The Dream Where the Losers Go Read Online Free PDF Page B

in Jigger’s eyes, but he kept grinning and she kept smiling. Contract smiled, deal closed.
    “You got it,” Jigger said.
    T HE GUY SITTING behind Skey in homeroom kept shifting in his desk as if he had spiders crawling up his legs. The way he jitterbugged all over his seat, spinning his pen and whispering to himself, made her want to swat him. Withoutwarning, his loony spiders began to desert him and crawl all over her. Skey turned in her seat and glared.
    “What’s your problem?” she hissed.
    “Huh?” The guy glanced at her and froze. Skey assessed him in one fell swoop: pale skin, freckles, thick red hair. Very green eyes. Licking his lips, he began to spin his pen. Skey reached out and put a stop to the Bic.
    “What’s your problem?” she repeated coldly. She knew what hers was—if he didn’t stop fooling around, she was going to explode.
    He blinked several times. “I dunno.”
    Skey kept hold of his gaze. This guy wasn’t Jigger, he wasn’t a Dragon. He was one of the low-level termites of this school, and she could run him with her little finger. That much was established. “Well,” she said in an icy drop-dead tone. “Do you think you could keep quiet for a couple of minutes?”
    Across the aisle, another guy hunched over a notebook, working on a sketch that was probably obscene. “Ooo, Lick,” he said. “Beautiful’s talking to you.”
    Lick licked his lips again. “Yeah, I know,” he muttered.
    “So, you gonna ask her out?” asked the other guy.
    Lick flowered into a rose pink and dropped his eyes. He reached for the Bic, but Skey kept her grip on it.
    Your name is Lick? she thought. You are such a loser .
    Lick gave the other guy a sideways glance. “Isn’t she going out with Genghis Khan?” he asked. “I need my balls, man.”
    The other guy began a high ongoing giggle, and a tiny smile crept into a corner of Skey’s mouth. This fidgetty scarecrow, this bundle of nerves, this low-level loser had actually said something interesting. “Lick,” she commanded, pulling the pen from under his fingers.
    “Huh?” Surprised, he looked straight at her, and she saw intelligent life in his eyes. And nerves ready to blow.
    “Give me your arm,” she said. When he didn’t move, she pulled his left arm flat across the desk and slid up his sleeve. More giggles from the pornographer across the aisle. Uncapping the pen, Skey scribbled on Lick’s binder to make sure it worked. It looked frequently masticated.
    “Too bad it’s not magic marker,” she said. Then she wrote SKEY SAYS I MUST BE QUIET IN CLASS along the inside of Lick’s forearm. His muscles tensed and he trembled several times as she wrote. The boy was in shock. When she finished, Skey patted his arm softly.
    “There, there,” she said.
    The pornographer gave Skey’s inscription a quick glance. “You been told, Lick,” he said.
    Lick read his arm about twenty-five times. As the bell rang, Skey handed him his pen. Very briefly, his green eyes met hers.
    “I will never wash this arm,” he said. “You will have to do it for me.”
    M S . R ENFREW WAS not pleased. Frowning over bifocals and a very large nose, she said, “I didn’t appreciate my time being wasted yesterday.”
    Grim. Ms. Renfrew was grim. Her words were tomb-stones. A conversation with this woman was a stroll through a cemetery, each phrase appearing on yet another granite slab: Skey Mitchell, flunked out at sixteen. Skey Mitchell, locked up at sixteen. Skey Mitchell, dead at sixteen.
    “Ms. Mitchell,” demanded the grim Ms. Renfrew. “ Could I have your attention please?”
    “Huh?” Pulling herself out of the cemetery, Skey focusedon Ms. Renfrew’s nose. It was so huge. A lot of breathing went on there. “I’m sorry, Ms. Renfrew,” she said quickly. “I didn’t mean to forget you yesterday. It was my first day back and I got talking to some friends.”
    Ms. Renfrew did not look impressed. Reaching to one side, she pulled a large stack of books