Kill You Last Read Online Free PDF Page A

intramural volleyball for years.
    “Mom says they probably ran away and will pop up in a day or two,” I said.
    “Three girls from different states ran away together?” Roman repeated dubiously.
    I winced at how dumb that must’ve sounded. On the screen, Roman’s eyebrows dipped with concern. “Should I not be saying this stuff?”
    “No, it’s okay.…I guess.”
    “If you ask me, it’s just plain sucky,” Roman said. “I mean, I like your dad, and I think it’s a ridiculous leap from catching someone staring at your cleavage to assuming he’s going around hurting people, but—”
    “Wait,” I said. “Nobody said anyone’s been hurt. Maybe they didn’t run away together , but that doesn’t mean they didn’t go somewhere. They could have all joined a cult.”
    “The Kirby Sloan head shot cult?”
    I sighed. “Let’s talk about something else.” I told her about my interview at Sarah Lawrence that morning, and Roman told me that she’d decided to apply early decision to Skidmore, where she wanted to pursue art and dance. When we finished, I closed my laptop and sat on my bed, feeling really, really down about the rumors concerning Dad. Was it partly my fault for never saying anything to him about the way he sometimes acted around my friends? I guess there are parts of our lives that we’re aware of, but we try to make them go away by not thinking about them. I realized I was guilty of the same thing Mom was—we believe that if we don’t think about certain problems, they won’t be true. There’d been so many embarrassing things Dad had said over the years.…Like once he’d asked me what Courtney’s bra size was. And then there was the time he wanted to know what my friends and I talked about when we took showers after gym, and other times when he made sexist jokes that I found seriously distasteful. And then there was the Ferrari, and how before I was old enough to drive, he used to love to pick me up at school in it. Nothing seemed to make him happier than when one of my friends asked if he would take her for a ride around the block before we went home. And since it was a two-seater, that always meant going off with her alone.
    If only I’d said something, told him that some of the things he did and said were borderline creepy…Maybe it would have made a difference. Maybe he would have been more careful about the way he acted and we wouldn’t be in this situation now, where everyone assumed he was guilty of having something to do with those missing girls.
    But like everything, there was another side to the story. Most of the fun times I’d had with my family had come because Dad had gotten us to go out and do something. And when I was upset, he’d always been the one I’d gone to, the one I could depend on to help me feel better. Mom never seemed to understand me the way he did, and for that reason I needed him and was a little afraid of doing anything that might make him angry. So as those moments came when maybe I should have said something about his behavior, I’d just tried to laugh it all off, saying things like “Oh, it’s just Dad being Dad” and “He’s harmless.” Because, I realized now, that’s what I wanted to believe.
    My BlackBerry buzzed. I picked it up and felt my jaw tighten. It was another e-mail from [email protected]: Wre I 2 die today, my dying wish would B 2 C Ur dad get what he deserves.
    I sat up on the side of my bed, thinking I should show it to Mom, but then caught myself. She was already upset about what was happening with Dad and with imagining a life without me at home. Showing her another e-mail like this wouldn’t help. The best thing I could do about this latest e-mail, I decided, was to keep it to myself.
    And there was something else: like the last one, this message had come as an e-mail, but was written like a text. What did that say about the person who’d sent it?

Chapter 8
    I’D GIVEN UP on my homework and was skipping around