Read The Elephant of Surprise (The Russel Middlebrook Series Book 4) for Free Online Page B

for two weeks, it made sense that he'd have run into the homeless camp eventually. So is that who the hamburgers were for?
    Talk about the Elephant of Surprise. Kevin Land, Well-Established Asshole, was delivering meals to the homeless?

 
    CHAPTER FIVE
     
    That Saturday night, I went out to a movie with Min and her girlfriend Leah, just like I'd promised earlier in the week. Gunnar and his girlfriend Em came too.
    At first, I was having a good time. The five of us had done stuff as a group before, lots of times. It had never felt like it was two couples and me—like I was a fifth wheel. I mean, I'd had a boyfriend, Otto. He lived in another city, but I'd had him.
    But now Otto and I had broken up, and that night as I sat in the theater watching the movie with my friends, it felt totally weird. Isn't that funny? Absolutely nothing was different: it was the same five people, doing basically the same thing we'd always done—even sitting in the same place where we always sat in the theater. But because I no longer had this almost-imaginary, eight-hundred-miles-away boyfriend, I felt like I was all alone.
    After the movie, we went to get something to eat on McKenzie Street, which was the one small neighborhood in our town that was even the slightest bit hip and/or trendy. And as we walked down the sidewalk, I was suddenly hyper-aware of how we were arranged—Em and Gunnar walking side-by-side, Min and Leah together, and me.
    "Where should we eat?" Em said from up front. She was this sort of bookish type with baggy clothes in earthtone colors and tortoise-shell Harry Potter glasses.
    "How about Ethiopian?" Gunnar said. "They have that whole thing where you eat with your hands."
    "I don't know," Leah said. "I think I'm sick of Ethiopian." Right then, Min stumbled a little on the sidewalk in front of me. "How about pizza?" Leah said.
    "Sounds good to me," Em said.
    That decided, we headed toward the restaurant. As we crossed the street, Min drifted back toward me. "Well?" she said.
    "Well what?" I said.
    "Leah." When I didn't say anything, Min said, "You forgot all about it, didn't you? You said you were going to watch and tell me if she seemed weird!"
    "No!" But the truth is I had forgotten. I'd been preoccupied with feeling like a fifth wheel, but I didn't want to admit that to Min. I glanced up at Leah, who is tall and blond and was wearing army fatigues. "I haven't noticed anything yet, but I'll keep looking."
    As chance would have it, it was the pizza place where, almost a year earlier, I'd first met up with the other members of the Geography Club, this secret gay alliance I'd been in. I remembered how it had felt so hush-hush, like we were spies meeting for a rendezvous. If you'd told me then that a year later Min and I would be out and proud, and that I'd have just broken up with my almost-imaginary boyfriend, well, I actually might have believed you.
    After we ordered, we sat at the table—me on the end, of course. Then we talked and played tic-tac-toe in the parmesan cheese we'd shaken onto the tabletop. Gunnar, of course, was too busy photographing and posting the conversation to, you know, actually participate in any of it.
    "How long are you going to keep this up?" I asked him.
    "I'm not sure," he said. "I'm pretty sure I'll just know when it's time to quit."
    "No one's even following your posts. You know that, right?" Well, no one except Otto, I thought.
    "No," he said. "I don't know that."
    "Gunnar, I'm your best friend, and last week, I unfollowed you."
    Everyone laughed at my joke except Gunnar.
    "It doesn't matter," he said. "Being followed isn't the point."
    "Then what's the point?"
    He thought for a second. "I'm not sure. It's an experiment. Sometimes you don't know the point of an experiment until after it's over. Besides, it's a record of my life. Do people write in a diary because they expect other people to read it? No, just the opposite. They're writing for themselves, to have a record of what they did