Something Like Normal Read Online Free PDF

couldn’t stop it.
    I lift my beer cup for a drink. Dirt fills the lines of my hand, and my fingers are stained with blood. The cup slips from my grasp, splashing beer across the top of the table. Paige jumps off Ryan’s lap, shrieking something at me, but I don’t understand what she’s saying. My chest is tight and I’m having trouble breathing.
    I have to get out of here.
    My chair falls over as I stand up.
    “Trav, where are you going?” Ryan calls after me, but I don’t answer. I push my way through the living room and out the front door. The air is cooler outside, clear, as I pull it into my lungs in giant gasps until my heart rate returns to its regular rhythm. I look at my hands. They’re clean.
    I walk down the street toward the Shamrock, the biker bar on the corner of Delmar and Estero. Apart from bikers, the only people who go there are leather-skinned old beach rats and brittle-haired women who think they’re still young and hot. The music is dirtball rock, the floor is sticky, and the beer is served in plastic cups, but they’re good about looking the other way when you “forget” your ID.
    Going through the open doorway, I pass Gage Darnell. He was a year ahead of me at school, but dropped out when he turned eighteen. He’s leaving with a familiar-looking girl with a fake tan, fake nails, fake blond hair, and probably fake boobs. She looks like an Internet porn star—and not necessarily in a good way. I went to school with her, too, but her name escapes me. Angel? Amber? Something strip clubby, I think.
    “Hey, Travis, welcome home.” Gage offers his fist to bump, then continues on his way. The blonde wiggles her fingers at me, then latches on to his arm. I might have slept with her.
    Perched on barstools are a couple more girls around my age. The one wearing cutoff shorts and cowboy boots is Lacey Ellison. She’s not especially hot and wears too much makeup, but we didn’t call her Easy-E in high school for nothing. She’s flirting with a biker sporting a Hells Angels emblem on his leather vest and a dirty blond goatee. Lacey giggles at something he says and touches the snake tattoo on his forearm.
    Beside her is a girl with a mass of light brown hair pulled into one of those sexy-messy knots. Compared to Lacey she’s overdressed; the only skin showing is a narrow stripe between the top of her threadbare Levi’s and a washed-out blue T-shirt. She doesn’t acknowledge me—not even a little chin lift—as I claim the empty stool next to her and order a beer, and for some reason, this bothers me. Probably because I’m drunk. “Nice night, huh?”
    Her green eyes meet mine in the Guinness mirror behind the bar and it feels like all the air has been sucked out of the room. I’ve never slept with this girl, but she was the first I remember wanting.
    Harper Gray.
    The first time I kissed her was at a middle school slumber party Paige threw when her parents went to Key West, leaving her alone for the weekend. It was at the end of summer and I was new, because my dad had just been traded to Tampa Bay, but I’d already made friends with most of the guys on the eighth-grade football team at early practice. The lure of alcohol and girls wearing pajamas was too strong to resist, so we crashed the party. After raiding the liquor cabinet, Paige decided it was time to play seven minutes in heaven. I went first, using the spinner from an old board game, and it landed on Harper.
    “Your seven minutes start… now,” Paige said as Harper followed me into the laundry room. I shut the door and she leaned against the washing machine, looking scared. I remember the sharp scent of the bleach mixed with the fabric smell of clean laundry. “I’m Travis.”
    “I know.” Her eyes flicked shyly down to our feet—we were both wearing beat-up old Chucks and it seemed like a sign—then up at me. “I’m Harper.”
    I already knew, too.
    “Like Harper Lee?” I was showing off. I hadn’t read To Kill a