Read The Way We Bared Our Souls for Free Online Page A

to find the outsiders, those who didn’t drink from the agua of our lunchtime clique.
    Like Jay said, I had to save my soul.
    And to save my soul I needed to take a big risk. I needed to convince others to save theirs.
    And suddenly I knew just the person who could help me do it.
    • • •
    I drove past my own house and parked three doors down, in Kit Calhoun’s driveway. Kit and I had grown up together and were in the same year in school, but he and I hadn’t talked much since our ill-fated “romance” three summers before. Today, however, he was my gateway to Thomas Kamara.
    I was perhaps a little
too
well aware of the fact that Thomas had been hanging out in my neighborhood recently, always glued to a skateboard. Kit appeared to be teaching the Liberian orphan how to emulate Tony Hawk. Thomas was a fast learner. He also happened to look amazing with his shirt off. I’d seen them in the middle of my road, doing ollies and kickflips and skating in the empty pool in Kit’s backyard, which had been converted into a half-pipe. A lot of kids used to congregate there for long skating sessions, but Kit was more of a loner these days. Thomas, another notorious loner, seemed to be the only one allowed in.
    How can I describe Thomas? In brief, he was a really hot student from Africa who looked half the time as if he wanted you dead and the other half as if he was about to hand you a bouquet of flowers and sweep you off your feet. There was just something so intense about him. Vibrant. Even when he seemed clouded or out of it at school, Thomas still had this piercing quality to him. And then there was the matter of that poem he wrote, the words he’d never meant for me to see. Right now it was those words more than anything that steered me toward him. But more on that later.
    I let myself in through the Calhouns’ side gate, my childhood route, and walked around the house to the backyard. There was Kit, not skateboarding, exactly, but straddling the rusty diving board with his wooden deck on his lap, staring into the empty deep end of the pool. He was either lost in thought or ignoring me on purpose.
    I suspected that Kit harbored some malice toward me. Which was understandable for two reasons: One, I might have been responsible for both his initiation into romance and his first broken heart. The summer between eighth grade and high school—the summer that decided many social fates—Kit and I hung out almost every day. In the not-too-distant past, Kit’s swimming pool had been filled with water and was a huge draw for me and the other kids in the neighborhood. Kit, on the other hand, had less appreciation for it. “I wish I could drain it and turn it into a skatepark,” he’d always say. Eventually, he got his wish.
    But back during those lazy summer pool sessions, Kit and I got to know each other, floating head to head on inflated rafts in the blazing desert sunshine, drifting with the music that was always playing from his stereo. We talked about our parents, what we thought high school would be like, where we saw ourselves five years after graduation. We’d seen all the same high school comedies and romances and had read a lot of the same books. We felt qualified to declare to each other what mistakes we wouldn’t repeat.
    “You’re going to get popular and forget about me,” Kit had teased. “You’re going to be one of
those
girls. I’ve got a bad feeling, Lo. You’ll start dating a generic senior quarterback on the first day of school. His name will be Rocco, and he’ll think Pink Floyd is a flavor of ice cream.”
    I laughed and dismissed that prediction, throwing a beach ball at him. “Well,
my
crystal ball tells me you’re dead wrong,” I said. But secretly I thought that all sounded pretty great. Not the forgetting-about-Kit part, obviously, but . . . just . . . meeting new people, trying different things. And it turned out that Kit wasn’t too far off in his prediction. Except it was a