The Sphere Read Online Free PDF Page B

explanations occur to me, none of them good. I drop Axel’s hand and start fidgeting with my fingers again. I shouldn’t have come. Axel puts an arm around me.
    “Having a good time?”
    I nod and smile.
    “I’ve never seen you smile like that.”
    Special message for all you harpies: he’s with me. Who could say how long it must have taken the three giggling chatterboxes in front of us to do their hair? Blonde number three thousand walks over, goes up to Axel, and kisses him on the cheek before he even realizes she’s there.
    “Hey, handsome,” she says, sounding like a femme fatale.
    She walks off before he can even react. Once she’s a little distance away she looks back at him and smiles. Axel waves, his hand moving like a puppet’s. I hate her already.
    “Do you want anything to drink?” Axel asks, but before I can answer we’re interrupted again.
    “Axel, man! What’s going on?” shouts a guy with shaggy hair who walks toward us with the careless, even gait of a camel.
    “Dissie, David,” says Axel, by way of introduction.
    “Nice to meet you,” says David, but he only looks at me for half a second. “So how’s the novel going, man?” he asks Axel.
    “Well, you know... not too bad, I guess. That’s something, right?”
    “It sure is!” David gives Axel a slap on the back.
    They both start laughing so loudly that several other guests turn and stare at us.
    “I’m so jealous, man!” exclaims David.
    “Let’s see if I can finish the draft by the end of the month, and then I can spend the rest of the summer on editing,” says Axel.
    “You’re a machine! You already have a first draft?”
    What draft? Great, now it’s not just the other guests whose conversations I can’t follow. I have no idea what Axel’s talking about, either.
    “Yeah, the draft’s done... Just about, man.”
    Axel is strutting like a peacock. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look so proud. Or happy—is he happy? Suddenly I don’t recognize him. In fact, ever since we got to this party he’s been looking more like a stranger to me. I didn’t know he hung out with this kind of crowd, and I definitely didn’t know he had a draft of anything.
    “Well, yours is going better than mine, then,” says David. “I’m blocked, man, I can’t even get my protagonist right...”
    “Man,” “man,” “man”—that’s all I understand. What about me? Doesn’t he care whether I want something to drink or not? What about everything he told me yesterday, what he told me just this morning? Axel gestures wildly; he won’t stop talking about things I don’t understand, things that exclude me completely. What novel are they talking about? What draft? Since when does he like literature so much? He let go of my hand the moment he saw his friend. Okay, fine. I guess I should have known how much he likes literature, he made it clear enough at the beach when he knew how my parents had come up with the twins’ names. It’s obvious his friend has written something, or is writing it, right? But it seems like Axel is writing something, too.
    I hear raucous laughter coming from the blond girl from earlier, the one with the awful femme fatale voice. She’s done her disappearing kiss on the cheek routine with a few other boys. The three standing next to her right now are about to slip and fall in puddles of their own drool. Not one glass but three—the queen of the party has three different boys offering her a drink. Meanwhile Axel has forgotten me entirely. The girl is shameless. I didn’t even know it was possible to bat your eyelashes like that. She doesn’t care for any of the three drinks being offered to her, no sir. The blonde puts her hand on the waist of a boy passing by. No, she doesn’t just put her hand there, she poses it. I realize that she has an elegance I’ll never have, not even if I died and was born again. That’s just how it goes. Now the blonde has lost interest in her three gallant suitors, and