Killing Britney Read Online Free PDF Page A

morning. She hoped that if she just ignored it, maybe she could roll over and fall back asleep. The sadness she’d felt when she’d gone to bed had lingered and sunk into her bones in the night.
    “Britney! Enough already! For the hundredth time, do you have any idea what time it is?”
    “Sort of,” she mumbled.
    Peering with one half-closed eye at the Peanuts clock she’d had on her wall since she had learned to tell time, she saw it was already 11 a.m.
    When her father stuck his head around her door, she had to scramble for the blankets so he wouldn’t catch her naked.
    “Jesus, Dad!”
    He stepped inside and leaned against the wall. He was wearing his yard work clothes: faded jeans and a green-and-white rugby shirt.
    “Are you up yet?”
    “Now I am!”
    “Good. And are you feeling any better?” He smiled softly, but she could tell it was fake.
    She snuggled into her covers, balled them in her fists up under her chin. “No,” she said bluntly.
    Moving right to the point, he said, “Well, I need you up now. I want you to take Adam downtown in, oh—” He glanced at his watch. “I actually wanted you to be gone by now, but let’s say half an hour. His parents and I have decided he needs to find a job.”
    “Ugh.” She hid her head under the blanket and squirmed.
    “I can’t do it, Britney. And whatever it is between the two of you, I need you to get over it. He’s a troubled kid.”
    “I know he’s a troubled kid. Last time he was here, he chased me around that berry farm we went to with a dead mole.”
    “Last time he was here, the two of you were only nine years old. And even if you think he is annoying, you’re the mature one. You can handle it. Let’s go.” Clapping, he said, “He’s waiting for you.”
    “Fine. Whatever,” she said, and her father left her alone again.
    Adam didn’t know anybody in Madison and he didn’t know how things worked here. From the day Britney had been told he was coming to stay with them, she’d worried that he’d cramp her style. He was funny looking, maybe not pimply, but too skinny for his height. He dressed preppy—that might go over all right in New Hampshire, but it was the furthest thing from cool in Wisconsin. Light blue Tommy Hilfiger oxfords and pleated khakis and beat-up old running shoes. Instead of the heavy insulated parkas everyone around here wore to keep out the winter wind, he wore a canvas Lands’ End hunting jacket. He parted his floppy hair on the side. In New Hampshire, he’d apparently been a star on the golf team. The golf team! That was like being the star of the chess club. When he walked, his elbows and knees bopped around as if someone had taken the joints out of them.
    And there was something awkward and unpleasant about him. He had a malicious way of teasing her, pestering her for no reason, long after she told him to leave her alone.
    Now, as he sat next to her in the passenger seat of the bright yellow VW Bug that her father had bought her for her sixteenth birthday—the new kind with the wrapping, oversized aerodynamic windows and the thing on the dash designed to hold flowers—he kept asking her questions as if he were doing research or something. “How many people live in Madison?” “Besides cheese and milk and stuff, what other industries do you have here?” “Is it true people here drink more beer than the whole rest of the country combined?”
    Her stock answer to all of these questions was, “I don’t know.” She couldn’t fathom why these things mattered to him—unless he was just being willfully annoying, which would make sense; that’s how he usually was.
    “I’ve heard there’s a wicked rock scene here. Are there any cool bands I should check out right now?”
    She turned on the radio. “I don’t know, Adam,” she said. “Why don’t you scan the channels for a while and see?”
    “I mean underground stuff that doesn’t make the radio. The stuff you can only pick up on the QT.”
    “I