Read Blue Is for Nightmares for Free Online

are so not the hockey type," Amber says, extracting a floral pair of chopsticks from her lunch box.
    "No, he's the perfect type. Creative, smart, and athletic." Drea links her arm with Donovan's.
    "Maybe you'd like to sketch me when I'm looking a bit... perkier."
    "I've got some time now," Donovan says.
    Drea smiles in Chad's direction, collects her tomato salad, and makes her grand exit with Donovan.
    "Why does that always happen?" Amber stabs her chopsticks into the table.
    "What?"
    "She always gets the guy"
    "I'm right here." PJ leans in for a kiss, but Amber jams a grape in his mouth.
    "I thought you always said Donovan was a creep," I say. "He is."
    "Then why do you flirt with him?"
    Amber shrugs, plucking out all the green grapes from her fruit salad with the chopsticks. I look over at Chad, who has fallen silent, his eyes locked on the image of Drea and Donovan walking away.
    It's late when I get back to the room. I ended up spending a good chunk of the evening studying for the French test I'm hoping Madame LeSnore lets me retake. I've already decided I will apologize to her first thing in the morning, saying that I've been having some family problems back home. It isn't so far from the truth. My mother couldn't have been happier when September rolled around and I had to go back to school.

    45
    It's not that me and my mother don't get along. We just don't get along well. Sometimes I think it might have something to do with my dad. He passed away when I was just seven years old.
    You'd think that would bring my mother and me closer--leaving just the two of us to brave the world on our own, to keep his memory alive. But it hasn't. I wonder sometimes if it just pulled us further apart--like maybe my mother would have been happier as I was growing up if she had a partner, a soulmate, to raise me with. It's not like she's some modern-day Mommie Dearest or anything. Some of my friends over the years have said they'd kill to have such a cool mom like mine a mother who still reads Seventeen and goes tanning and gets her acrylics filled. Who knows the names of all the boys in school because my friends dish to her about them--even more than they dish to me. The truth is we're just different. I'm more like my gram. That's why I miss her so much. And that's what irks my mother so much.
    "Drea?" I fling my backpack to the floor and glance at Drea's side of the room bed still made, last night's pajamas still in a heap at the foot of her bed. It doesn't look like she's been back here yet. I wonder if she's still with Donovan.
    I squat down by the side of the bed and collect the soiled laundry underneath. I've learned that if you're quick to clean up the mess, it doesn't smell as much. But I've already left this stuff too long. You can see a cloudlike outline of golden brown on one of the sheets, and they smell like dirty diapers.
    I squish everything inside a pillowcase filled with dirty school-uniform parts, grab the soiled plastic shopping bags
    from underneath my night table, and make the five-minute trek across the dorm parking lot to the washroom. I swing the door open, promptly dump the plastic bags into the trash, and flop the sack of dirty laundry onto one of the machines. I begin separating the lights from the colors and darks, the way the mom-looking women do on TV commercials for laundry detergent. That's when I notice a pink bra, stuck between a fold in the sheet and statically clung to Drea's lacy white handkerchief. I know the bra isn't mine, but I hold it up to my chest anyway. Definitely not mine. The cups stick out so confidently, it's almost as if they could get a date all by themselves.
    I'm just about to deposit the bra into the machine when I feel the bra's vibrations. They come over me all of a sudden, like tiny pins of electrifying heat that charge through my arms and point down my fingers. I move the silky fabric between my fingers and the feeling deepens, like someone has taken hold of my skin, dug their