Red 1-2-3 Read Online Free PDF Page A

emotional equations:
    “You were delivered a blow, Jordan, when your parents announced their divorce. You need to rise above it.”
    It hadn’t been anywhere near that simple.
    She hated trite psychology. The school therapist had made it seem like life was little more than hanging on to a rope and swinging back and forth above some abyss and that Jordan had allowed her grip to slip loose.
    She felt like she had no home any longer, that everything in her life was a lie, that the two people closest to her were nothing more than illusion and deception. She had decided that she would never love anyone. Not anymore. And as angry as she was, she could not shake loose from the sensation that she was somehow to blame for something terrible, something that had ripped her life apart as casually as one might tear a shred of worn cloth into a rag.
    When she surveyed the landscape of her senior year of school, she could see nothing but rocks and crevasses strewn across dirt and mud. Boys 22
    RED 1–2–3
    she’d once happily experimented with sexually now mocked her. Girls she’d once thought were her friends now spent all their time trashing her behind her back. Her life had become so entwined, so knotted, that she didn’t know where to turn. Jordan’s typical day, she imagined: A miserable grade on a test in the morning; fumble the ball during basketball practice in the afternoon so often that the coach yells at you and then removes you from the starting lineup; eat alone in the dining hall at dinner because no one will sit with you.
    She wished she could hide somewhere, but even this was impossible.
    Her damn red hair—she hated it—made her stand out in every crowd, when all she wanted was to fade away into anonymity. She even tucked it up beneath a knit ski cap, but this hardly helped.
    She was walking along a pathway between the art studio and the science labs, head down, her parka scrunched up, her backpack jammed with books tugging at her shoulders. Cold rain dripped from the ivy that covered the dormitory buildings at her exclusive private school. At least, she thought, the weather fits my mood. Jordan plowed along, a little glad that the weather was driving everyone along the black macadam trails that crisscrossed the campus with the same rapid pace. It was early in the afternoon, although the dark gray skies made it seem like night was about to tumble down. She had basically skipped lunch, only ducking into the cafeteria for an orange, a hunk of French bread, and a small milk carton, which she stuffed into her parka pocket to eat in the solitude of her room.
    As a senior, she had managed to get a single—no roommate—in one of the smaller, converted houses that rimmed the campus. A regular New England white clapboard home built a century earlier, it had a wide front porch and a stately mahogany center stairwell. It had once been home to the school’s chaplains, and had a ghostly smell of religious devotion inside.
    Now it housed six upper-class girls and the women’s lacrosse coach and Spanish instructor, a Miss Gonzalez, who was supposed to act as a dorm parent and confidante, but who spent most of her free time meeting with the assistant football coach, young and married with two little children.
    Their sounds of their unbridled—and the girls thought sporting —passion 23
    JOHN KATZENBACH
    penetrated the walls and gave the girls in the dormitory something to laugh about and secretly envy.
    Thinking about the squeals, moans, and sighs of cheating that came from Miss Gonzalez’s suite actually brought a grin to Jordan’s lips. Letting go like that must really be wonderful, she imagined. It didn’t seem at all like her fumbling, self-conscious experiments with boys.
    She shook her head and slowly all her troubles crept back onto her shoulders and into her heart, as if the jammed backpack that weighed down on her neck was filled with far more than books. For the first time since the day she’d finished packing