Immortal Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

swallowed, cradling the broken doves in her lap. “No, you go. I’ll get it.”
    He nodded once, his shaggy dark hair flopping over his forehead. With his face free from powder and fresh from sleep, he could have been any average teenage boy stumbling out of bed.
    Assuming the average teenage boy would be caught dead wearing black nail polish.
    “There’s money in my purse,” Liz said. “For the ice cream.”
    Zack’s mouth flattened. Did he remember the last bitter fight they’d had before leaving North Carolina, when she’d accused him of taking money from her purse to buy drugs?
    Of course he did. Zack—sensitive, observant, intelligent—remembered everything.
    A fresh start, she reminded herself. For all of them.
    She held his gaze.
    “Sweet,” he said at last. “Thanks.”
    Liz expelled a shaky breath.
    They would be all right, she thought as she listened to the front door click shut behind them. The sound of their footsteps thumped down the steps and faded away. Everything was going to be all right.
    In time.
    She regarded the fractured crystal in her hands, the furled and frozen wings, the fault line running through its pedestal like a bolt of buried lightning, and a storm of grief shook her heart.
    She closed her eyes. A tear oozed beneath her shut lids and rolled unchecked down her cheek.

    Zack shot a glance at the girl behind the cash register. His age, maybe a year older. With girls sometimes it was hard to tell. She was pretty, with purple eye shadow and a silver lip ring at the corner of her mouth. She was reading some thick book, but as he approached, she closed the black-and-white cover and shoved it beside the register.
    Zack put his purchases on the counter without making eye contact. The Invisible Man.
    The girl picked up the box of hair color with one hand. “This yours?”
    Zack gave her his walled-off look. The store—WILEY’S GROCERY, announced the painted sign out front in big, old-fashioned letters—was practically empty. Who did she think he was buying it for?
    “Because the other brand is better,” she said, as if he’d asked. “Not as harsh. And it comes with this little conditioning tube—”
    “This is fine,” he interrupted. “And an ice cream bar, please.”
    “Self-serve,” she told him. “In the freezer.”
    “I know.” He dug in his front jeans pocket for his wallet. “It’s for my sister.”
    The cashier glanced toward the front of the store where a freezer case sat next to a bunch of store displays. Sunscreen. Bug spray. Charcoal briquettes. Emily propped the door open, shivering in the fog that rolled off the bags of ice.
    The girl behind the cash register arched her eyebrows. “That’s her? That’s your sister?”
    His mom was always going on about people in small towns, how everybody knew everybody and looked out for each other. He couldn’t explain he didn’t want people to know him without going into the reasons why, so he just nodded.
    Emily selected an ice cream bar, letting the freezer door thump shut. Zack watched her peel back the paper.
    “She doesn’t look like you,” observed the cashier.
    No, she didn’t. Emily took after their father, Ben: warm brown eyes, warm brown skin, warm, wide smile.
    “I’m adopted.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    Zack lifted one shoulder in a shrug. He didn’t care if she believed him or not.
    She blinked her purple-lidded eyes. “Seriously? Because some days I wish I was adopted. I used to pretend that my parents, my real parents, my fabulously wealthy real parents who lived in, like, the Bahamas or New York City or someplace . . . Anyway, I used to imagine that one day they’d show up and take me away and give me everything I ever wanted. A pony. A canopy bed. A scholarship to Harvard.”
    He bet nobody in this crappy town on this godforsaken rock in the middle of the ocean ever went to Harvard.
    “You want a pony,” he repeated.
    “I want to get off World’s End,” she said frankly. “I want