Forever Changes by Brendan Halpin Read Free Book Online Page B

you’re disgusting.  Are you just trying to make me lose my appetite so you can have more chocolate munchkins?  Cause it’s not gonna work.”
    Stephanie started talking about how Kevin was starting to act weird, and Brianna knew this meant there was breakup drama on the way.

to ponder the infinite
    When Mr. Thompson, the college counselor, finally ended Thursday afternoon’s senior class assembly at the final bell of the day, Brianna bolted out of the auditorium.  She could hear Stephanie calling “Bri!” behind her, but she  had to get out of there.  She jumped into the Sunfire and put-putted up the street, swinging the car around the corner without hitting the brake.  That felt a little better, but still not good.  She could go home, but today was Dad’s day off, and she really didn’t want to talk to anybody right then.
    Her phone started playing those familiar notes in her purse—probably Stephanie or Melissa. It was definitely somebody who was planning to go to college, and probably somebody who wanted her math skills to help them out.  She let the call go to voicemail.
    Brianna drove until she reached the beach.  The snack shack was shut for the winter even though it was still September, but Mario’s House of Clams was open.  She grabbed a 24-ounce ice blue Gatorade and her enzyme pills out of her bag and went in and got some fries.  She poured a bunch of salt on them and walked over to the beach. She wondered idly what the volume of this weird French fry container was.  It was a rectangular solid, but it sloped up from the bottom like a cone.  So neither formula would really fit.  One more thing in life that seemed simple but was actually really complex.
    There was hardly anybody on the beach.  It was a sunny day, but it was windy, and it was barely 70 degrees out.  She sat in the sand and watched the waves and ate her fries.  She tried hard not to think.  Some guy came walking along the beach with his Golden Retriever, and as he chucked a stick into the freezing cold water and the dumb dog went right in after it.  Brianna thought about how this simple act of a guy throwing a stick for his dog needed some pretty complicated math just to figure out how fast the stick might be going, or to describe the path it took into the water.   It would be to account for that end-over-end thing the stick was doing. Describing the arc of a tennis ball would probably be easier.
    Her phone rang again.  She took it out of her purse and looked at the caller ID.  Melissa.  She’d call her later.  She turned the phone off.
    A cold breeze blew in off the waves,  and Brianna was starting to wish she’d brought a sweatshirt.  A plain sweatshirt, though—not a UMASS or URI or Dartmouth, or BC, BU,  or any of those other ones that everybody was wearing around school these days.
    She couldn’t believe that in in the middle of the senior class assembly  Mr. Thompson had said,“We are all facing challenges—whether you are battling  a difficult situation at home, or cystic fibrosis, or muscular dystrophy—” and everybody had looked at Brianna and Keith Who is in a Wheelchair. Then he went on about how every adult in the building was here to help them win their personal battle, or scale their own personal mountain, or something.  Then he’d reminded everyone that now was the time that the college process started to get serious.
    Brianna grabbed a rock from the sand and tried to throw it in an inverse parabola.  She picked up another one and tried again. She did this for a long time.  So long that she started to feel a little bit tired from the effort of throwing rocks, which got her depressed since she’d been throwing rocks to try to stop thinking.  She thought of getting  her CD player, but she didn’t really need to: Love’s songs were playing in her mind on what seemed to be an endless loop.  Little bits of the album kept popping into her brain, as though it had become her personal