Played. Liz Fichera

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СКАЧАТЬ and I immediately felt like an idiot. Here I was just trying to make small talk, and I succeeded in pissing her off again in less than twenty seconds.

      Just as I was about to open my mouth and apologize, she said, “What about you? Ever heard of a washing machine?” Her button nose wrinkled for emphasis. The awkwardness between us had returned.

      I closed my eyes and counted to three. “I was at a party last night. Got home too late to change.”

      “How nice for you.” She didn’t hide the contempt in her voice.

      “Our maid doesn’t work on Saturdays,” I added, matching hers with more of my own.

      “Ha. Ha.” She exhaled. “Now you think we have a maid?”

      “Well, don’t you?” Ryan Berenger had gotten a new Jeep for his sixteenth birthday. He wore expensive sunglasses and his parents were members at the country club. Didn’t people like that employ maids?

      Riley exhaled again, loud. Loud enough for me to hear the disgust in her voice. Or maybe it was disappointment. She shifted in my arms. “Look, could we just not talk?” She tugged on the rim of her baseball cap again.

      Now my shoulders shrugged indifferently. “Sure. Just making conversation.” I looked out at black clouds blowing straight for us.

      “Well, insults don’t exactly make good conversation starters.”

      “Okay,” I challenged. “So you say something. We might be here awhile, you know.” I hesitated to tell her that it could be more than a little while, especially when she kept reaching for her leg, the one she said hurt the most.

      “I wonder what everyone’s doing up at the campsite? You think anyone’s noticed we haven’t come back yet?”

      “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”

      “Hasn’t it been hours already?”

      “Maybe.”

      “I wonder what they’re thinking,” Riley said. She had finally stopped shivering.

      “Who?” I really hoped she wasn’t referring to Jay Hawkins again.

      “The other kids.”

      “What do you care what they think?”

      “I always care what other people think,” she said. “Years of practice. Can’t help it. Don’t you?”

      I chuckled. “I couldn’t care less.”

      She sighed, heavy. “I wish I was more like that.”

      “Then why aren’t you?”

      She looked at the name tag on my chest. I reached down and ripped the soggy thing off.

      “I suppose you’re the one who nicknamed me Pink Girl. Real nice, by the way. Very original.”

      “That really fits you. And I may borrow it from time to time. But it wasn’t me.”

      “Seriously?”

      “Seriously.”

      Her chin lifted. “Which one?”

      “Guess.”

      She sighed like she didn’t want to play. But then she said, “Bossypants.”

      I bit back a laugh because that nickname seriously had crossed my mind for Riley Berenger. “Nope. Not me.”

      She pulled back. “Smart?”

      “Nope.”

      Her voice grew louder. “Thorough?”

      I smiled down at her. “Bingo.”

      “But that is so...lame.”

      “I thought it was perfect for you. The perfect nickname.”

      “Thorough is for grandmothers and computer manuals, Sam. A girl doesn’t want to be nicknamed Thorough.” She rolled her eyes and looked away. “I thought for sure yours was Pink Girl.” Then she reached for her name tag and peeled it off her sweatshirt. She crumpled it up and slipped it into her pocket.

      “So which one was yours?”

      “I’m kind of hungry. Are you?” she said, ignoring my dumb question since her pink ink on my name tag made it pretty obvious which nickname she’d chosen for me. I was Complicated, though? What did she mean by that?

      “What do you have?”

      She reached into a pocket in her sweatshirt. “One water bottle.” She reached into her other front pocket. “A slightly broken granola bar.” And then she reached inside her pocket a third time. “And one stupid pinecone.” She threw it as hard as she could into the slanting rain.

      “Nice throw.”

      “It’s a gift,” she said.

      I looked down at her as she continued to stare straight ahead. Riley’s neck was long and pearly white, almost translucent. For some reason my eyes landed on the skin just below her ear and stayed there. I swear I could see her pulse move, and it stole my breath for a second. I did a mental headshake. But before I could stop myself, I said, “You know, you’d be a lot prettier without that hat.”

      Silence. She turned to me, unamused.

      I swallowed, hard. I had no idea why I’d said that. It just popped out. Suddenly I was a fashion expert?

      But it was true.

      “I’ll shut up now,” I said.

      Riley nodded and looked away. Instead of making stupid small talk, we listened to the rain.

      13

      Riley

      Sam was seriously starting to freak me out. Why did he say such things? I knew he was a little odd—well, I really didn’t know that to be a hard fact, but I had heard that he acted strangely.

      Scratch that.

      More like it was what I’d observed.

      Sam often sat by himself in the cafeteria. I knew this because I sat alone sometimes, too. And when you sit alone, pretending to study the math book beside your sandwich or doodle in the corners of your notebook, your eyes tend to scan the whole room beneath your eyelashes. My attention was usually drawn to other loners like me. There weren’t many of us but, if we wanted to, we could have started a club.

      The one thing that stood out about Sam was that he didn’t mind being alone. He wore his aloneness like a badge, challenging anyone to mock him. No one ever dared to look at him funny or anything. It was sort of a mutual unspoken understanding, which I suppose you could negotiate when you were well over six feet tall and, maybe, two hundred pounds. Even the biggest senior boys СКАЧАТЬ