The Last Song Read Online Free PDF

prevent her from falling. She felt her arm jerk on impact and watched almost in fascination as the lid flew off the Styrofoam cup, soda arcing through the air before drenching her face and shirt.
    And then, just like that, it was over. Up close, she saw the brown-haired player staring at her, his eyes wide with shock.
    “Are you okay?” he panted.
    She could feel the soda dripping down her face and soaking through her shirt. Vaguely, she heard someone in the crowd begin to laugh. And why shouldn’t someone laugh? It had been such a fantastic day already.
    “I’m fine,” she snapped.
    “Are you sure?” the guy gasped. For what it was worth, he seemed genuinely contrite. “I ran into you kind of hard.”
    “Just… let me go,” she said through clenched teeth.
    He hadn’t seemed to realize he was still gripping her shoulders, and his hands instantly released their pressure. He took a quick step back and automatically reached for his bracelet. He rotated it almost absently. “I’m really sorry about that. I was going for the ball and—”
    “I know what you were doing,” she said. “I survived, okay?”
    With that, she turned away, wanting nothing more than to get as far away from here as possible. Behind her, she heard someone call out, “C’mon, Will! Let’s get back to the game!” But as she pushed her way through the crowd, she was conscious somehow of his continuing gaze until she vanished from sight.
    Her shirt wasn’t ruined, but that didn’t make her feel much better. She liked this shirt, a memento from the Fall Out Boy concert that she’d sneaked out to with Rick last year. Her mom had almost blown a gasket about that one, and it wasn’t simply because Rick had a tattoo of a spiderweb on his neck and more piercings in his ears than Kayla did; it was because she’d lied about where they were going, and she hadn’t made it home until the following afternoon, since they’d ended up crashing at Rick’s brother’s place in Philadelphia. Her mom forbade Ronnie from seeing or even speaking to Rick ever again, a rule that Ronnie broke the very next day.
    It wasn’t that she loved Rick; frankly, she didn’t even like him that much. But she was angry at her mom, and it felt right at the time. But when she got to Rick’s place, he was already stoned and drunk again, just as he’d been at the concert, and she realized that if she continued to see him, he’d continue to pressure her to try whatever it was he was taking, just as he’d done the night before. She spent only a few minutes at his place before heading to Union Square for the rest of the afternoon, knowing it was over between them.
    She wasn’t naive about drugs. Some of her friends smoked pot, a few did cocaine or ecstasy, and one even had a nasty meth habit. Everyone but her drank on the weekends. Every club and party she went to offered easy access to all of it. Still, it seemed that whenever her friends smoked or drank or popped the pills they swore made the evening worthwhile, they’d spend the rest of the night slurring their words or staggering or vomiting or losing control completely and doing something really stupid. Something usually involving a guy.
    Ronnie didn’t want to go there. Not after what happened to Kayla last winter. Someone—Kayla never knew who—slipped some GHB into her drink, and though she had only a vague recollection of what happened next, she was pretty sure she remembered being in a room with three guys she’d met for the first time that night. When she woke the following morning, her clothes were strewn around the room. Kayla never said anything more—she preferred to pretend it had never happened at all and regretted having told Ronnie even that much—but it wasn’t hard to connect the dots.
    When she reached the pier, Ronnie set down her half-empty drink cup and dabbed furiously at her shirt with her wet napkin. It seemed to be working, but the napkin was disintegrating into tiny white flakes