At Face Value by Emily Franklin Read Free Book Online

glad.” My mother sets her bag down on the front porch, and fiddles with her enormous key ring until she finds the brass one that unlocks our front door. Like many of the houses in Weston, ours is historic—and the front door still has one of those buck-toothed keys that you have to fit in just right or the door won’t budge.
    I think about calling Leyla to do homework tonight, about the college essay that plagues me, and about how I’ll try not to look at last year’s yearbook picture of Eddie. (He’s caught in action on the soccer field during a practice, with no shirt. Bless that heat wave!)
    Mom opens the door with a small kick and goes inside. I stay outside for a minute, enjoying the early fall evening. It’s easy, in quiet moments like this, to think about being with Eddie—on the porch doing newspaper stuff, or joking around playing with a football in the grass like we’re part of an Abercrombie spread, or holding hands while we sit in comfortable silence. I take a seat on the white wicker bench on the porch and imagine him next to me. A smile creeps across my face. Then the sun starts to set, casting its glow across the porch and creating shadows that make everything look longer and bigger than it already is.

five
    “Y OU SO HAVE TO come, it’s gonna be great!” Leyla says into the phone the next night. I can hear her music in the background. She starts humming along with “Are You Leading Me On” and says, “I love General Public. I’m putting this song on my fundraising mix.”
    At school today, I came up with the idea of getting random students to burn CDs of their favorite songs for an auction grab bag. Leyla mentioned the idea at the Word meeting, and everyone loved it. Of course, I was glad to have the mix grab bag approved, and the fact that Leyla got credit for it … well, at first I felt weird-slash-annoyed, but then my intellectual side took over and I figured that as long as the money gets raised, it’s no big deal. Plus, it’s not like Leyla meant to pilfer my brainstorm. She said it just slipped out—and to call her on it would be petty and useless.
    “There’s no way I’m going,” I say, then brush my teeth while I wait for her response. She knows she’s got to come up with a damn good argument to sway me into spending my Friday night at the school gym. “I spend enough of my waking hours trapped in that low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lighted cave. I don’t need to trek back there voluntarily.”
    Granted, the school gym won’t look like the sweat-infused basketball haven it normally is; rather, it will be a jousting hall for the Weston High’s Night of Knights, in which maidens and masters of the sword alike get to dress up and drink grape juice out of gray plastic goblets that are supposed to make everything feel authentic. The drama crowd has been busy preparing since August, making sets, painting scenes, and sewing flags. Not really my kind of fun but, then again, maybe the whole town’s just trying to rally against the puritanical roots set down by Pilgrims way back when.
    “Okay—here are my top three reasons why you should go,” Leyla says. “I’m even turning my music off so you can hear me better.”
    “This sounds important,” I say, rinsing. “I’ll even hold off on flossing until you’re done.” I leave the bathroom and go to my room. Our house is actually two buildings put together—a tiny farm cottage from the 1800s, which is the main house, and a silo my parents connected to the house and converted into a sort-of tower. If I were a princess-type girl, I would have endless fodder for daydreaming. My room occupies the whole top part, so I live in a perfectly round bedroom. It’s slightly bizarre, but it works.
    I’m on the floor, staring out the window at the full fall moon as Leyla talks. “Okay, the first reason to go is that you’re a senior. Since you let your social life pass you by in other years, this is your last chance to see the Knights