Pants on Fire Read Online Free PDF

take a Dramamine beforehand if I win), and open the Quahog Festival, which takes place on the third Sunday of August.
    Which happens to be at the end of this week.
    And, okay, to qualify you have to have a GPA of at least 3.5 (which, believe me, rules out a LOT of girls at my school), and be willing to show up at a lot of cheesy events during the Eastport Towne Fair, such as the quahog-eating contest (disgusting) and the quahog races (boring. Bivalves aren’t very fast).
    But to compensate for all that, the winner also gets fifteen hundred dollars in scholarship money from the Eastport Quahog Festival committee.
    Even better, the money comes in the form of a check made out to the recipient, which she can deposit into her personal account and then spend on whatever she wants. I mean, they don’t check to make sure she spends it on her education.
    Which, I’ll be frank, is the reason I’m running for Quahog Princess.
    And, okay, I know I have zero chance, with Sidney running, too (she could care less about the money. She’s in it for the tiara).
    But at least I have a better chance than Morgan Castle. I mean, Morgan Castle can barely open her mouth in public, she’s so shy.
    Although she has a much better talent than I do. I mean, for competing in a beauty pageant.
    And yeah, I realize beauty pageants are sexist, and all of that. But come on. Fifteen hundred bucks? Even second place is a thousand. Third is five hundred.
    So even if both Sidney and Morgan beat me (which is likely), I’ll still be five hundred dollars up from where Iwould have been if I hadn’t entered (the only other entrant is Jenna Hicks, who has multiple nose and eyebrow piercings, only wears black no matter how hot it is outside, and whose mother is making her enter in order to make her socialize more with girls her own age who don’t list “Kafka” as their answer to Interests on their MySpace page. Which, not to be mean or anything, doesn’t exactly make Jenna Quahog Princess material).
    Which is good because my parents are making me cut back my hours at the Gull ’n Gulp to one night a week once school starts up again next month, so I will totally need the scratch.
    “What did he say?” I asked. “When you told Tommy about Quahog Princess?”
    Liam shrugged. “He laughed.”
    I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise.
    “He laughed ?” I did not like the sound of that. At all . “Laughed like how?”
    “What do you mean, laughed like how?” Liam wanted to know.
    “Like did he laugh like he thought it was funny,” I asked, “or like an evil genius? Was it ha ha ha ? Or MWA ha ha ?”
    “What is wrong with you?” Liam asked me, loudly enough to cause the Tiffanys and Brittanys to burst into a fresh batch of giggles, over by the towel desk.
    Whatever. Let them laugh. What do fourteen-year-olds in belly-baring tanks and yoga pants know about pain? (Not just the kind you get when your belly-buttonpiercing you got illegally in the city gets infected and you have to tell your mom so she can take you to the doctor, and then she grounds you.)
    I mean real pain, like trying to figure out what Tommy Sullivan could be doing back in town. He and his parents had moved away—to Westchester, outside of New York City, in a whole other state—the summer before our freshman year…the same summer I’d first played spin the bottle and kissed Seth. They never said they were moving because of what had happened the year before. In fact, my mom, who was their realtor and sold their house for them, said Mrs. Sullivan had told her they were moving so Mr. Sullivan could have a shorter commute to his job in Manhattan.
    But everyone had always sort of just assumed that what had happened with Tommy—and the outside of the new Eastport Middle School gymnasium wall—was a large part of why they left.
    So why had he come back? It’s true his grandparents still live here—we see them sometimes when Mom and Dad make us eat at the yacht club, which they