A Living Dead Love Story Series by Rusty Fischer Read Free Book Online

Halley’s Comet or a solar eclipse.
    â€œYou mean you already bumped into this fellow once before, Maddy?” asks Dad, holding up his greasy plastic spatula like a reporter’s notebook.
    I shrug. “Yeah, I mean—”
    â€œThe first time was right after Home Ec,” Hazel answers for me. While I’m kicking myself for telling her about the first Stamp collision, she says, “That one I can write off to coincidence. But twice? In one day? That requires a smidge more explanation.”
    â€œI
can’t
explain it, Hazel; that’s the thing. I was just strolling out of the graveyard after finishing a grave rubbing, and he was running home from football practice and
—bam
—we bumped into each other.”
    â€œHe doesn’t sound very coordinated, dear,” Dad says as he flips the grilled cheese. “Are you sure this is someone you should really consider boyfriend material? I mean, what if he asks you to the Fall Formal and trips while you’re making your grand entrance? You only get one of those, you know.”
    Dad’s thick, black bifocals are slipping down his nose as the grease sizzles from the pan. He’s faintly smiling, like maybe he’s playing with me. When I open my mouth to defend Stamp, he merely winks and returns to making dinner.
    The minute it’s ready, Dad eats with gusto; he does everything with gusto. I watch in amazement as he makes quick work of his own sandwich before eyeing ours hungrily. Hazel, who avoids cheese at all costs (and eggs, apparently), is only nibbling her first half to be polite. (To me, she can say—and do—anything. To Dad, she’s the picture of Miss Manners.)
    When she catches him looking at her sandwich, she lies. “Mom’s making meat loaf tonight, and I’d feel bad if I filled up over here. Would you like mine, Mr. Swift?”
    â€œOh,” he says, nose crinkling with delight, “only if you
insist.”
    She slides it over and eyes me suspiciously as I make short work of dinner.
    Upstairs, after I do the dishes—and Dad’s god-awful greasy pan—Hazel interrogates me some more as we linger in my bedroom. “You’re sure he didn’t ask you out?” She sits cross-legged on my bed, toying with the tassels of an aqua blue throw pillow. “It looked like he asked you out. I mean, I can kind of read lips, and he definitely said the words ‘you’ and ‘out’ in the same sentence.”
    I laugh. “No, he didn’t ask me out and, no, there’s nothing to tell.”
    Now, I suppose I should feel bad for not squealing to Hazel about everything the minute it happens, because we’re best friends, right? But we’re not
that
kind of best friends. We’re not frenemies or anything like that. It’s just that, well, Hazel’s used to being the pretty one, the popular one, the one with a boyfriend, the one who tramps off to Fall Formal every year while I take the pictures in the yard, eat a pizza in my sweats, and wait by the phone until she gets home so I can hear how much fun she had.
    She doesn’t do well when the spotlight shines on me, which it rarely does, but …still. Like when Mr. Humphries, our History teacher and the guy who runs the school elections every year, misunderstood us sophomore year and printed
my
name on the ballot for class secretary instead of Hazel’s.
    Now, a
true
best friend would have laughed it off and cheered me on because it’s not like we were running for secretary of state or something, right? But not Hazel; she flat-out
demanded
Mr. Humphries print all new ballots and threatened to write a letter to the editor of the local paper called “Voter Fraud Dampens Barracuda Bay Class Elections” if he didn’t.
    He did, I bowed out, and …that was pretty much that.
    So ever since then, the small things in life that
do
happen to go my way—an A+ on a term paper