Read A Blue So Dark for Free Online

someplace once that ugly flowers are the ones that reproduce. Everybody picks the prettiest blooms, so the uglies are the only ones that stick around in the ground long enough to spread their seed. Whole world gets uglier and uglier, all because of flower pickers. Someday, I'll look out into a meadow and see nothing but tiny little Angela Friesons. Makes me wish I could grab Frieson by her crazy blue boots and yank her right out of the ground.
    But I can't because I'm stuck with her. All year-me and Frieson, lab partners extraordinaire.
    This is how it happened: there are three girls in Mr. Wickman's first period Bio II. Three. Me, the Freak, and Ruby Fox. I swear that's her real name, Ruby Fox, and by God if the girl doesn't live up to it. In the ninth-grade unofficial Best of Class, she was voted Girl Most Likely to Pose for Juggs. And when Mr. Wickman told us to partner up back in August, the guys didn't see me or the Freak-they just saw Ruby.
    So there we were, me and Frieson, in the back corner, while everybody else was pawing at Fox. Angela sighed and craned her neck, looking out at the rest of the room like surely, surely, there had to be somebody around who was better than that creepy Aura Ambrose.
    Failing to find anyone better, she just moaned an "All riiiiight. I guess," in her crazy southern twang, and scooted her desk toward mine as we launched into our first project together-some juvenile worksheet that helped us get to know each other. As if Angela Frieson had time to learn anything other than what we'd be tested on-after all, the girl couldn't disrupt her 4.7 GPA.
    Yeah, lucky me, I get Angela Frieson who, because of what I can only imagine was the world's most tragic scheduling conflict in the history of all time, got stuck in regular Bio II. Angela Frieson, who's auditing band so that two nonhonors courses in the same semester (imagine the horror!) won't bring down her precious GPA. Angela Frieson, who resents that she has to have a lab partner at all, especially one that she fears she'll have to carry on her back, somebody who will get the credit for all her right answers. Angela Frieson, who is positive she is smarter than the entirety of the Crestview student body combined, who never once even considered the possibility that I'm no slouch in the scholastic department myself. It's just that I'm not skywriting it, or weeping about a B+ on an exam, you know?
    The tardy bell lets loose its funky blurp, blurp, Bio II begins in full, and I'm about to scratch another notch on the top of my desk (just like the good little inmate that I am) when the Freak leans toward me and whispers (even her whisper has an accent), "Hey, Aura, I wanted to talk to you about the cat."
    I guess our school gets them from the Humane Society or something. Nothing like the crawdad and the worm and the frog we dissected back in Bio I. A real cat, that somebody loved, that got in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thinking about having to dissect it-like they do in Bio II every year, no secret there-makes my skin feel prickly, like it's not just an arm or a leg that fell asleep, but my whole body.
    "What about it?" I mumble.
    "Listen, after we dissect it, I want it," she tells me in her awful drawl.
    "What for?" I ask, my mouth all twisted up as horror breaks through me.
    Angela rolls her eyes at me like she's sure my mother once dropped me on my head on a regular basis. "I'm gonna take all its skin off and put its skeleton back together."
    "Jesus," I hiss, trying desperately not to shriek.
    "Well, it's not like I'll be doin' it for pleasure," Angela says, the daisy petals of her hair flopping around her face. "I mean, it's the extra credit assignment. Every semester, it's the same."
    "To take a poor mutilated cat home and glue it back together?" I screech.
    I just stare at her, mouth open. I can't quite believe it. Take some living thing ... (Okay, so the frogs and crawdads were alive at one point, too-but the cat seems different to me.