Imaginary Enemy Read Online Free PDF

not a snitch. I won’t tell.”
    I didn’t believe him in spite of our code. This was big. Too much for one person to bear the responsibility for.
             
    By evening, all the bubbles were gone. The waterworks looked sterile. Their flowers and grasses had been stripped away and thrown on the compost heap. The mosses carpeting the stones had turned a dull muddy color. When I stood near them, the smell of rotting vegetation assaulted me.
    The rest of the yard looked festive. Strings of Japanese lanterns were stretched between the trees. Tiny white lights were twined around the trunks and into the fronds of the palms. Mason jars half-filled with sand flickered with tea-light candles on the tables. Wreaths of fern and baby’s breath circled the jars.
    I looked around for Sharp, wondering if he was angry with me. Then Chord walked up. “Where’s Sharp?” I asked.
    “You won’t be seeing his face for a good long time. Jazz and I are smuggling in bread and water.”
    “Is he coming to the party?”
    “No way. He’s not allowed to leave his room ’cept to go to the bathroom. And he has to do yard work all summer. Elliot says he needs to learn to appreciate the balance of nature.”
    I looked up at the second-story window of what I knew to be the bedroom Sharp shared with Jazz and Chord. Light was spilling through the glass. I wondered what Sharp was doing…. Reading, practicing an instrument, seething?
    I glanced across the patio at Elliot and my father, engaged in an intense conversation. Certain that Dad was learning of my part in Elliot’s backyard environmental disaster, I knew I’d soon be in as much trouble as Sharp. I decided to visit the food table and fuel up before I got evicted, or imprisoned, or entombed, or whatever. I took my plate to the farthest corner of the yard, where there was an arbor with two benches and a small pond. The structure was made of gray limbs that were long and straight, with the bark and smaller branches stripped away. Elliot had built it years ago from the remains of a tree that had snapped during a hurricane.
    I sat on the bench. The sweetness of the jasmine climbing the arbor mingled with the pleasing aromas wafting from my plate of food. I suddenly wondered if the koi that usually swam in the pond had survived our crime. I began to eat. I wasn’t exactly gluttonous, but maybe filling my stomach would displace the guilt lingering inside me. Was it my fault Sharp had been stupid enough to tattle on himself? I absently tossed a crust of bread into the little pond. Had the soap killed Elliot’s fish? I gazed into the water but saw no movement, only the vaguest reflection of my own face—but it was dark, after all. They
had
to be in there, with their lovely, nearly translucent tails spreading behind them.
    The wind chimes hanging from the arbor tinkled and I looked up at the house. Sharp stood in the window, the light behind him illuminating his hair like a halo. A halo? Or was that my guilt again? I popped a shrimp into my mouth but it stuck in my throat. I felt an unreasonable, ridiculous urge to confess—to go to Elliot and beg his forgiveness. I took a sip of punch to wash down the shrimp. Why should I fess up just because Sharp did? Is it my fault he’s so stupid? I asked myself defensively as I bit into a cheese straw. He knew what was at stake. He should have kept his big mouth shut.
    Sharp’s silhouette left the window. I saw him cross to the doorway, where the light switch was mounted, and then the room went dark. I imagined him lying on his back staring at the ceiling, furious with me.
    Luke, now almost fifteen, sat down on the bench across from me with his long legs sprawled out in front of him. “So, Janie, you’re letting Sharp take the heat all alone?” he asked. Luke and my father were the only two people on the planet who got away with calling me Janie. Sometimes Chord or Zander taunted me with that nickname, but I always made them pay. Zander I’d