Liv, Forever Read Online Free PDF Page B

There are a
number
of things I have to be a part of.”
    “Like … now?” I didn’t get it. His list sounded like a resume for some job application.
    He shrugged. He wasn’t going to elaborate.
    “But why is it so important to your dad?”
    “Because I’m an Astor.”
    “What’s that?”
    His face broke again into the most perfect imperfect smile.
    “
What
?” I asked, starting to feel self-conscious.
    “I think I’ve been waiting for you my whole life.”
    “It must’ve been a pretty boring life.”
    “It was. Then I met you.”

 
    Day one of classes and the first thing I learned is that I was not, in fact, a junior in high school. I was a Fifth Former or, if talking to an outsider, “a Fifth-Form Wicky.” Someone said it’s something they do in England. The Wickies had different words for lots of things. Not that anyone spoke to me much. I felt the entire campus was looking down on me. Or, rather, looking
through
me. No one noticed me. And I’m not just talking about the students—the teachers, too. I wasn’t expecting a parade or anything, but after the public humiliation of the first day, I thought they might soften toward the transfers. At my old school, the new students would always at least be introduced in homeroom. Of course, Wickham Hall didn’t even have homeroom. They probably considered it too common or something.
    I can’t say I minded not having to stand up and introduce myself, but a simple acknowledgment might’ve beennice. It was like the teachers already had their favorite star students and had no interest in a new one.
    My first class was English literature. The teacher, Mrs. Winslow, explained that Minerva and Wallace Wickham had personally established the Wickham Hall curriculum. And because they were great lovers of Romantic poetry, we’d spend the better part of the first semester on it. We’d start with the “big six” writers. William Blake first.
    Blake was one of my favorites, always, because he was a poet
and
an artist. He illustrated his own poems, mixing text with imagery. And that’s what I liked to do. I never wrote actual poems, but I used text. Also, he was almost as obsessed with angels as I was.
    We read “A Little Girl Lost” aloud. The first stanza always got me:
    “Children of the future age,
    Reading this indignant page,
    Know that in a former time
    Love, sweet love, was thought a crime.”
     
    He was so certain things would have changed for us “children of the future age.” But had they? Had we even come close to attaining Blake’s vision of “free love”? At Wickham Hall they wouldn’t even let you be alone with a guy.
    When Mrs. Winslow asked what the father in the poem might stand for, I raised my hand. I was pretty sure I knew. Social restraint, conventions, rules. But she completelyignored me. One of the Sloans from my dorm got called on instead and guess what? I was right.
    Then Malcolm’s blond friend piped up. “But couldn’t love be a crime?” he asked, smiling incessantly. “If you loved the wrong person?”
    From snippets of conversation around campus, I’d gathered that his name was Kent Steers and that he was Abigail’s twin brother. It made sense. He had her same straight blonde hair. And I’d known his smile seemed familiar when I first saw him in the dining hall.
    “Fascinating concept, Kent. Not a theme that’s central to the poem, but very,
very
interesting,” Mrs. Winslow fawned.
    But none of the teacher’s favorites—the Sloans or Charlottes or Dylans or Kents—seemed to notice the irony of reading this poem at Wickham Hall.
    I CHECKED MY SMALL metal mailbox in the Student Activity Center on my way to lunch. I found one piece of paper, a memo marked URGENT . It read:
    To: All Wickham Hall Transfer Students
    From: Headmaster Thorton
    Each of you needs to check in at the infirmary today for your start-of-year physical exam. Nurse Cobbs will be available all day.
     
    I consulted my campus map and discovered