Platinum Read Online Free PDF Page A

mine, I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t see him. And, even though I didn’t want to admit it, I had a sinking feeling that he wasn’t a hallucination.
    It didn’t take me very long to decide that there was exactly one way to deal with Not Really There Boy, and that was to ignore him the way I ignored my more corporeal but equally annoying Non admirers. Since I didn’t have the stomach for explicitly crushing their little dorky hearts, I wasn’t left with many options, but usually, ignoring them eventually did the trick, and they got over me. With any luck, Hallucination Boy would do the same.
    Even if he didn’t, and even if he wasn’t, in fact, a hallucination, that wasn’t my primary concern. I’d broken at least ten social commandments when I’d cornered Lissy to ask her for help, the most important of which was “Thou shalt not leave Fuchsia Reynolds alone with thy boyfriend.” Currently, my so-called best friend was sitting in Brock’s lap, her skirt hiked up to Timbuktu and her hands on his face.
    I didn’t let my annoyance show as I walked toward the cozy twosome. Fuchsia was my friend, which meant she definitely wasn’t supposed to be giving my boyfriend a lap dance, but she was also Fuchsia, which meant that if I let her get away with it, she’d do it again.
    “Pumping him for information about Jackson?” I called out as I approached the table. “I hate to tell you this, Brock,” I continued, my voice light, joking, and deadly, “but she’s using you for your hot friends.” Fuchsia tore her eyes away from Brock’s just long enough to glance not-so-subtly around to see who had heard my completely innocuous question and my not-so-innocuous comment. I’d put her in an awkward position. To deny that she was using Brock to get to his friends, she’d have to explain what she was doing in his lap, but without denying it, she looked desperate, and desperate didn’t land a girl an A-list guy.
    With Fuchsia sufficiently distracted, I ran my hands through Brock’s thick hair, leaned over his chair, and kissed him upside down on the mouth a la Kirsten Dunst and Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man. I was doing an absolutely splendid job of ignoring the almost tangible stare of the dark-haired, not-there stranger and putting Fuchsia in check, all in one fell swoop.
    “What was that for?” Brock asked when I pulled away.
    I leaned down next to his ear. “Just for being you,” I said. “And for being nice to my friends, even when they are kind of…you know.” I made sure that Fuchsia heard the last, oh-so-sincere sentence. Clearly, I wasn’t insulting her. I was thanking my boyfriend for looking out for her, even in her present pathologically skanky state.
    Fuchsia’s eyes narrowed. It had me shaking in my boots. As if.
    “Aren’t you going to kiss me back?” I asked Brock, allowing my bottom lip to jut out just a little. Almost instantly, Brock was on his feet, and Fuchsia, ousted from his lap, was trying her best to look like getting up had been her own idea.
    Just as Brock’s lips were closing in on mine for the second time that lunch period, I felt someone else’s breath on my neck and low-spoken words in my left ear. “Well done, Princess.”
    “Aaaaarrrrgggkk!” The sound I made as I jumped away from the whisper and fell to the floor wasn’t exactly identifiable, but it was loud enough that when I looked up, everyone in the entire school was staring at me.
    No biggie, I told myself, refusing to allow a blush to creep up my cheeks. People stared at me all the time. It came with the territory. Instead of cringing at the fact that I was sprawled across the floor, I took the opportunity to show off my legs.
    When in doubt, show some skin.
    “Nice. Real nice,” the not-there boy said, a smirk on his red lips. “Classy, too.”
    This was so not good. No one else could see him. No one else could hear him, and ignoring him didn’t seem to be working too well. Luckily, however, I was nothing