Caught by Jami Alden Read Free Book Online Page B

you were gone?”
    “Ah, no,” Laurie replied with such deliberation that there was no doubt as to the state of their relationship.
    “Wait.” Toni pushed off the counter with her hip and walked to the table. “Kara’s mom said you two have been close for a long time.
    Laurie gave her heavy, straight hair a toss. “Yeah, that was true until this year.”
    Joyce leaned in and put a hand on Ethan’s arm. “Laurie and Kara had a bit of a falling-out. But she won’t tell me what it’s about.” She sighed and shook her head.
    “I told you, Mom, we just grew apart or something,” Laurie said, her tone full of the sharp exasperation teens had spent centuries perfecting. “Let it go already.”
    “I don’t understand how you can be friends one week and not the next, especially after all this time.” She turned to Ethan. “They used to do everything together—dance classes, summer camp, everything. They even made the Promise pact together. Then—poof.”
    Laurie remained silent. “Fine,” Joyce said, throwing her manicured hands up. “Don’t tell me. I’m just your mother.” She pushed away from the table and walked out of the kitchen, leaving Laurie alone for the moment with Ethan and Toni.
    Laurie craned her neck, listening as her mother’s footsteps faded down the hall. “Toward the end of the school year, Kara got into some things that weren’t exactly my scene.”
    “Your mom said you made this Promise pledge with her,” Ethan said. “Was the fact that she had a boyfriend the problem?”
    “We can still date guys,” she said, leveling a look at him that would have slain him had he been under the age of twenty-one. “We just don’t have intercourse.”
    Ethan shifted in his seat. Discussing sex with a teenager in front of a woman you wanted was not a situation he was comfortable with.
    “Kara’s mom mentioned an online community.”
    “The V-Club,” Laurie said, nodding. “We created a network on FacePlace so we could meet other girls who had taken the pledge and were saving themselves for marriage.”
    “Girls like you and Kara.”
    “Yeah. At least I thought so, anyway. But then Kara’s parents split up and it really messed her up. She got really angry at her dad. He was always all over her to stay straight, get good grades, all that stuff. And here he was, having an affair and trying to hide money from the family. She said it didn’t matter what you really did, as long as you only let people see what they wanted to see.”
    “Her parents didn’t notice any difference.”
    Another eye roll. “Her dad isn’t home very often, and her mom, even when she’s there, she’s not ‘there,’ know what I mean?”
    “Okay, so tell us more about this weird behavior,” Toni said.
    “I don’t know, she wasn’t herself. We’d make plans and she’d flake, come up with lame excuses. Like my mom said, we used to do everything together, and all of a sudden she’s never around. A couple of times I caught her in a lie about where she’d been. Finally I confronted her about it, and she told me she’d started hanging out with some new people and didn’t want to hurt my feelings. But she invited me to a party right before I left for France. And after that I didn’t really even want to hang out anymore.”
    “Some bad stuff go down?” Ethan prompted. It was hard to imagine what could happen at high school party that would produce the look of disgust on Laurie’s face. Then again, she was a twenty-first-century avowed virgin till marriage, so her sensibilities were more easily offended than his.
    “Like I said, not my scene. It wasn’t a high school crowd. A lot of drunk frat boys and girls jumping into the pool naked. Kara was on something and kept telling me not to be such an uptight bitch, so I left. I didn’t want to say anything to my mom because I knew she would freak out.”
    Ethan absorbed the new information, lined it up with what he already knew about Kara. “What about