Trapped Read Online Free PDF

beard his hair was still dark. I guess once you’re old enough for any gray hair at all, there’s not much point in trying to minimize the damage.
    On the plus side, there were girls. There were two freshman chicks, Krista O’Rea and her best friend, Julie Anders. Or maybe it was Enders. Really, it was hard to concentrate on Julie when Krista was around. It was hard to concentrate on anything.
    Krista was wearing a blue wool hat, even though she was indoors: a blue hat and a sweater. She turned around at the sound of our footsteps. She had thick brown hair and her eyes were sort of blue-gray. Her skin had just a few reddish brown freckles here and there. But it wasn’t the colors as much as theway it was all arranged. If I could include a picture here, I would.
    And did I mention her body? Because I will, repeatedly. She wasn’t tall, but she had that awesome combination of just enough curves on a tight, athletic body. Soccer in the fall, hoops in the winter. Really, they shouldn’t let girls like her mingle with the general population, not in high school anyway. Half the time the guys here were so stuffed with hormones and frustration that we walked down the hallways stiff-legged and ready to burst.
    Her eyes flashed past mine and sort of froze me in place. I read once that an avalanche can move so fast and hard that it will suck the air right out of your lungs. It was like that: one quick look that took the wind right out of me. I didn’t actually gasp, but it was only because I’d seen Krista before. Many times. She was on my bus route.
    Just that morning, I’d spent about twenty quality minutes staring at the back of her neck on the bus, wordless and possibly drooling. Maybe that sounds creepy. It wasn’t active staring, it was more like, I don’t know, a trance. In any case, if I’d known she was over here waiting, I wouldn’t have spent so much time in shop.
    Not that I would’ve said anything to her. She tied me in knots.
    Now she was standing next to Julie, who was turning to say something to her. It was no surprise that they were together. It would’ve been more surprising to see the two of them apart.They were the kind of best friends who had tons of pictures of each other in their lockers. Still, I wondered what they were doing here after school on a day like this. I wondered if I’d have the guts to ask.
    The last member of the little circle, the one standing farthest away from us, was Elijah. His full name was Elijah James. I’d always thought his name would’ve been less strange the other way around: James Elijah. Not that you even needed a last name with a first name like that. There weren’t any other Elijahs around that I knew of. Maybe two hundred years ago there might’ve been.
    He was a weird kid, in any case. He wasn’t exactly a goth, but those kids would’ve loved it if he had been. He was legitimately strange in ways they could only play at. He didn’t wear all black and mope around. He wore the same few ratty old sweaters and walked around with these clear, wide-open eyes, like he was seeing things you weren’t.
    I remember, maybe like mid-September, I was walking along the hallway outside the library, and he was inside. He was always in there. I saw him through one of the long windows that ran along the door. It was just a glimpse. He was balancing a coin on the tip of his pen. The coin — I think it was a quarter—wasn’t wobbling. It wasn’t moving at all. It was like it was stuck on there, like it was welded. Elijah was just looking at it, balancing it.
    He was a sophomore, like Jason, Pete, and me; but he wasn’t like Jason, Pete, and me. He was wearing a sweater with alternating bands of brown and tan. It made him look sort of like agiant bleached-out bumblebee, the kind you find when you clean out behind a window screen. It always seemed like maybe someone else had dressed him and he hadn’t really noticed what they’d put him in yet. And now he was one of seven