B00B9FX0F2 EBOK by Ruth Baron Read Free Book Online Page A

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    “Can you not tell people about all this? I don’t want anyone to think I’m crazy.”
    “Good luck with that. I have better things to talk about with my other friends than your weird zombie love story.”
    Jason doubted that were true, but he knew he could trust Rakesh to keep quiet about Lacey, at least for a couple days. A couple days was all he needed. Monday, I swear . It was a simple misunderstanding, and she was going to explain everything. He just had to trust her.
     
    His heart sank when he walked into his house on Friday afternoon. He could sense it the second he came through the door, the dwindling light at his back. Boredom was waiting for him. Boredom had occupied every room, and beyond each room the entire town. It was inescapable. His mom and Mark were out to dinner in the city, not that he was unhappy they were gone. He flopped down in the den and flipped through all 450 cable channels. Nothing. His Netflix queue was filled with experimental documentaries and pretentious German movies he’d added in the hopes that he would someday be the type of guywho would enjoy experimental documentaries and pretentious German movies, but someday wasn’t yet.
    Retreating to his room, he turned on his computer. He’d vowed to steer clear of the Internet until he heard from Lacey, so instead of logging on to Facebook, he did what he’d done so many nights before, when the name Lacey Gray meant nothing to him. He scrolled through iTunes. For about the zillionth time, he settled on All Hail West Texas . He knew you were supposed to listen to it on tape, and he even had the cassette, but alas, he had no working tape deck, so digital would have to do.
    Lying back on his carpet staring up at the ceiling, he moved his lips silently along with “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton.” And at first it worked. He got lost in John Darnielle’s raw voice, belting out the lyrics like they were the only thing that mattered to him in the world. For the moment, they were. But when he got to “The Mess Inside” and all that talk of fighting the “sense of creeping dread with temporal things,” it was like the spell was broken. He turned up the volume to see if he could drown out the voice in the back of his mind telling him he was fooling himself, but it was hopeless.
    He was alone on a Friday night, and the one person who made him feel happy and whole was no longer making him feel happy or whole. He couldn’t suddenly revert to the person he’d been before they’d begun talking, a person who had accepted those empty spaces as a fact of life, who thought happiness was overrated. And he wasn’t going to last until Monday pretending that she didn’t exist. The next thing he knew, he was in the kitchen, dragging the stepstool across the cool tile floor of the kitchen, climbing up, swinging open the cabinet above the fridge. Just as he remembered, next to the flashlights andbottled water his mom stored in case of emergency was a dusty copy of the Brighton County phone book.
    When he was little, he’d seen his parents use it all the time, calling a shoe store to find out their hours or copying down the address of his doctor’s office as they rushed out the door to an appointment. These seemed like ancient practices to him now. If he was visiting a store that didn’t have a website, he looked it up on Yelp. But Jason had imposed the Internet ban on himself because he knew searching for the Gray family online would mean endless stories about Lacey’s death and pages dedicated to her memory. So here he was flipping through the pages until he got to one that started with Graves and ended with Harris. His eyes followed his finger down the page until he reached the second listing for a Gray.
    Gray, Edward … 3492 Belmont Rd. 621-9067
    Jason’s heart was pounding as he dialed. He wanted it to be disconnected, to ring through forever. It rang three times before a male voice picked up.
    “Hello?”
    Jason hung up