One Track Mind Read Online Free PDF

see that boy.
    She knew little about him except that he went to her high school and he didn’t fit in. He was one year ahead of her and had seemed to appear out of nowhere at the beginning of the spring semester.
    Her friend Shana said he was poor white trash, that he came from a broken home and his mother was a barmaid, and “was no better than she ought to be,” whatever that meant. Worse, his father was in prison for fraud. The boy’s name was Kane Ledger.
    Lori had secretly thought he was very handsome, and she suspected she wasn’t the only girl who did. But he had none of the things that most people in school had—no nice clothes, no stylish haircut, no car, no decent house or respectable family and apparently not even lunch money.
    He could’ve eaten the government-assisted free lunch with the other poor kids, but he didn’t. He sat alone in the lunch room, his nose in a library book. He looked like a hoodlum, and he never smiled or acted friendly. When he walked through the halls, he radiated a fierce solitude. It was as if he were the only real person in a teeming hoard of ghosts.
    Lori thought he was strange and probably no good. As her mother would say, he wasn’t one of “their kind.” That meant many things, including that he’d be lazy, slipshod and undependable.
    But he went straight to work, got the wheelbarrow and pruning shears and lopping shears out of the garden shed, leaned the leaf rake next to its door and then set out to work with an energy it was hard to ignore.
    He certainly didn’t move like Mr. Merkle, who plodded through the plants like an elderly tortoise, slowly going snip, snip, snip. No, Kane Ledger moved with speed and strength, so much that Lori suspected he didn’t really know what he was doing.
    She decided she should watch him carefully, because if he ruined her mother’s roses, there’d be hell to pay. Lori knew something about pruning because people couldn’t live in the same house with Kitty Simmons and not know more about roses than they ever wanted to.
    She narrowed her eyes to focus on him harder. She was almost disappointed that he did seem to know what he was doing. Was he Mr. Merkle’s apprentice or trainee or something?
    Well, it was good he was learning a trade. Shana had said she’d seen him digging ditches with some workmen along the highway during spring vacation. If he applied himself, he could be a gardener instead of a common laborer.
    The sun beat down harder. His dark hair was long and hung nearly to his shoulders. He took off his garden gloves, reached up and tied his hair back neatly with one of its own strands. It was a strange, efficient movement, and made him look rather like a young Native American brave.
    She was growing hot and wanted to go into the pool, but she wasn’t sure she should take off her cover-up. Her mother had let her have the two-piece bathing suit on the promise she wore it only at the family pool and that she didn’t “parade around” in front of members of the male sex.
    This particular male, however, hadn’t so much as glanced in her direction. It was as if she were so unremarkable that he didn’t realize she was there. But as the sun blazed down more hotly, he stopped, stripped off his damp white T-shirt, and she certainly became more aware of him.
    He was almost too lean, but his shoulders were surprisingly wide. He was totally snake-hipped, and his bare torso was all muscle, no fat. He was tanned, so tanned that she felt disgustingly pale.
    But she noted all this almost subconsciously because what struck her most about his bare skin was that he had tattoos. They covered his upper arms, his shoulder blades, and when he turned in her direction, she saw he had some kind of small tattoo above each of his nipples.
    She ducked her head, embarrassed, but fascinated, too. No respectable boy at Halesboro High had tattoos, but he had half a dozen or more. What kind of person was he?
    Not a person she should give a second