No Safe House Read Online Free PDF

letting him get into her pants. “So what is it? I’ve tried a few things. Not just pot.” A lie, but one had to keep up appearances.
    “Nothing like that,” Stuart said. “You ever driven a Porsche?”
    That took her by surprise. “I’ve never driven anything, you idiot. I won’t have a license for two more years.”
    “I mean, you ever
ridden
in a Porsche?”
    “Like, is that the sports car?”
    “Jesus, you don’t know what a Porsche is?”
    “Yeah, I know. Okay. Why you asking me if I ever had a ride in a Porsche?”
    “Have you?”
    “No,” Grace said. “At least, I don’t think I ever have. But I don’t exactly pay a lot of attention to what kind of car I’m getting into. Maybe I was in one and didn’t know it.”
    “I think,” the boy said, “if you’d been in a Porsche, you’d kinda know. It’s not like an average car. It’s all low and swoopy and shit and fast as fuck.”
    “Okay, so no.”
    Stuart was kind of hot looking, and one of the cool kids, although not exactly in a good way. He had that don’t-give-a-shit thing going on, which had some appeal to a girl who was sick to death of having to make safe choices. But after being out with him three times, she was starting to think there wasn’t a whole lot going on inside that head of his.
    Grace hadn’t told her father she was seeing Stuart, because he knew exactly who the boy was. She could recall her dad bringing up his name more than once, back when Stuart was in her dad’s English class two years earlier. He’d be marking papers in the evening at the kitchen table and say something about this Stuart kid being thick as a plank, which her dad didn’t do very often because he said it wasn’t professional. He said it wasn’t right to comment on the work of students his daughter might know, but once in a while, if the kid was dumb enough, he slipped.
    Grace remembered a joke her dad had made. For a long time, right up until this year, she’d thought she might like to be an astronaut, someone who went up to the International Space Station. Her dad had said maybe Stuart could be an astronaut, too, because all he did in class was take up space.
    Tonight, Grace had to wonder whether maybe her father had this boy nailed.
    One time, Stuart had asked her what she wanted to do when she finished school, and when she’d told him, he’d said, “Seriously? They only send guys up into space.”
    “Hello?” she’d shot back. “Sally Ride? Svetlana Savitskaya? Roberta Bondar?”
    “You can’t just make up names,” he’d said.
    Oh well. It wasn’t like she had to marry him. She just wantedto have some … fun. She wanted to take a few … risks. And wasn’t that just what he’d asked if she’d like to do?
    “I have definitely never ridden in a Porsche.”
    Stuart grinned. “Want to?”
    She shrugged. “Yeah, sure. Why not?”
    A cell phone started buzzing.
    “That’s you,” Stuart said.
    Grace dug her phone out of her purse, glanced at the screen. “Oh, jeez.”
    “Who is it?”
    “My dad. I’m kind of supposed to be home by now.” It was nearing ten.
    Adopting a deep baritone voice, Stuart said, “You get home right now, young lady, and do your homework.”
    “Stop it.” Even if her dad was a huge pain in the ass at times, she didn’t like other people mocking him. She hated it, at school, when she’d hear other kids running her dad down. It was no picnic, going to the same school where your dad taught. All these extra expectations to be a good kid, have above-average marks. After all, they’d say, she’s a teacher’s daughter. Talk about a cross to bear. Not that her marks were bad. She did pretty well, especially in science, although sometimes she’d write a couple of wrong answers just so she wouldn’t get a hundred percent and have the boys call her Amy Farrah Fowler, the nerdy scientist girl on that TV show.
    “You gonna talk to him or not?” Stuart asked as Grace’s phone continued to buzz.
    She