Skinny Read Online Free PDF Page B

retired stripper Crystal Rogers, offers free pole-dancing classes on Sunday afternoons if you bring your church bulletin. Of course, you have to wear clothes, and she dances only to “Christian music.”
    I glance back at Wolfgang. He shifts from one foot to the other, staring over the top of my head. Like he doesn’t see me. Right.
    “He can’t believe he has to sit by you. He’s going to be telling his football buddies about this at practice today,” Skinny says.
    I can’t really blame him. It’s pretty obvious I’m not going to fit. They put the wooden folding chairs lined up right next to one another. Touching. There won’t be room. Kristen is normal high-school-girl sized. Probably doesn’t weigh more than a hundred twenty-five pounds. I can use some of her space.
    Wolfgang won’t be as easy, though. He’s big — the football-player, camouflage-hat-wearing, take-off-from-school-the-first-day-of-hunting-season type. His family currently supports a bill to allow legally blind hunters to use laser sights to hunt any game sighted people can hunt. He was quoted in the Huntsville Item as saying, “This opens up the fun of hunting to additional people, and I think that’s great.” C’mon, what’s not to like? A bunch of blind people out in the forest shooting guns?
    Wolfgang’s going to need all of his seat space and more. Kristen glances back at me, flipping a few curls over her shoulder with a signature move, and frowns. Her light brown eyes are the same exact color as her hair.
    “You’ve got to be kidding me. Out of all the kids in this line, I have to be next to her?”
    I stick my tongue out at her and she quickly turns back to face front with a huffy puffy noise. There is a rustle of people and voices out beyond the curtains. The whole school will be here. It’s required. The bleachers will be full of students all the way up to the nosebleed section. The band will play, the principal will speak, some class president will say a few words, and they will announce the awards.
    “Are your hands shaking?” It takes me a minute to realize Wolfgang is talking over my head to Kristen. “What’s wrong with you?”
    “I don’t like to be in front of crowds,” she mumbles back to him. “Stage fright.”
    She should take one of her mom’s classes. Hanging upside down on a pole would probably give her plenty of confidence.
    I see Rat near the back of the line with the other science geeks. He gives me a silent thumbs-up, and I nod back at him. Since I’m only receiving the award for outstanding sophomore English student, I don’t actually have to go to the podium. That’s the only reason I actually came to this thing. Otherwise, I would have faked being sick or something to get out of it. But they told me all I had to do was sit there and smile when my name was announced. They said I didn’t even have to stand up. But I didn’t think about the wooden chairs in tight little lines waiting out there in the stage lights. It was a stupid mistake.
    Once when I was nine years old I sang a solo. It was Christmas Eve, and the church was lit only with candles. I sang “O Holy Night.” There was a collectively murmured “awww” when I walked slowly to the center of the stage. They thought I was cute and chubby, and they were going to like it no matter what sound came out of my mouth because I was a kid and it was Christmas. Then I sang the first line. I could feel the surprise trickle through the crowd. I could actually sing. Pure. Clear. Perfect.
    On the first chorus, I hit the high note. O night divine! I felt like an electrical plug meeting a socket for the first time. The energy surged through me, connecting me directly to every single person in every single pew. I had them, all of them, held in the notes soaring through the wooden beams of the chapel. People wanted to look at me because they wanted to listen to me. My body dissolved into the sound. Magical and totally addictive. I knew that night it