The 9th Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

me. The science club, you told me. What happened? You got into a fight over the theory of relativity? Did creationists crash the party and start a rumble? I don’t understand how you went to a party of science geeks and came home with a black eye.”
    “It’s no big deal!” he said. “Just let it go, will you?”
    “I’m calling Mrs. McEvoy—”
    “No!”
    Nikki stepped back and jammed her hands on her hips. “Then spill it, mister. And you’d better not leave anything out. It’s your bad luck your mother is a police detective.”
    “It sucks,” he said, looking down at the floor.
    “Well, it can suck for ten minutes or it can suck all day long. Your choice. I’m not leaving this spot until I have an explanation. Where were you when this happened?”
    “On the lake,” he said. “We went skating. We ran into some kids, that’s all.”
    “You ran into some kids and what?”
    “I crashed into a guy and he got pissed and he hit me. That’s all.”
    He was lying. She always knew. He had yet to acquire his father’s ease with it, thank God. Hopefully, he never would. Where Speed would look right at her, wide-eyed, and spew a streaming line of bull, Kyle wouldn’t make eye contact. He looked off and down to the left, as if he was staring at an imaginary teleprompter feeding him this crock of shit.
    Nikki sighed and sat down beside him. She put an arm around him and put her head against his shoulder.
    “You make life more complicated than it needs to be.”
    She could almost hear his thoughts: You don’t know anything. You don’t know anything about me. She’d had those same thoughts herself at fifteen. Life had seemed unbearably complicated and difficult, and no one had understood her, least of all her parents. They could have put bamboo shoots under her fingernails and she would never have told them anything.
    She put her right hand gently over Kyle’s left, which was pressed hard into his thigh. The knuckles of his right hand were swollen, the middle one split open. He had fought back. Whoever had given him that shiner had gotten something back in return.
    “Let’s see that eye,” she said, getting up.
    Tenderly, she pressed her thumb along the brow bone, wondering if she should take him for an X-ray. A blood vessel had burst in the inside corner of his eye, filling the white with blood. While it looked scary, she knew from personal experience it was no cause for true alarm.
    “Do you have a headache?”
    “I do now,” he muttered.
    “Don’t be sarcastic. I can drag you to the ER and we can waste our day there while they ask you all the same questions in triplicate. Follow my finger with your eyes,” she instructed, drawing a line in the air to the left and back to the right. His vision tracked.
    “Do you feel nauseous?”
    “No.”
    “Any double vision?”
    “No.”
    “Why did you lock your door?”
    “’Cause,” he said stubbornly, then thought better of leaving it at that. “I wanted to be alone. I didn’t want R.J. bothering me.”
    Fair enough, she thought. R.J. could be like a big golden retriever puppy—curious and lovable and annoying all at the same time. He was still too much of a little boy to understand the seriousness of being fifteen.
    “Make yourself presentable,” she said, moving toward the door. “Marysue is making eggs. I want you to eat something. Then you can have some Tylenol and spend the rest of the day brooding. All right?”
    He shrugged and looked away, and her heart ached for him. She would have taken all his hurts away and eaten them for breakfast if she could have.
    She went back to him and pressed a kiss to his forehead. “I love you,” she said softly. “Nothing is ever as bad as it seems.”
    A mother ’ s lie, she thought as she left his room, her memory calling up the image of a dead girl lying broken on the road.
    Some things were every bit as bad as they seemed.
    Some things were even worse.

5
    It was midmorning before Kovac dragged his