Alice in Wonderland High by Rachel Shane Read Free Book Online Page B

to romantic to conserve energy.
    Now I could see the dark bags under her lower eyelids. Her black suit covered her body, baggy because it had belonged to our mother. Unlike me, she could fit in clothes that didn’t come from the children’s section. Her sunshine-blonde hair cascaded around her face, casting an angelic glow. My own hair, plucked from the same golden harp, concealed me in a similar disguise. Lorina opened a white box tied with a red-and-white-striped baker’s ribbon and slid it across the table toward me.
    Miniature replicas of bigger cakes waited inside the box, each one covered with pastel fondant and white frosting that spelled out Eat me!
    â€œWhy’d you splurge on the cakes?” I reached in and took the light-blue one. It fit my mood.
    â€œI have something to celebrate.” Lorina’s finger hovered over the cakes, dangling back and forth as she tried to decide which one to choose.
    I smiled. My lips seemed slippery, like they might slide right off my face. “Oooh. What?”
    â€œAre you okay? You look a little weird.”
    â€œPretty tired.” I hated to lie, but I had no idea how to explain the green liquid, not without getting in trouble or hiring a chemist. “So what are we celebrating?”
    She reached over and stroked my knuckles. “Alice, you don’t have to keep things from me. I’m here for you. If you’re sick, I want to take care of you.” Her words made me feel shittier than the manure Whitney probably used to make her plants grow.
    Of course Lorina would drop everything to take care of me. That was what she did. My twenty-one-year-old sister had put most of the inheritance we’d received into a college fund for me, trading her own education for the role of pseudo-mom. She wouldn’t let me get a job, claiming she wanted me to enjoy my childhood like she had done, before she had to abandon it to raise me.
    â€œReally, I’m fine. Tell me about your news.” I sat up straighter even though my head felt fuzzy, too stuffed with cotton to operate regularly. “Cute guy?”
    She blushed. “No, nothing like that.” She wiped her fingers over her brow in a dismissive gesture that clearly showed she wished it were exactly like that. “It’s work stuff.” Lorina administrated the crap out of her administrative-assistant position at the Department of Public Health and Safety for the town. In fact, I sometimes suspected she did all her boss’s work on top of hers. “Apparently Wonderland isn’t so wonderful lately.”
    â€œThat’s an understatement.” We lived in Wonderland, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago where they tore out trees and then named streets after them. Everything pretty and picturesque, like the rolling hills and cornfields my school bus used to pass by in elementary school, had melted into a haze of gray, like someone had zapped all the color with a Photoshop ray gun. Monstrous warehouses squatted on the now-barren lots, and it was only a matter of time before gas masks became fashionable to combat the exhaust fumes being spit out from clogged highways.
    â€œThere’ve been some shady eco-demonstrations going on.”
    The blood drained from my face. Did this have anything to do with Whitney’s group and whatever was going on at the warehouse or the message at school? I shook that thought away. They seemed to be doing good things, not bad. Planting a garden in an unused space was the kind of project elementary schools would force their students to do during an agriculture lesson. Of course, they never did this under the cover of night in absolute secrecy.
    â€œLike what Mom and Dad used to do? With the farmers’ market?”
    â€œNo, what they did was all in the public eye. This isn’t. It’s illegal.” She chomped down on a tiny cake.
    â€œIllegal how?” My breath waited in my throat. Is this what Chess meant about getting in