Read Watch for Me by Moonlight for Free Online Page B

souls.”
    “Well, I’m curious about the ones in our house but for now, lead me out of this temptation and deliver me to pizza, Meredith,” she said. “I feel faint.” As they walked, Mallory said, “There’s Sasha again.” Sasha was still in the shoe department, with at least fifteen boxes lined up and pyramided beside her stockinged feet. “What she said was funny. Like she wants to be a nurse and a professional and get scholarships, but you can tell she wants to marry a rich guy, too.”
    “Being a nurse is a very good path to that,” Merry said, waving to Allie and Erika, who were headed toward them down the mall. “Nurses marry doctors.”
    “What about Mom? She married a soccer player with bad knees who had a degree in American literature! If Dad were a doctor, we wouldn’t be giving up our mother seventy hours a week!”
    “Then Dad is the one who got lucky. Of course, by the time she’s rich, we’ll be out of college. We’ll have to survive on our own, without our mother’s help. I’m going to have to marry a rich man on mah own, y’all,” Merry said, mimicking Sasha. “Don’t you think I’m charming enough to be the fairest in the land?”
    “You’re so deep, Meredith,” Mallory said. “What’s a vixen like you doing without a date for the formal?”
    They passed the mall fountain and could detect the steamy, awful-wonderful smell that issued from the collision of Latta Java and Pizza Papa on the far end of the mall.
    “You know, we should stop quick and get Dad a birthday present while we’re here,” Merry said. Tim’s birthday was in April and so was Adam’s. Adam was easy. He’d gotten an iPod for Christmas, and the girls went in together on a fifty dollar card for him to fill it with songs. They drifted over to the CVS store and debated on buying Tim an electric toothbrush, reading on the package that it was good for “aging gums.” They agreed it was kind of a cold present, which reminded them of the time that Tim had given Campbell a Crock-Pot slow cooker for their anniversary—in which she had, the next day, planted a cactus. Their father hadn’t even dared to bring it up.
    They began to run to meet up with Allie and Erika and, an hour later, had demolished a Monza Four Cheese pizza bought on discount from Drew. By the time they finished, the mall was about to close. Allie’s mother was there to take her and Erika to the gym class they’d enrolled in on Sunday nights to improve their tumbling. Merry often said—in a pretty conceited way—she was glad to have learned her tumbling when she was six. The twins waved through the window of Pizza Papa to Drew and then jumped on the red bus that was just pulling up to the stop.
    As they put their packages into the rack and settled into seats, Meredith suddenly punched her sister hard on the bicep.
    “What was that for?” Mally demanded.
    “For telling me I’m a loser because I don’t have a date for the formal! ‘I’m not defined by that’—that’s what you’d say,” Merry said.
    “You could have fooled me,” said Mallory. “Anyhow, I’m sorry.... Speaking of that, what are you going to wear for a coat if you wear something sleeveless? With our luck, there’ll be a foot of snow that night. You’ll look great in Stella McCartney with a parka.”
    “You can wear Mom’s old opera cape. Grandma can take it up a few inches. Neely’s lace dress is long-sleeved,” Merry began, and then stopped in the middle of her sentence. She had only ever seen pictures of old movie stars like James Dean, but the boy standing under the streetlight at the gates of the Deptford Mall looked like all those pictures. His hair was cut short on the sides and fell forward in a long blond twirl onto his forehead. His hands jammed into the pockets of a beat-up brown leather jacket, he slouched against the light post, next to where flowers bloomed in the spring. When the bus rolled past, he looked up, and Merry thought she had seen the