Forever in Blue by Ann Brashares Read Free Book Online Page A

eat?”
    She didn’t want to eat. She didn’t want to do what he said. She felt that if she ate, she’d be acceding to him, to this life in the underworld, and she wasn’t willing to do it.
    “Does he see anyone? Does he leave the house? Do his interests include anything other than staring at a computer day and night?”
    “Don’t be so dramatic, Bridget. He’ll be fine.”
    All at once she was furious. She was standing and her fork was clattering around on the floor. “He’ll be fine?” she shouted. “Just like Mom was fine?”
    He stopped chewing. He put his fork down. He looked not at her but through her, past her. “Bridget,” he said in a low rumble.
    “Why don’t you look around! He is not fine! Why won’t you see it?”
    “Bridget,” he intoned again. The more times he said her name, the less she felt she was even in the room with him.
    “This is no way to live! Can’t you see that?” She felt the tears in her throat and behind her eyes, but she wouldn’t cry. He wasn’t safe enough for crying, and hadn’t been in a long time. It’s too lonely this way.
    He shook his head. Of course he couldn’t see it. Because it was how he lived too.
    “Bridget. You live the way you choose. You let Perry do the same.”
    And me. You let me be, he might as well have added.
    She wouldn’t sit down. She wouldn’t eat his eggs. But she would live the way she chose. She would do that for him.
    She grabbed her duffel bag and her backpack and walked out of the kitchen and out of the house. That was what she chose.
    “So when he called, I told him I couldn’t talk,” Julia explained, sitting cross-legged on Carmen’s twin bed in their small dormitory room in Vermont. “I felt bad and everything. I don’t know how to tell him that I’m not going to be into it this summer.”
    It was funny. The setting was new—the campus of a performing arts center that housed the theater festival—but the situation was the same—Julia sitting on a dorm-room bed at night telling Carmen the latest episode in her off-again relationship with Noah Markham, scholar and stud.
    Carmen nodded. She had finished putting all her stuff away, so she started refolding things.
    “I mean, what if I meet someone here, you know? Have you looked around? There are a lot of good-looking guys. Probably half of them are gay, but still.”
    Carmen nodded. She hadn’t really looked around yet.
    “A place like this, anything can happen. You know how costars are always falling in love on movie sets and ruining their relationships?”
    Carmen read Us Weekly often enough to know the truth of this. She put a bottle of the shampoo they both liked on Julia’s dresser. She saw the familiar black-and-white picture of Julia’s mother in the silver frame. Julia kept it in her dorm room at school. It was a glamorous picture taken by some famous photographer whose name Carmen only pretended to know. Julia’s mother had been a model, Julia told her. She was beautiful, certainly, but Carmen also registered that Julia’s mother almost never called.
    Carmen didn’t put out any pictures of her family, but taped inside the cover of her binder she kept a small picture of Ryan on the remarkable day that he was born. She’d also taped a picture of the Septembers at Rehoboth Beach, the last time they’d all been together. Sometime during the winter she’d moved it from inside the front cover to inside the back cover, because though the sight of it made her happy, it made her happy in the saddest possible way.
    Julia watched Carmen arranging the room. “Hey, did you pick up the Teramax conditioner?”
    Carmen raised her eyebrows. “I don’t think so. Was it on the list?”
    Julia nodded. “I’m pretty sure I wrote it on there.”
    Carmen scoured the pharmacy bags but couldn’t find conditioner of any sort. “I must have missed that somehow.” She felt guilty, though she didn’t even use it.
    “Don’t worry about it,” Julia said.
    “I’ll pick