Chasing Orion by Kathryn Lasky Read Free Book Online

Phyllis was, and I was thinking that when her face and Emmett’s had been trapped in the mirror together . . . well, they looked really nice. If that mirror had been heart-shaped, it could have been like a Valentine card.
    “Georgie! Georgie!” Emmett gave me a nudge.
    “Yeah!” I jerked back to attention.
    “Mrs. Keller was asking you where you are going to school.”
    “Oh,” I said, and straightened up. “I used to go to Peter Stoner Elementary School, but now I’ll go to Crooked Creek since we’ve moved into this neighborhood.” I wanted to tell them how this was a stinking rotten deal that I had to change schools and Emmett didn’t.
    “And you’re going to Westridge, I assume,” Mrs. Keller was saying to Emmett.
    “Yes ma’am, I’ve been there all along.” Then he turned to Phyllis and leaned forward a bit. Both their faces crowded into the mirror. “Where did you go, Phyllis? North Tech?”
    “Oh, no,” Mrs. Keller said quickly. “Phyllis went to Tudor Hall School for Girls.”
They must be rich,
I thought. I had never met anybody who had gone to a private school.
    Now I could never figure out how Phyllis could do the next thing she did, because as far as I could see, my face wasn’t in the mirror, but somehow she must have seen my expression. “You’re surprised, Georgie?”
    I didn’t know what to say. So I just shrugged and said, “Only girls?”
    “Only girls,” she repeated, and she gave her head a very small shake and the white-gold curls shivered.
    “Do they have proms?” I was fascinated by proms. It killed me that Emmett, who was about to be a senior, had never invited a girl to a prom. Emmett didn’t care about anything except basketball and astronomy. His life was nothing like Archie’s and Veronica’s and Betty’s. Imagine a comic book called
Emmett.
People would fall asleep. Emmett was not my idea of a true teenager. He might as well have been forty.
    “They call them proms, but they’re pretty pathetic, if you know what I mean.” Instantly I knew she was talking to me. And then my face was in the mirror with hers. Just the two of us! There was a quick flash of blue in the mirror that was like a little secret message to me. She had actually winked at me when she said, “if you know what I mean.” It was that feeling I would get when I would see the first shooting star on a summer night. I wanted it to happen again. There was something so personal about her wink and what she said. It was just like I was her equal and she was sharing a secret. A high-school girl and a sixth-grader sharing a secret! I was actually tempted to wink back at her and say, “Oh, yeah! I know what you mean.” Six little words, but they meant so much. It was as if these six little words had been put in a bundle and tied up with a pretty ribbon. A gift for me — just for me.
    Well, I knew what she meant — sort of, even though I had never been to a prom. I felt this deep thrill inside me. I was really being included in a way I had never thought of. This floaty feeling would happen to me when I got really excited about something. I know exactly the first time it happened. I was actually floating. I was in a swimming pool learning how to swim. It happened when I was finally able to pick my feet up from the bottom of the swimming pool and not sink. It was this wonderful, indescribable feeling. Maybe a baby bird felt this way when it first flew. I don’t know, but I definitely felt floaty at this moment with Phyllis, as if I had passed into another element — water, air, and I was part of it, no longer outside it.
    When we got home from Phyllis’s, I went in and fixed myself a second lunch — two Popsicles and a slice of ham. I realized I hadn’t read the paper that day. It was still on the counter. I never missed a day reading the reported new cases. They listed them county by county. Marion County was our county now. So far this year, there had been fifty-one cases. I looked at the