Read All Alone in the Universe for Free Online

startled expression of fish twitching in the bottom of a rowboat or fried on plates. Mrs. Flaiber turned forward, and the car moved slowly back into traffic, crunching pebbles and grit musically beneath its tires.
    I was surprised, too. A rush of exhilaration went through me. Maybe Maureen just hadn‧t seen what was happening, what Glenna was doing. Maybe I just needed to tell her. She dropped her beat-up tennis shoes onto the sidewalk and slid her toes inside.
    “Are you mad?” she asked.
    I just needed to explain it to her. Make her see. That was all. “Not mad,” I said. Then I said it, what was in my heart:
    “I just miss when we were friends.”
    I waited for her to get it.
    “We‧re still friends,” she said, standing on one foot to pull the back of her shoe up over her heel. She looked at me as if I had said something really humorous. “You goof,” she said. “Hey, let‧s go down by the river.”
    She started off across the spongy, shimmering parking lot of the Seldem Plaza, leading the way through the canyons of wavy heat made by the parked cars. I followed her, like maybe I had my whole life. But wanting only to keep on doing that.
    “You know what I mean,” I said. A few shades less certain, though, that she would. “I miss the way we used to be friends. Before Glenna.”
    It crossed my mind that to anyone who happened to see us there, we would look the same as we always had. Debbie and Maureen. There they are. “Frick and Frack,” my dad said. We would look the same. Did that mean something?
    “You should give Glenna a chance,” said Maureen. “She tries to be nice to you.”
    We moved through a short tent of shade next to the AS-P and then the scrubby weeds that are the native flora of Seldem, the kind that can grow up through concrete as long as it‧s not the middle part that cars drive over all the time. The kinds of scratchy weeds that grow about ten inches high, then branch out and blossom forth in stiff, itchy exploded seedpods.
    “Glenna doesn‧t want to be my friend,” I said. “Glenna wants to be
your
friend. Glenna would be happy if I disappeared from the face of the earth in a puff of smoke.”
    We looked at each other. We both knew it was sort of true, and we smiled a little bit the way you can smile at something that is true when it is said out loud for the first time. It was a relief, in a way, to know that Maureen saw that part of it. For the moment that seemed enough. Going further seemed dangerous, like stepping off a cliff. Because I could also tell that Maureen wasn‧t going to be deciding right then and there to dump Glenna. She didn‧t see why she should.
    I realize now that Maureen saw something in Glenna that I could not see. (I leave it to her biographers, or maybe to microbiologists, to discover what that is.) Not that I was trying too hard.
    Anyhow, it felt safer then to leave that topic behind and take this bit of time with Maureen any way I could get it To add it to the little pile of proofs that I hoped would add up to some charm that could eventually ward off Glenna.
    So we squeezed between the dusty bushes to get to the riverbank, where we sank our feet into the silty mud, and sat on the low, bouncing branch of a big old tree that leaned out over the water. We crossed our legs like yogis and tried to balance there with our eyes closed. The shallow part of the river flowed along steadily, but in no hurry, about a foot below our branch, greenish brown, the color of a dollar bill. We opened our eyes and dangled our feet, making whirls and eddies form around them, talking about whatever, one thing or another. The sun must have been moving along up above the trees because the patches of sunlight shifted bit by bit over the moving surface of the water, lighting up patches of our shoulders and legs and the tops of our heads. In a way it was the best afternoon of summer. But it was also like a prediction from the oracle at Delphi; it could mean practically