Thin Ice Read Online Free PDF Page A

lunch bag on my tray and left. Seniors had early lunch, and she’d only hung around to dump the news.
    After she left, I looked around the cafeteria, wondering who in that huge assembly of six hundred students might offer the key to a good time. I passed over the freshmen and sophomores (I wasn’t that desperate), looked at the backs of the departing seniors, then picked up my tray and moved over to a table of classmates. Leesa Coltrane was holding court. Unless you liked endless conversations about clothing, Leesa was not the world’s most interesting person, but she did throw parties. The conversation—shoes, the latest Delia’s catalog, Ms. Penny’s wicked grading system—didn’t even slow down when I arrived, though Cody Rock managed to stop stroking some sophomore girl’s hair long enough to give a little wave.
    I can’t say I’m real close to many of the kids in school. They’re all mostly party friends, I guess. One hundred sixty-seven classmates and I’ve known many of them most of my life; except for Jean and Kady, there’s no one I automatically think of as a good friend. How did this happen? How does a person get to be seventeen and have so few friends? In a crisis, who would come hold my hand?
    “Gawd, Arden, you wear the weirdest clothes.” Leesa smiled and bit down on a baby carrot. “Where did you get that shirt?”
    I was wearing my second-best, a kiwi-colored bowling shirt formerly owned by “Franz.”
    “Duluth.”
    “The mall ?”
    “Ragstock.”
    She made a face and a tiny orange sliver popped out of her mouth and stuck to her lip.
    “Ragstock?” said Tiffanee. “That’s where I went for a Halloween costume. There was such a weird clerk there. He had hair that hadn’t been combed for like a year and he smelled.”
    Everyone looked at me and my shirt as if we gave off a bad scent. It didn’t, nor did I. I’m clean and I use color-safe bleach in the laundry.
    “I like it,” said Cody . “But maybe you should leave a few more buttons undone.”
    What a wit! As the others laughed, Cody turned to his girl and they smacked a quick kiss, a young lovers’ high five.
    The conversation got off me and back on track and I gleaned that everyone’s life this weekend was centering around either work or a hockey game in Superior. No party.
    Friday night alone. Well, I could work or study, right?
    The house was dark and cold when I got home. My mood exactly. The first order of business was food. As I opened the fridge the phone rang, and my spirits soared. Had I won something? Was there a party? Had the Drummonds changed plans and stayed home?
    It was my brother. “Hey, sis, I need a favor.”
    “I just got home. Can I eat first?”
    “Quit whining, this will only take a minute. I’m having a hell of a time with the valves on this Mercedes. I came home at lunch and shot off a question to one of the guys on the mech list. Check and see if there’s a reply.”
    The mech list was an Internet group of car mechanics who used the list to share information. I’m no Luddite, but I’m not exactly in love with the computer. I mess around with it some, though not as much as my brother. For a while I used it to network with other crafters, but I got fed up with the way newsgroup and bulletin board discussions digressed—there were too many middle-aged women obsessing over muffins or their gardens. Scott, however, loved what he found through the Internet and he especially loved the hardware. Every year he’d power up to a faster machine. Hairy-chest machines, I call them. Sort of a pattern with my brother.
    I went to the study and picked up that extension. “What’s your password?” He paused before telling me, a hesitation that was justified because I snorted when he did, “‘ BigTool ’?”
    “I’m a mechanic.”
    “Oh, sure.” I logged on and pulled down his e-mail. “Whoa, you get a lot of stuff. Mechanics must be chatty people.”
    “Look for something from JasperP, probably