Rivals Read Online Free PDF Page B

wanted to show him she didn’t think he was a bad
person. It meant so much, to see her smile like that, her face just a few
inches away from his. Her mouth so close to his. He leaned in just a little
closer, and she did, too.
    “You rock,
Lucy,” he breathed.
    “Thanks,” she
said. One of her hands tangled in the hair on the back of his head and she
started pulling him even closer. Their lips grazed each other and he felt her
braces underneath.
    He pulled back
hurriedly. He had just almost kissed her! That wasn’t cool. Desperately, he
tried to think of something to say that would smooth over what had just
happened. “Best friends forever, that’s what the girls say, right? BFFs?” he
asked her.
    He didn’t
understand the look in her eyes. It was hopeful and terrified and lost and
disappointed and burning with triumph all at the same time. He had no idea
what she was thinking, or feeling.
    Then she lifted
her arms away from him and reached for her leg braces. “I have to go home,”
she said. “I forgot that I have to get dinner ready tonight, Mom is working
late and if I don’t get the pork chops started right now my Dad isn’t going to
have anything to eat, and he’ll just laugh, and then he’ll say forget the pork
chops let’s order a pizza, which would normally be cool, except his cholesterol
is up again and the doctor says he can’t have any cheese, and anyway I can’t
eat pizza because it makes me break out but I want you to know, I’m totally
your BFF, and I will always be here for you if you want to, to, to talk, yes,
to talk, or you know, just hang out. Chill. Be cool, together, just two
friends hanging, we don’t even have to talk, we can just be quiet sometime and
see how long that lasts which, you know perfectly well, for me is not going to
be that long. But we could try that.”
    “Thanks,” he
told her, as she hobbled out the door. She didn’t reply or even look back. He
really hoped he hadn’t screwed things up by nearly kissing her. It wasn’t like
they’d ever thought of each other that way before but she was a girl and he was
a teenage boy and sometimes you couldn’t help yourself, and—
    “Oh God,” he
thought. “What if I made her feel so uncomfortable she won’t be my friend
anymore?”
    A scratching
sound on his window scared him half to death. He jumped up and ran to the
window, throwing it open to see what was outside. It was Maggie, crouched on
the roof looking in at him. She had a lot of eye makeup on and it made her
eyes look huge.
    “You’re not
the smartest brother anyone ever had, are you?” Maggie asked. “And you don’t
understand other people at all.”
    “If you wanted
to insult me you could have just come to my door,” Brent told her. He climbed
through the window and into the chilly night air. You could see half the
neighborhood from up there, rows of two-story houses curling in on themselves
on meandering dead-end roads. In the distance the mall was a smudge of light
on the dark blue horizon. “When was the last time we were up here?” he asked,
feeling like the roof had gotten steeper or maybe his center of gravity had
changed. It didn’t feel nearly as stable as it used to. “Before Mom died, I
know, but how old were we?”
    “When I was
your age.” Maggie skipped easily up the slope of the roof to stand on the very
top of the house. “That’s probably how long it’s been since we did anything
together without complaining about it.”
    “Without you complaining about it,” he corrected her. He wished
she would come down from there. He didn’t want her to fall. He didn’t want to
lose another family member for some stupid reason that didn’t make any sense.
“Why did we stop hanging out together, anyway?”
    She shrugged.
Then she stood up slowly on the toes of one foot, balancing herself by
stretching out her arms. “I guess we didn’t have anything in common. But now
we do again.” Then she dropped to a crouch, pumped her