Disrupted

Read Disrupted for Free Online

Book: Read Disrupted for Free Online
Authors: Claire Vale
lips to add some volume to the thin line, then gave up.
    My eyes were my best feature, a warm brown that I liked to think of as soulful. And the rest of me, well, quite normal, really. Nothing amazing, but nothing to make guys run from in horror. And they didn’t. But they would.
    It had already started.
    Hadn’t Chris said he always avoided me? Even Gale hated me on first sight, and she wasn’t even a robot boy.
    I stared at my reflection and watched a tear slip out.
    Was I really such a terrible person? Another tear. I’d made a conscious decision to turn the breezy girl from Mayfair into a moody teenager who was clearly not okay with the mess my parents had made of our family life. It was supposed to be a temporary measure, but what if I never found my way back?
    What if I only had myself to blame for never finding someone who could love me forever and ever?
    “Everything changes, you know.”
    My hands went to my face at the sound of Chris’s voice, blotting the wetness beneath my eyes before I turned from the mirror.
    “Just seeing the future changes it, Willow. That’s what’s got Drustan so worried about us finding out about stuff, you know.” He came inside, softly closing the door behind him. “If you know you’re going to hook up with someone, for example, you try too hard, or don’t try hard enough, so it ends up not happening.”
    I shot him a dark look as I went to sit on the bed again.
    Couldn’t he at least pretend he hadn’t eavesdropped on my very private chat with Wanda? “It really doesn’t matter.”
    Chris dropped to the floor, his back against the wall, his long legs spread out in front of him. “Then why are you crying?”
    “My eyes are watering from pain,” I muttered. “My ankle hurts like crazy.”
    “It still hurts?” Chris jumped up. “Why didn’t you say something?”
    Yeah, right. He was officially dead and I was going to whine over a sore ankle?
    Chris left to fetch an ice pack, and came back with Gale. “Hopefully it’s sprained,” she was telling him.
    “And I hope the scraps of metal holding you together land up in a recycling plant,” I snapped back. Honestly, what had I ever done to her?
    “Why, you- you!” spluttered Gale. Her tubular body elongated into a thin spindly pipe until she was almost as tall as Chris. “I’ll have you know that I’m fashioned of a very unique, highly precious alloy metal that is—”
    “Fashioned?” I burst in. “Now that’s stretching it.”
    “Cut it out,” said Chris.
    “She started it,” said Gale, slinking down to normal size.
    I turned on Chris. “You heard what she said about hoping my ankle’s sprained. That slimy rust bucket detests me and I don’t care if you believe me or not.”
    With a squeak, Gale flew up and at me. I slid off the bed to avoid a walloping, but Chris caught her by the foot, reeling her in. Then he let go suddenly, and she dropped to the floor with a thud and a whelp.
    Before I could offer a smile of thanks, he yanked Gale onto her feet and glared at me. “Gale hoped your ankle was sprained as opposed to fractured, Willow. Because apparently while this—” he held out a folded patch of quilted material I hadn’t seen in his hand “—can heal inflamed muscle, it can’t knit bone.”
    Oh!
    “Sit down,” he barked in a voice that instantly knocked me back onto the bed. He handed the wad of material to Gale with the order, “Just get over there and zap the bad out of her ankle.”
    And then, before I could blink or Gale could protest, Chris slammed his way out of the room.
    I watched suspiciously as Gale wrapped the padded bandage once around my ankle. At first I couldn’t feel a thing. The bandage was neither hot nor cold, certainly not tight enough to apply the required pressure to a swelling. But before long a warm pins and needles sensation worked through my ankle and, with my foot stretched on the bed, I eased back and down onto my elbows.
    “Remove it as soon as the

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