Black Tuesday by Susan Colebank Read Free Book Online Page B

made her hold the phone a few inches from her ear. “I’m still at the tennis courts. We had a match against Central. Won all but one of the matches.”
    He paused, like he was waiting for Jayne to congratulate him. What did she care?
    There was a girl hooked to a ventilator. Because of her. Tennis matches weren’t that important in comparison.
    â€œWell, I better get going,” Coach said. “Mrs. Reynolds needs some foil for a chicken she’s baking tonight. I’ll see you in the halls on Monday?”
    Jayne ran a finger over the flat surface of one white blind. She listened with half an ear to the tinny sound it made. “Sounds good. I’ll see you then.”
    As she hung up, she slowly closed the blinds, shutting out the world and a car proclaiming, GO JAVELINAS!

8
    HAVE YOU SEEN my medic alert bracelet?”
    Jayne pushed her scrambled eggs into the bacon, making them touch and ignoring Ellie and yet another of Ellie’s demands. Ellie wanting eggs. Dad making Ellie’s eggs. The eggs being runny and inedible.
    Just like Ellie liked them.
    â€œNo, I have not.” Now that the eggs were touching the meat, she didn’t have to put up a front about eating them. Even her mother knew she didn’t eat food that touched.
    Today was the first day she’d be back in school. Jayne concentrated on smushing the eggs down, pushing the liquid yolk out of the gelatinous mound. Right now, getting the liquid squeezed out of her eggs was her number-one priority.
    It kept her from thinking about . . . other things.
    Which wasn’t realistic. Not while she was sitting here already sweating in the navy trousers and white blouse her mom had picked out for her. The outfit she’d wear to see the lawyer after school.
    There was no reason to think. Not with the notebook of questions her mom had painstakingly dictated to Diane. Questions Jayne had spent three hours answering late last night to keep her mind off the pile of books with a week’s worth of undone homework in them.
    Her mom had edited her answers, too. Like the question that asked, “Were you distracted when you were driving?” In place of the paragraph where she’d detailed checking her cell-phone caller ID, her mom had scratched through her words and had written, “Just the usual amount of distraction a driver faces from day to day.”
    â€œAre you even listening to me?”
    Jayne looked up at Ellie. Her life was so simple, and it didn’t hurt any that she looked like a movie star in the making. Her skin was as flawless as Kate Winslet’s or some other English actress’s.
    Jayne? She was fighting a losing battle with an angry, bulbous stress pimple on her right cheek. Reminiscent of the vicious pimples those Survivor people got after three weeks without soap or Proactiv.
    â€œWhy don’t you just use your backup bracelet?” Jayne concentrated on the food in front of her, never having felt less hungry in her life.
    She had exactly eight hours and thirty-seven minutes until she met with the lawyer. Until she found out how much more her life was going to change. Which was a weird concept for a girl who’d planned every aspect of her life since she was three.
    From when Ken and Barbie were ready to get married, to which college Jayne would eventually apply to.
    She went to the sink and scraped her untouched breakfast into the garbage disposal, careful not to let her cast get wet. Ellie stood next to her, frantically looking through a pile of Arizona Republic s.
    Jayne rolled her eyes as the eggs slipped down the drain. “The bracelet’s probably in your gym locker.”
    Ellie started pulling open kitchen drawers, rifling through their organized contents. “Why do you say that?”
    Jayne stifled a sigh as she went over to a kitchen chair to zip up her messenger bag. “Because that’s where you’ve left it at least two other times.”
    She took