The Half Life of Molly Pierce Read Online Free PDF Page B

usual brooding self, pushing his peas around on his plate like he’s trying to figure out what they’re saying to him, and Hazel chirps tirelessly on about her perfect day, her perfect friends, her perfect life.
    Fucking alien.
    The doorbell rings halfway through dessert but Erie lets herself in without bothering to wait for any of us. She eats an entire second dinner at an impressive pace and consumes two pieces of pie in less than six minutes. She has the metabolism of—I don’t know—a hummingbird. Something that eats a lot and moves like a blur and somehow stays annoyingly skinny.
    I’m not as skinny as her. I have a fuller face and a small waist but bigger thighs and hips.
    I’m not looking forward to retelling everything to Erie, but I’ve already decided I’ll leave out all the weird stuff. The more I think about Alex’s take on things, the more I realize how unnecessarily freaked I’ve been. Especially with Erie, who finds a way to blow the simplest situation amazingly out of proportion. I’ll stick to the basics. Dead boy. Ambulance. Brother. Funeral. The end.
    I should call Luka, I know, and tell them both together, but the idea of the two of them is exhausting. I’m tired. I’m always tired on Wednesdays and I still have homework to do and it’s already seven. I was supposed to wash my hair tonight. I still could—maybe Erie will braid it for me.
    Erie’s my oldest friend. She moved from California to Massachusetts when she was five and her mom walked into my parents’ bookstore and asked for a job. She rang as a cashier for a little while until she found something better and that’s how I met Erie. She was always hanging around in the children’s section, pulling endless books off the shelf to see whether they had enough pictures. At five years old I was reshelving her discards. Not much has changed.
    Her full name is Erie Black, no middle name. Or, that’s what I’m supposed to tell people. Really, her full name is Erie Moon Black, but I’m not allowed to ever repeat that, ever, under penalty of her revealing that I once peed in the middle of the hallway in my sleep. When I was fourteen.
    We all have secrets.
    After dinner Erie and I head up to my room and she plops herself down on her stomach on my bed and I take the window seat and she doesn’t take her cell phone out, which from her is a sign of utmost respect. She realizes I have something important to tell her.
    So I tell her.
    I leave out the weird parts—the lost time (of course) and Lyle knowing my name and Sayer meeting me by my car. I do tell her he asked me to the funeral but I omit the details.
    When I’m done, Erie has shifted to sitting cross-legged, her face in her hands and her blue eyes wide and alert. You have to work for it sometimes, but Erie can be the best kind of listener. She never says anything until you’re done, and she’s completely riveted if it’s a good enough story.
    “Wow,” she breathes when it’s clear I’ve told her everything. “Wow, Molly, that’s just . . . I can’t believe it. Are you going?”
    “Alex thinks it’s a good idea.”
    It helps to call him Alex. You could just be talking about one of your other friends. Not your head doctor.
    “If you want me to go with you . . .”
    “I don’t think Sayer would want me to bring anyone. He said it’s going to be small.”
    “Let me know,” she says. Her face has changed a little. Slightly. Like she was about to say something and then remembered she couldn’t. “Sayer, huh? That’s a weird name.”
    I shrug. “He seems nice.”
    “But they’re not from around here?” she says. “We would have met them before.”
    It’s true. The towns are so small around here that we even know people from two and three high schools over.
    “Could be new,” I say.
    “This is awful, Molly,” she says, and she actually shudders. “That you had to see all that. Had to go to the hospital, even. Your fault for skipping school and not