The Smart One Read Online Free PDF Page A

but before I could get anything out, his mouth was on mine and his heavy body was pushing me down onto the couch.
    Kenny had learned how to kiss since that first bumbling attempt in junior high, and I couldn’t help but compare him to skinny Lewis Lambert, the boy I had just broken up with. Kenny’s lips were soft and relaxed, his body broad and heavy. I felt like I was kissing a man, not a boy, and the sensation was luscious.
    We kissed and kissed, getting hotter and hotter, until we heard Joey’s key in the door. She tromped in unaware and went right past us into the kitchen.
    “I thought you were sleeping at Anna’s,” I said, sitting up and straightening my shirt.
    Joey stopped and turned around, looking slowly from me to Kenny and back to me. She laughed a deep, stupid laugh. She was stoned.
    “The nerd and the turd,” she said, and laughed again. She turned and went back into the kitchen.
    “You really believed I was sleeping at Anna’s?” she yelled from the kitchen.
    I heard my parents’ bed creak upstairs and was pretty sure Joey had woken them up.
    The refrigerator door slammed shut, and Joey emerged from the kitchen with a bowl of cold macaroni and cheese, which she was picking at and shoving into her mouth with her fingers. “You’ve really got your head up your ass. You’re as gullible as they are.” She nodded toward the stairs to the bedrooms.
    “I’d better go,” Kenny said, and rose to leave.
    I looked up at him. “You okay?”
    He nodded. “I’ll call you,” his whispered.
    As he opened the front door, Joey yelled out to him. “Hey turd, I know someone who can get you some killer hash if you’re interested.”
    Kenny looked at me quickly, his face red with shame. I thought he was embarrassed by my sister’s display, but realized later it was the color of betrayal. The offer of hash was more appealing than a relationship with me. As it turned out, the betrayal didn’t stop there.
    But that was eons ago. I shifted my weight on the hood of the car and opened my palms toward the sky as if the warmth of the sun could erase my past and lead me to a new future in a new place where none of this mattered. I hoped the letter from Principal Belita Perez would arrive soon.
    I heard an engine and looked up to see if it was the moving truck, but it was just a car with a noisy transmission headed my way. My butt was starting to slip off the hood of the car, so I repositioned myself. Alas, I managed to accidentally hip check my cell phone, which skittered off the car into the middle of the street…right into the path of the oncoming car.
    I jumped off the hood, but it was too late to run into the street and grab the phone without risking my own life. So I just stared, holding my breath, hoping the car might graze past it. But the driver’s signal was on. He was pulling over and headed right for my phone.
    I tried to scream “Stop!” but nothing came out, and I watched in horror as my shiny new state-of-the-art Horizon SlimBlade crunched beneath the front tire, then flipped over for a second assault by the rear.
    The driver parked in front of the Waxmans’ house. I took a deep breath, wondering if I’d be able to keep myself fromgoing for his jugular even though he probably had no idea he’d driven over anything, let alone an insanely expensive piece of electronic equipment that could practically end hunger and bring peace to the planet. Then the door of the car opened and a broad-shouldered man got out.
    I stopped and stared. He was blond. He was tan. He wore a loose white shirt rolled up at the sleeves and a familiar crooked smile that made my heart flip over like a squashed cell phone.
    “Bev Bloomrosen,” he said, as if I was the last person he expected to see sitting in front of my house.
    I walked into the street to retrieve my damaged phone. Then I turned to face him.
    “Kenny Waxman.”

Chapter 4
    “Jeez,” he said. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
    You have , I wanted to