Read Unforgiven for Free Online Page A

scrawled back, right over the words of Cam’s note. She crumpled it up and pitched it at him the next time Mr. Davidson turned around.
    The rest of her day was long and dreary, but at least she got a break from Cam. She didn’t see him at lunch or in the hallways or in any of her other classes. Lilith reasoned that if she had to have two classes with him, it was best to have them back-to-back first thing in the morning and get the squirrelly sensation he made her feel out of the way. Why was he so casual with her? He seemed to think she enjoyed his presence. Something about him filled her with rage.
    When the final bell rang, when she most wanted to be slinking behind the carob branches to play her guitar alone at Rattlesnake Creek, Lilith trudged to detention.
    The detention room was spare—only a few desks and one poster on the wall that featured a kitten clinging to a tree branch. For what felt like the three thousandth time, Lilith read the words printed beneath its calico tail:
YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE, BUT IF YOU DO IT RIGHT, ONCE IS ENOUGH.
    The way to survive detention was to go into a trance. Lilith stared at the kitten poster until it took on an otherworldly quality. The kitten looked terrified, hanging there with its claws puncturing the branch. Was it supposed to embody “living right”? Not even the decor in this school made sense.
    “Room sweep!” Coach Burroughs announced as he burst through the door. He checked in every fifteen minutes, like clockwork. The assistant basketball coach wore his silver hair in a greased-back pompadour, like an aging Elvis impersonator. The kids called him Crotch Burroughs, in honor of his borderline indecent shorts.
    Even though Lilith was the only one in detention today, Burroughs paced as though disciplining a room full of invisible delinquents. When he got to Lilith, he slapped a stapled packet on her desk. “Your makeup biology test, Highness. It’s different from the one you skipped out on yesterday.”
    The same or different, it didn’t matter—Lilith was going to fail this one, too. She wondered why she was never called into a counselor’s office, why no one seemed interested in how her appalling grades were threatening her college prospects.
    When the door opened and Cam walked in, Lilith actually smacked her forehead.
    “Are you kidding me?” she muttered under her breath when he handed Burroughs a yellow detention slip.
    Burroughs nodded at Cam, sent him to a desk across the room, and said, “You got an assignment to keep you occupied?”
    “I can’t begin to tell you how much I have to do,” Cam said.
    Burroughs rolled his eyes. “Kids these days think they have it so hard. You wouldn’t know real work if it bit you. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. In the meantime, the intercom is on, so the office will hear everything that happens in this room. Understand?”
    From his desk, Cam winked at Lilith. She turned to face the wall. They were not on winking terms.
    As soon as the door closed behind Burroughs, Cam walked to the teacher’s desk, switched off the intercom, then sidled over to the chair in front of Lilith. He sat down and put his feet up on her desk, nudging her fingers with his boots.
    She shoved his feet away. “I have a test to take,” she said. “Excuse me.”
    “And I have a better idea. Where’s your guitar?”
    “How did you manage to get a detention on your first day of school? Going for a new record?” she asked, so that she wouldn’t say what she was really thinking, which was,
You’re the first new kid I can remember. Where are you from? Where do you shop? What’s the rest of the world like?
    “Don’t worry about that,” Cam said. “Now, about your guitar. We don’t have a lot of time.”
    “Weird thing to say to a girl sitting in detention for eternity.”
    “This is your notion of eternity?” Cam looked around, his green eyes pausing on the kitten poster. “Wouldn’t be my first choice,” he finally said.