Memento Nora Read Online Free PDF

she said as she nodded in the direction of the table by the art stacks.
     
    My best friend, Micah, and a girl, both with their heads down, almost touching, were working away at something. They were totally absorbed in whatever they were doing—and each other. It was as if they were in their own private bubble.
     
    And the girl was Nora James.
     
    Velvet was so right—for so many reasons. This was going to be bad. In my head, the whirring noise, like the running in my dreams, like the beating of hummingbird wings, returned. With a vengeance. Shit. I mumbled a good-bye, grabbed my books, and exited the library, Velvet hot on my heels.
     
    “I thought you guys were just friends,” she said.
     
    “That isn’t it.” And she knew it. She knew I was obsessed with someone else.
     
    Velvet put her arm around me. “Why don’t we try some retail therapy? Thrift shop variety, of course. Cheap but still therapeutic. Or we could dye our hair blue.”
     
    Velvet smelled like lavender. And she did look like Jet. The hummingbirds settled down to a dull flutter.
     
    I chose the blue option.
     

Minus the Gates
     
    Therapeutic Statement 42-03282028-11
Subject: JAMES, NORA EMILY, 15
Facility: HAMILTON DETENTION CENTER TFC-42
     
    That evening Dad’s car service took the girls and me to the football game and the lacrosse team party after it. I won’t bore you with party details—those are memories I want to keep, anyway—but let’s just say I doubted Micah would have fit in very well. I told myself as the service dropped me off that I wasn’t going to see him again.
     
    And I kept thinking that all weekend.
     
    Then Sunday evening we had a rare occurrence in our house: we all ate dinner together. We are like one of the Behind the Gates families, minus the gates. Everyone is successful. Busy. Off doing their own thing. Dad, aka Ethan Trevor James III, is a partner in Soft Target Security; and he runs some sort of operations center downtown for his biggest customer, TFC. I’d never been beyond the lobby because of the restrictions, but I imagined the people inside staring at banks and banks of monitors, watching every TFC in the world for break-ins or whatever. When he’s not working, which he always is, Dad likes to play golf or have drinks with his clients. They usually live in swanky compounds or high-rise security complexes.
     
    Mom—Sidney Woolf James—who I’ve probably made sound like a shopaholic, is a real estate attorney. She used to practice some other type of law when I was little, but now she handles the legal stuff on the sale of the pricey houses and lofts that Dad’s clients live in. I think it bores her. She rarely talks about it except to mention something about the house, like it’s a Craftsman bungalow or it used to be a shoe factory back in the day. She likes places with character and history. Places that don’t all look the same, she says. Places where you can see the lives that came before you. We always go on a celebratory shopping spree after a juicy closing.
     
    So I naturally tuned into the conversation when Mom mentioned she had a closing tomorrow afternoon for a property in Los Palamos. It’s one of those Behind the Gates compounds with its own schools, malls, and even police force. You never really need to leave. And you don’t have to worry about the city curfew as long as you stay in the compound.
     
    Mom winked at me. I knew she was thinking major shopping trip. Usually that would’ve thrilled me, but this time it made me feel queasy and hot.
     
    “I have a lot of clients at Los Palamos,” Dad said. “Great golf course. Brand-new mall. Excellent schools.”
     
    “Zero privacy. Twenty-four/seven surveillance,” Mom answered. “And they’re using that chip that lets them know where you are all the time.” Mom obviously didn’t think this was a good thing. “You can’t turn it off.”
     
    “Not one car bomb since it opened,” Dad said, looking at me. “Nora,