Read Girls Fall Down for Free Online Page B

bangs. She met the eyes of one boy, a nice-looking boy, someone she would probably never see again, and his look slid down her.
    When they walked east along St. Clair they had become a group of five, Megan and Zoe joining them as well.
    â€˜I have to write an assignment about Guinevere,’ moaned Zoe. ‘Who I just hate so
much
. Did you read it? She’s so unloyal. She’s like this crazy old bipolar bitch.’
    â€˜We’re not doing that one, though, we’re doing that other one.’
    â€˜Well, God, you’re so lucky. It’s like a million pages of poetry. It’s diseased, if you want to know.’
    â€˜Is your class raising money for the global, the African thing?’
    â€˜I think. But I’m not sure what we’re doing yet.’
    The girl adjusted the gold barrettes in her hair with one hand, rolled up her skirt so that it brushed high on her legs, her bare skin goosebumped with cold, thinking about the boy from the public school, with a vague distaste and a wish that he would follow them. He might have been a nice boy.
    â€˜What I think, we need to have a slave auction,’ Zoe was saying. ‘Because it’s so the best kind of fundraiser.’
    â€˜We should make the teachers be the slaves,’ said Megan, giggling. ‘We should make Mr. Sondstrom be a slave. We so should.’
    The girl frowned and wiped mochaccino from her pink lips, swallowing against the heat in her throat. ‘Mr. Sondstrom’s too gross to be a slave even,’ she said. Megan didn’t know. It wasn’t her fault. ‘He’s just a squid. Sid the Squid.’
    â€˜Totally,’ said Lauren, bumping her shoulder supportively. The girl finished her mochaccino, crushed the paper cup in her hand.
    Turning off St. Clair, they walked past the frost-brown gardens of the residential streets, wet leaves in the gutters, heading towards Chorley Park, where there were boys playing soccer sometimes, or sometimes they would just sit on the benches and talk, their park, their place.
    â€˜But I’m going to the Eaton Centre later on,’ said Megan. ‘I need a new pair of shoes
so
bad. It’s a critical situation.’
    â€˜You know the place called Rebels? They have the
best
shoes.’
    â€˜Megan buys her shoes at Sears,’ said Tasha.
    â€˜I do not, you liar.’ Megan, a year younger than the others, her position in the group subject to question.
    â€˜You totally do.’
    â€˜Oh God,’ Zoe broke in, laughing nervously. ‘I have to tell you about my brother. I have to tell you about my psycho brother, okay? I mean, he’s got all these, like, warfare scenes in his bedroom, like, the little guys with their spears and shit. Which is spaz enough, right? But he’s now he’s like, okay, it’s, like, this warfare is all over, it’s modern times, and I’m going to do a terror gas attack, and kill them all. And I’m like,
God!
They’re a bunch of
toys
! But he’s, no, I’m gonna make a poison chemical from like Clorox and bleach and I’m gonna kill everybody, and I’m like, it’s a
toy
, Jordan, you mutant.’
    â€˜God,’ said the girl, rolling her eyes. ‘That is
so
random.’
    â€˜â€™Cause he’s like, it happened in, in the Japan subway, and all these people died, so he’s like, I can totally do this at home.’
    â€˜What happened in Japan?’ asked Tasha, her eyebrows pinched.
    Zoe shrugged. ‘I dunno. Terrorists or whatever. Jordan’s like Mutato-Boy, so, I mean, what does he know about it? I bet he dreamed the whole thing.’
    â€˜Would you believe,’ said the girl, ‘when I was a kid I was in that big subway crash at Dupont? Oh
God
, that was so scary.’
    â€˜Oh my
God
! You were
really
?’ gasped Lauren, and the girl’s face shone with gratified horror.
    â€˜I totally was,’ she said. ‘I