Read Caring Is Creepy for Free Online

imagined Wynn getting all these sexy or angry e-mails from guys we’d flirted with and then devastated in The Big Green Bus . It was Dani’s stated policy to never give out our real e-mail addresses to people we met online. But we weren’t officially playing The Game, and then there was also the fact I’d already told him my real name and hometown.
    “Tell him you’ll give it to him tomorrow if he meets you, and then we can go ahead and make a new one now. Just in case he’s a freak,” Dani said.
    Logan told me he was about to go on-duty and he looked forward to messaging with me the next day. And that was it.
    “On-duty?” I asked her. “What do you think that means?”
    “Maybe he’s a lifeguard. Who cares?” Dani shrugged. “You have an electronic date. You have an electronic date,” she sang, giving me a giant hug and dancing me around in a circle. She smelled like fabric softener and fresh hair spray.
    “You make him sound like a robot.”
    And that’s how the serious fun ended and the serious trouble began. Sounds innocent enough, huh?

A Swallowed But
    “I ’ll talk to him about it,” Mom said. Twin clouds of smoke gushed out of her nose. She crushed out her cigarette after taking two drags and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms. I hadn’t seen her in two days and this seemed important.
    “That’s it?” I asked.
    “What do you want me to do, sweetie?”
    “Mom, he was sucking on pills and then crunching them up with grandma’s old pestle. You don’t think that’s a little—” I grimaced. “—odd?”
    I set down the plate of toast and poached eggs—barely cooked and wobbly with warm, raw yolk, just the way she liked them—and handed her a fork. She broke off the corner of her toast and dabbed it in the bright gold yolk several times until it popped and oozed.
    “Just let me sit here a while and relax before you start hammering at me with all this.” She took another bite of toast. “I think you need a new pair of school shoes. There’s a sale going on over at the J. C. Penney in Statesboro.”
    “Mom, why aren’t you taking this seriously?”
    “I saw a real cute pair of sandals I think you’d like. But then they probably wouldn’t do for when it gets cool. If the sale’s good, maybe we could get you a couple—”
    “I think you should break up with him.”
    She dropped her fork and folded her arms across her chest. The only sound in the room was the faucet
drip-drip-dripping
.
    “How about this, Lynn? You just attend to your business and let me handle my own affairs. The way I see it, this has nothing to do with you and I don’t appreciate taking romantic advice from a pimply teenage girl.”
    Almost without meaning to, my fingers found the zit above my eyebrow.
    Mom slapped the table, making the saltshaker bounce and fall over.
    “You hear?”
    “Yes, ma’am,” I said. And swallowed the
but
I wanted to add.

The Dreamiest Arms in
People Magazine
    M y dream man was pasted on a piece of blue construction paper. His hair was blond and swept back to the right. Dani cut it out jaggedly and so it looked more like a scare wig than real hair. He had the face of a hero from a recent action movie, but the eyes had been colored in blue with a marker. The arms were too long for the body and stuck out at odd angles as though he’d fallen from a great height and broken several bones. His muscles bulged under an Old Navy T-shirt and something else bulged under a skin-tight pair of Calvin Klein underpants. For some reason, she’d also given him shiny, black, tasseled loafers she’d cut out and glued on top of his bare feet.
    “His name’s Dylan,” Dani told me when she gave him to me. “Or should I say Logan?”
    I rolled my eyes to heaven.
    “Don’t pout. It makes you look—”
    I did not want to know what it made me look like. “He’s got nice arms,” I said, just to say something.
    “They’re what’s-his-name’s arms … uh … the drummer from that