Read Blue Like Friday for Free Online Page B

colors.
    â€œHi, Hal!” I called.
    Hal made a zipping signal across his mouth to shut me up, and he indicated that I was to dismount.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” I asked in a loud whisper.
    â€œNothing,” he whispered back. “But he’s up already. We haven’t much of a head start, so we have to dash, OK?”
    I nodded.
    â€œRight,” said Hal throatily, “wheel your bike quietly to the end of the road, and then we’ll cycle from there.”
    I nodded again. I am so cooperative, really. And away we went. Against my better judgment.
    There wasn’t much traffic about early on a Saturday morning, so we made good headway by cycling like mad. Every time a car came up behind us, Hal turned around to check if it was Alec, but it never was.
    â€œMaybe he’s not going to do it,” I yelled at Hal when we stopped at the traffic lights in town. “Maybe he doesn’t want to. Maybe your mother has made him go to the golf thing with her after all. Who’s supposed to be minding you, by the way?”
    â€œI mind myself,” Hal said.
    â€œYou don’t!”
    â€œYeah, I do. Unless it’s nighttime. Come on, Olivia,” he suddenly yelled, spurting ahead as the lights changed to green. “Keep up!”
    I jumped onto my pedals, and I kept churning all the
way over to the hospital. We got off at the gate and I hung over my handlebars, trying to get my breath back after our crazy bike ride.
    The hospital is a big, sprawling place with blue railings and a lot of low, flat-roofed buildings. Just inside the gate, on the left, is a large notice board with signs in different colors that point you to the various departments, and on the right, before the notice board, is a glass kiosk sort of thing, with a security man in it. There’s a red-and-orange striped pole that goes across the gate, so you can’t get in unless the security man raises it.
    As soon as I could talk, I said, “Well, are you sure he got the message?”
    Hal was pretty winded too. “I think he must’ve,” he gasped. He breathed a bit and then he went on. “There was an ALMIGHTY row this morning. My mother threw her shoes out the window.”
    â€œWhy?” I wondered if maybe he’d put stones in her shoes as well.
    â€œI have no idea. Anyway, she came down in her bare feet and her new outfit, and she jumped into her car and zoomed off to her golf tournament without even having any breakfast.”
    This house was beginning to sound odder and odder. I mean, it’s one thing to start turning a garage into a playroom and then go off the idea. It’s another thing to start threatening an odd little squirt like Hal with six years of
compulsory rugby and another thing again to throw your shoes out the window because someone won’t take you to a game of golf. Maybe they were always flinging things out of the windows. Maybe they did worse than that.
    â€œOh, Hal,” I said.
    â€œSo, you see, Olivia?”
    I did kind of see. His family certainly seemed a bit peculiar, I have to say. I started to feel a bit sorry for Hal, and there’s only one of him too, which makes it harder. Larry would not be my idea of a person to spend the rest of my life on a desert island with, but if the chips were down, we’d stick together, me and Lar. Poor old Hal had no one. Only me.
    â€œBut, Hal, you know, you can’t mess with grown-ups. They always win in the end.”
    Hal shrugged.
    We were just locking our bikes to a railing, out of sight behind a parked car on the other side of the road from the hospital gate, when Alec’s little white van appeared at the end of the road, and there was Alec hunched over the steering wheel, looking right and left before turning into the road we were on.
    To be fair to Hal, Alec wouldn’t exactly be my idea of someone I’d like to meet at breakfast every day from now until I was old enough to leave home.