Tunnel Vision Read Online Free PDF Page B

long as she understands that limited funds mean a limited amount of work. I’d love to be a charity for everyone out there that needs help, but this is not the time to be looking out for the rest of the world.
    We cover the fine points, I explain how and where to meet me, and just like that I’ve got a meeting with a client. I’ll admit, it’s not exactly lighting my world on fire the way a spat between a lawyer and a doctor would, but hey, worst-case scenario, I make a few bucks and help the lady out.

SIX
    Betty soldiered through the rest of school, ignoring Jake’s texts as they came through with increasing frequency. She knew that her moms rarely looked into the phone stuff, thanks to the unlimited plans on their cell phones, but she would have been shocked if they didn’t look this week to see if their whore daughter and that awful pimp, Jake Norton, hadn’t been communicating.
    It was enough to make her sick, and it was only the respite of getting behind the wheel of her ten-year-old Volkswagen Beetle that had any effect on her mood. She drove home while the Ramones sang their mindless and catchy punk through the speakers, and by the time she was home she was smiling despite herself.
    Betty could hear the music before she opened the front door, and though she couldn’t imagine what Ophelia could possibly be painting that would be best influenced by 1990s gangsta rap, she did feel that her mother’s muse was a good one. Suppressing a grin, she walked inside and shut the door after her, grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and trudged upstairs to work on her homework. In addition to the suffrage paper, she had math homework, an English test in two days, homework for her chem lab in three, and what felt like a mountain of other bullshit on her shoulders.
    Betty sat at her desk and slid her computer from her schoolbag, uncased it, and then waited for a few minutes as it fired up. When the laptop was ready, Betty tossed on a pair of cheap headphones, flicked the mouse to a playlist on iTunes, and then got to work on the suffrage paper.
    As always, she started with Wikipedia. There wasn’t a teacher in the world that would have allowed her to cite from a website so easily, and so often mistakenly, altered by random users, but the bibliography at the bottom of each page was a gold mine. Betty, like most students, hated the search for good sources, but here they were, all properly organized and ready for a couple mouse clicks to transport them to the bottom of her own paper.
    When she was satisfied with the shored-up back end of her paper, even if the majority of the writing was yet to be done, Betty slid the headphones from her ears, stretched in her chair, and headed to the kitchen to see if there was anything worth eating.
    After a brief inspection of the refrigerator, cupboard, and fruit basket, Betty settled on a handful of raspberries and half an apple one of the moms had left in the door of the fridge. Deciding that the fruit would hold her over until that evening’s meal-and-fight, Betty trudged back up the steps, Ophelia’s music providing a bass-driven rhythm that made it impossible not to feel like she was dancing along as she moved.
    Halfway up the steps, though, there came a knock at the door. Most likely the UPS driver. Heaving an annoyed sigh, Betty walked back down and swung open the heavy door without checking the peephole or attaching the U-bolt—both major no-no’s in Andrea’s book—and found before her not the UPS man, but a grinning June.
    “What are you doing here?” Betty asked. “I’m grounded, remember?”
    June shook her head and said, “Doesn’t matter. Does not matter.” The way June’s eyes were bugging out of her head had Betty wondering if her friend might not have decided to embark on a second and more successful attempt at their previous summer’s goal of buying magic mushrooms, but then she saw the piece of paper June was waving in her right hand.
    “What is