Red Heart Tattoo Read Online Free PDF

Morgan happy and honestly didn’t know how to handle the days when she felt controlled by her hormones. She didn’t know how to handle such days either, so she kept to herself when they happened.
    Kelli sprang off the bed. “Don’t you start on me!”
    “I’m not.” Morgan glanced around the bedroom heaped with clothes and old food wrappers, unwashed plates and glasses hardened with milk stains. “I’ve—uh—never seen you let your space get so trashed before.”
    “Well, thanks,
Mom
,” Kelli snapped. She scooted off the bed and started picking up the mess on the floor.
    “Hey, I didn’t mean—”
    “Just go,” Kelli said, a sharp edge to her voice.
    Offended, Morgan recoiled.
    Kelli marched to her closet, dropped a pile of wadded clothes onto the floor and hung her head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be ugly to you. I’m just trying to figure out some things. Forgive me?”
    Morgan stood up. “Of course. I—I hate to see you so unhappy. We’re friends. We should be able to talk about what’s bothering you.”
    Kelli clutched a jacket to her chest, a jacket Morgan recognized as one of Mark’s. “I will,” she said. “I just need some space right now.”
    “I can live with that,” Morgan said, not certain she could, but knowing she shouldn’t pressure Kelli. Nobody liked to be nagged. Kelli would talk to her when she was ready. She walked to the door, paused. “You’re my bestfriend in the whole world, Kelli Larson. I don’t think it’s right to let Mark make you crazy. I know he loves you.”
    “Right,” Kelli mumbled without conviction. “He just doesn’t love me enough.”
    Baffled and confused, Morgan left Kelli alone in the ruins of her bedroom.

“C arla, you here?” Roth called out as he walked through Uncle Max’s house. He heaved his book bag onto the counter and looked at the kitchen clock. It was after five.
    “You by yourself?” Carla’s voice answered from the back porch.
    Roth opened the door and stepped onto the weathered wood deck. Carla sat in an old lawn chair. She was wrapped in a quilt, one hand hidden from sight. Roth winked. “Just me.”
    She blew out a mouthful of smoke and eased her hand forward to reveal a cigarette. “Good,” she said. “I just lit up and would have hated to toss it.”
    Max didn’t like her smoking and she’d tried to quit many times, but every now and then she slipped up and just had to have one. Roth was the only person who knew. She slid a lawn chair toward him with her foot. “Sit.”
    Roth flopped.
    “He called to say he was running late, so I took a chance. Don’t ever start smoking, then you’ll never have to stop.” She took a long drag. “How was your day?”
    “Before or after Trent Caparella and his jock buddies got in my face?”
    “Why’d they go after you?”
    “Trent doesn’t like me looking at his girl.”
    “Is she pretty?”
    Roth flashed a devilish grin. “Best-looking girl in the school.”
    Carla laughed. “You touch her?”
    “Not yet.”
    “She worth getting beat up for?”
    Roth shrugged. “Haven’t decided.”
    Carla searched him with her eyes. “Sure you have.”
    “Never could fool you,” he said with a laugh.
    Carla was more a mother to Roth than his real one had been so many years ago. His memory of both his parents was sketchy; the thing most vivid, most haunting in his memory was the ball of fire that had taken them away. He kept a wedding photo of them in the drawer beside his bed. Max had given it to him. “You should remember them when they were happy,” Max had said. “Not what they became after meth took them over.” Roth had been angry at his parents for years, all the time he had spent in foster care, before Max had come along, war-wounded but determined to raise his brother’s kid. Why had his parents loved meth more than him? He was their flesh andblood. Meth was just in their blood. And yet meth had won the war for their minds and bodies. Roth was collateral