Read Dark Water for Free Online Page B

all. She was good at math, like Robby, so she didn’t mind my being good at book reports and vocabulary tests.
    Everything was perfect until eighth grade. Greenie was an early bloomer, and while I stayed the same shape, skinny as a tree that grew straight up, the layer of fat around Greenie’s middle seemed to move up to her breasts. She got her braces off and started keeping her mouth closed. Then her legs stretched and became thin. By the end of the year, the sort of boys who didn’t do their homework began to hover around her locker, never the least interested in me. We stayed friends mostly because Greenie and I had this history together, our secret power to bring inanimate things to life.
    I remember that we drifted into second-period drama class that day without interest, though it was our favorite class and Ms. Grant our favorite teacher. The room was always cold because the floor was glossy white concrete and the walls werebrick. We were supposed to be brainstorming for a one-act, five-minute play, and as usual Greenie and I were partners. Ms. Grant left the class unsupervised, as she sometimes did, and went into her office while fifteen or twenty of us lay sprawled on the various pieces of furniture that had been donated for stage props. I spent some time at the bookshelves where Ms. Grant ran a lending library of British theater productions and foreign films, looking for something that featured Marcel Marceau. A big droopy guy named Hal told me I should watch
Les Enfants du Paradis
, which turned out not to feature Marcel Marceau at all, but was directed by Marcel
Carné
and featured a totally different famous French mime. I signed it out and put it in my backpack, and while I was throwing out lame ideas for the plot of our one-act, five-minute play, Greenie started in a very low breathy voice to tell me about her upcoming date with this boy named Hickey.
    “You’re kidding, right?” I said.
    “You know that guy who drives a Honda with Texas plates?” she asked, ignoring my attempt to laugh at her boy love’s name.
    I didn’t, but right then Ms. Grant came out of her office and shouted, “I hope from the noise level in this room that you’re all going to be ready to write a rough draft of your script in fifteen minutes, including but not limited to Ms. Coombs and Ms. DeWitt?”
    So that was all I knew when I was introduced at lunch to a boy I would frankly have called unworthy of breathy-voiceddescription. His eyes had a sleepy look I associate with low achievement, like most of the boys who were mesmerized by Greenie’s breasts. The cuffs of his jeans had come unraveled from dragging along under the heels of his sneakers. His hair hit his eyes mid-iris. He looked older than us, too, which I realized halfway through the conversation was because he had an actual and pressing need to shave.
    We were wandering over to the pizza stand when I opened my wallet and saw nothing in there except an old raffle ticket.
    “Wait,” I said. “I forgot to get money. I’ll have to go find my mom.”
    “You bring your mom to school?” Hickey said.
    “Her mother
teaches
here,” Greenie told him. “Sometimes. She’s a substitute. Mrs. DeWitt.”
    “Oh, her,” Hickey said. I waited for further observations, but he kept them to himself, which made me feel subtly insulted.
    “So I guess I’ll see you later,” I said.
    “We could do Pedro’s,” Hickey said. “I’ve got, like, this gift certificate.”
    Fallbrook High doesn’t have an open campus, so I said, “But we’re not allowed to do that”—the sort of nerdy remark I’d been making since the age of about four.
    “Hickey is,” Greenie said. “He’s eighteen, so he’s got a pass.”
    “He does, but we don’t.” This, too, is the sort of thing I’vebeen pointing out since the age of four. But Greenie just gave me a pained look, so I followed her to Hickey’s car, and nobody saw us.
    The taco stand was maybe five minutes away, right on Main