Nothing Like You Read Online Free PDF Page A

bagged lunch and a book. This time it was bagged lunch, my Spanish workbook, and Saskia Van Wyck. I was obsessed. Suddenly. How could someone who spent years loving shiny, willowy, well-adjusted Saskia be even slightly interested in someone like me?
     
    I tucked some of the fabric from my dress up under mybra and it stayed there, stuck to my sweaty skin. The temperature hadn’t dipped below ninety in four days. We were indoors with AC and still, I felt as if I couldn’t escape the heat.
     
    Somehow, impossibly, Saskia looked fresh as a buttercup. Cool and put together but more importantly,
dry
. I pulled my dress loose from underneath my boobs and straightened up. Certain my face was shiny and pink, I tucked my head down, skimming my worksheet and wondering why I felt so nauseated. When I looked back up, she was staring back. We caught eyes for a second or two, then she turned back to her friend.
     
    Gym. I considered skipping but then didn’t. My grades had been crap after a shitty last spring and an uninspired fall, and since college applications were due in less than three months, I figured an easy A in Phys Ed couldn’t hurt. So I sucked it up and went. I changed into my stinky gym shirt and shorts in the toilet stall off the changing room and hauled myself out onto the crispy, beige-colored field where the grass felt like straw beneath my sneakers. I played forty-five minutes of soccer in ninety-two-degree heat with a bunch of blond girls who seemed equally unexcited by team sports, then I dragged my sweaty self off the field and back to the locker room, where I took a twenty-five-second ice-cold shower before slipping back into my dry dress and sneakers.
     
    After that, I walked to my car. I was trying to get the hairoff my neck, scooping it all up in one fist and twisting it into a rubber band, when suddenly, there was Paul right next to me, matching me step for step. He wasn’t saying anything. I looked at him and he looked at me and then we just kept walking. So I stopped. I turned sideways and said, “Can I help you with something?” And he cracked his knuckles and said, “Come with me.”
     
    After forty-five minutes of soccer, I said yes to a hike. I told him I had to stop home and get Harry, so we picked up the dog and drove up the mountain to Red Rock Canyon. Harry hung his head out the window and I chewed at my nails and wiped sweat from my forehead and watched Paul while he drove. He smoked two cigarettes, sang the chorus to a song that was playing on the radio, and every now and then he’d lean toward me as if he were trying to brush against me or something but the armrest and the stick shift were getting in his way.
     
    We parked. We got out of the car and walked for a while. We walked and we walked and we didn’t really say much, we just got hot in the sun and breathed hard, eventually stopping to sit on a rock.
     
    Paul said, “I’m kind of obsessed with you, Holly.”
     
    I didn’t know what to say back. I couldn’t imagine anyone really, really liking me. “You’re a liar,” I said.
     
    “I’m not.” He put his hand in front of his face to block out the sun. “Remember when your mom died?”
     
    “No,” I said.
     
    It took him a long minute before he got the joke but then he laughed so hard his eyes disappeared. “You’re funny,” he said.
     
    “You think?” I pulled on my dress, now stuck to my skin. I was wearing an old gauzy cotton dress of Mom’s and it occurred to me, suddenly, that I might be able to catch cancer through her clothes. I shifted around, then ran a hand discreetly down the side of my boob. No lumps.
     
    “How come you seemed so fine afterward?”
     
    I shrugged. They’d made such a spectacle at school when Mom died. They’d made an announcement over the PA system and I got tons of cards from teachers and even a few from students I’d never talked to. “I don’t know,” I said, which was the truth. I didn’t know. I’d been so sick