Curved by Samantha Strokes Read Free Book Online Page A

and create false resumes for myself, imagining myself at the top of a nonprofit. I’d donate more than just $1 million to the homeless. I’d work on expanding my efforts into poor neighborhoods and schools across the United States. Everyone could be touched by my charity work, eventually.
     
    As I finished up class, I recalled Joseph and my programs. How did I mess up so badly with him? I replayed my math in my head, the same way a violinist does her bow and strings, yet I couldn’t see how I had made any errors whatsoever. To me, my projects were always totally 100% safe.
     
    How had Joseph caught me?
     
    I needed to stay until the end of my class to take a quiz, which would unfortunately cut into my meeting time with Manhattan’s Concern. I sped through the answers, my neighbor peeking at me here and there for the harder questions. After I finished up the short answer, I turned it in, running out of the room like I had Joseph calling me from afar.
     
    Dammit. Even at school I couldn’t stop thinking of him.

 
    Chapter 7

 
    The campus wasn’t too large, so I arrived only five minutes late.
     
    Some of the other girls started already, not bothering to wait for me. As I slipped inside, their voices hushed—Zena and Ricarda in particular—and when I sat down, everyone glanced my way.
     
    “How nice of you to finally appear,” Zena said. She had straight, platinum blonde hair, a tan to go along with it. I tried once to brush up against her, hoping to pull off a wig, but no, her hair was all real. She had straight teeth but they were a shade of lemon, and if you ever got too close to her, you would smell a tangy scent, as if she never washed her… You know. “We were just getting started with our contingency report.”
     
    Zena and Ricarda liked to make our club sound more exclusive and complicated by using fancy names for regular tasks. “Contingency report” really meant the ten or so of us in the room had to get our shit together before the university inspected us for money issues. We had to report back to our Dean, Professor Bradley, and then there were a bunch of other dreary things like “hyper analytics” and “glamorourization of the organization.” It made me cringe just sitting there, hearing Zena go on and on.
     
    Then Ricarda plastered an ugly-ass PowerPoint on the opposite wall—who uses neon-pink font with a teal background?—all so she could talk about “statistically significant metrics.”
     
    “As you all know,” Ricarda said, “we’ve had our greatest number of soup kitchen volunteer sign-ups occur within the last week. More than thirty-seven!” Ricarda wore hornrimmed glasses and a cardigan sweater with the words PRINCESS underneath on her T-shirt. She spoke in a nasally tone, designating herself as the “reason why these metrics are so much better.”
     
    Even though I had been the one walking around New York City, from Staten Island up to the Bronx, all so we could recruit new people for our shelter at the university. I had also invested our money in stocks, researched the best ways of regaining our dividends, and placed a high amount of energy into our advertisements. Online and not.
     
    Just like Lindsay, these girls preferred to take the lead for themselves.
     
    “That’s enough,” I said. “ Ricarda, thank you.”
     
    “But I wasn’t even—”
     
    “Thank you,” I said. We were wasting time here flattering each other. I walked to the front of the room, clicking the projector screen up. I only had a couple high points I wanted to touch on, since Joseph was waiting for me, after all.
     
    Yeah, I might’ve not expressed to him a liking. But he was much better than sitting around with these girls. I noticed Angela then, and she too was suffering, playing with her phone instead of paying attention to Zena and Ricarda.
     
    She perked up when I talked. I didn’t cover anything special though, only the required supplies we would need to order for our event