Read Yesterday for Free Online Page B

say for myself. The longer I fail to provide an explanation the angrier he gets until I fi nally mumble that it’s not a good time for me to start seeing anyone and he hangs up on me.
    I can’t blame him.
    With that out of the way, I feel marginally better and magically ace a multiple-choice biology quiz on Tuesday afternoon and then argue with my sister over TV access on Tuesday night (I want to watch videos on MuchMusic and Olivia wants to see The A-Team ). On Wednesday morning the entire tenth grade is assigned a bus to the museum according to their homeroom. This means that I’m not on the same bus as Christine or Derrick and I end up sitting in the third row from the front with a girl named Tracy who’s in my homeroom but I’ve never spoken to.
    She sticks on earphones, closes her eyes and promptly falls asleep. I have the window seat and watch highway traffi c. As we approach Toronto I fi nd myself getting mildly excited. The skyscrapers and level of activity feel invigorat-ing compared to life in the suburbs. My grandfather lives downtown, near the Davisville subway station. Maybe we would’ve been better off moving closer to him rather than situating ourselves in the burbs.
    Forty minutes later I’m loitering among a mob of tenth graders in front of the Royal Ontario Museum, looking for Christine and Derrick. The fi rst person I fi nd is actually Nicolette who is standing around with a couple of other girls who qualify as popular and pretty. Standing together as a trio they remind me of the women on Charlie’s Angels, only younger. I met one of them at Corey’s party on the weekend and they all act really nice to me, despite what happened with Seth. They even say I can stick with them today, if I want.
    Meanwhile Derrick’s fi ghting his way through the crowd towards me and one of Nicolette’s angels sees him and points him out to me. “What’s with his hair anyway?”
    she asks snidely. “Does he think he’s that guy from General Public?” Nicolette levels an icy look at her friend on my behalf. Because I’ve been paying more attention to music lately I get the reference and Derrick’s hair is, in fact, exactly like the guy’s from British band General Public but that’s no reason for Nicolette’s friend to be bitchy. Especially when she happens to style her hair and dress exactly like her friends do.
    I wave at Derrick and step away from Nicolette. Derrick hasn’t found Christine yet either but we’re all being corralled towards the front entrance. Derrick and I both have homework questions to fi ll in during our stint at the museum— me for history class and him for geography. The kids who have both classes this semester must be pissed off at facing double the work but I doubt that any of the museum homework really matters.
    As Derrick and I head inside we overhear that a busload of tenth graders from our school arrived ahead of us and have gotten started, which means we might not be able to catch up with Christine right away. Tons of people are scrambling off in the direction of the dinosaur exhibit so Derrick and I decide to check out geology fi rst. While Derrick’s scrawling out an answer to a question about metamorphic rock I wander around staring at weirdly beautiful minerals and rocks.
    I stare at them for such a long time, being sure to read every inch of the text that goes along with the exhibits, that Derrick gets bored and has to hurry me up. It’s the same when we’re staring at gorgeous Greek statues, ancient hiero-glyphs and ugly insects. I can’t get enough of any of it and Derrick jokes about what a geek I’ve turned into when we fi nally do stumble across Christine in the museum cafeteria at lunchtime.
    Since we sit together in bio, Derrick’s well aware that I’m not normally so raptly interested in things that feel like homework. This is different. This building holds the knowledge of our past— humanity’s past and the planet’s past.
    Who wouldn’t fi nd that