry shortcake
    Cream on top
    Tell me the name
    of your sweet heart.
    Is it A…B…C…?

    Grace’s foot