Puddle Jumping Read Online Free PDF

class and he would move to the back row with me tomorrow. Mercer had given me a look like he didn’t believe me, but I didn’t back down.
    An agreement was reached and I made sure to wait for Colton as we left class, knowing after seeing his schedule he was going back to the Resources room for another period.
    He smiled a tiny bit when we reached the room, but turned abruptly and found his seat at the back of the class again. Like the creepy stalker-girl I am, I watched him settle in and then moved out of sight so he didn’t know I was still there.
    It was when I moved out of his view that I caught sight of the poster behind his head. It was of two pair of sneaker clad feet, one male and one female, frozen mid-air before landing in a deep puddle of water. Looking from their feet upward to their legs and higher, the shot revealed fingers knotted together as the boy and girl held hands. It was raining. It was black and white. And the only words on the poster were, FRIENDSHIP: A true friend is one soul in two bodies – Aristotle.
    So cheesy, but all of that stuff in school is. Yet, this particular poster didn’t seem that bad to me.
    It made me wonder if it were true.
     
     

 
    A fter school, I completely ditched Harper and waited for Colton outside his last class. If he was surprised to see me, he didn’t let on. Instead, he fell in by my side as if we’d been walking through the halls of our school together for years.
    “Want a ride home?” I asked, my palms all sweaty again.
    His head shook slowly from side to side. “At three-thirty-five I’m supposed to be standing outside for my mother.”
    I smiled as big as I could. “Then I’ll wait with you.”
    A nod. That was all I got, but it didn’t matter. It was something.
    I’ll be honest, I was more nervous about facing Sheila Neely again than I was to first approach her son. While we waited for her to drive the long loop set aside for car riders, mostly freshman, I thought of things I could talk to him about. Like, why the hell he was suddenly at school?
    Instead, I chickened out. “Are you busy after school tomorrow?”
    His answer was abrupt. “Yes.”
    Look, being a girl in high school is hard enough. But add having to do the ‘dude’ duty of asking someone to hang out was making my head want to implode. And we didn’t want that.
    About that time, his mom pulled slowly up before crawling to a stop. She rolled the passenger’s side window down and then kind of pulled her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose as she squinted to see if I was really standing next to her son.
    “Lilly Evans.” The way she said my name made my nose scrunch. I said hello and she laughed, her head thrown back and reddish hair bouncing. “I didn’t think you’d make it to sixteen . . . much less your senior year.”
    Touché, Mrs. Neely. One point for you.
    Colton was getting into the passenger seat, blocking my view of her, so I moved around to her window. She’d smiled wide and pushed her glasses into her hair to address me. I was leaning in and trying to speak loud enough for both of them to hear.
    “Would you mind if I picked Colton up for school in the morning? I can bring him home, too, if that’s okay with you.”
    I swear on a stack of Bibles, her eyes got so wide I thought she was going to have a stroke.
    “Really?”
    “Yeah, really. He has a class with me and stuff, so I figured we could ride together and his locker is next to mine and then he wouldn’t have to be dropped off and picked up . . .”
    She held a hand up to stop me and for a moment I thought she had tears in her eyes. “Absolutely.”
    “Awesome.” It was like I could finally, finally breathe again. I was going to take care of Colton this time, not the other way around.
    “He has a class tomorrow at the community college. Can you take him?” She looked so hopeful.
    “Sure. Should I . . . sit in?” I couldn’t remember if it was called shadowing or auditing or whatever, but neither