Fury by Elizabeth Miles Read Free Book Online Page B

good-bye.
    Gabby giggled.
“À bientôt, escargot!”
    Em hung up the phone shakily. She had a pit in her stomach the size of a bowling ball and spent the rest of the day watching old episodes of
Sex and the City
on her laptop. Every time the phone beeped, she jumped, but it was only Lauren asking if Em wanted to come bake Christmas cookies with her and Fiona, or JD lamenting about how lame his cousins were. No word from Zach.
    With her parents both working overnight shifts to ensure they could have Christmas Eve and Christmas off, Em had the house to herself—a treat she usually enjoyed by making up dance routines in the living room or eating ice cream during marathon phone sessions with Gabby. But tonight the house just felt big and empty. Even bigger and emptier than it felt when her parents were home.
    Until, just as she was falling asleep with Cosmopolitans and Manolo Blahniks running through her head, she got a text. From Zach.
    What’s on your x-mas list this year?
    She couldn’t help it; she got that tingly feeling all through her body again. She read his text three times quickly. Em was so tempted to write back,
You
, but she also didn’t want to seem desperate.
A puppy!
she wrote finally, in a fit of silly squirming.
    I’ll be sure Santa gets the memo. Sleep tight!
    Suddenly the world didn’t feel so vast. Em clutched her phone to her beating heart, with the sudden urge to kick off her blankets and dance on the bed.
    C u soon I hope,
he wrote again, signing off with a smiley face. Em melted. She was right—Zach
did
want her as bad as she wanted him. At least there was one person in the world who thought that she was special. One person who really cared.
    It was impossible, all of this. She knew that. Of course she did. But it didn’t matter. This moment was all that mattered—that he was thinking about
her
.
    She went to sleep that night clutching Cordy to her chest.
    “Spring rolls may be the best invention known to man,” Em said, taking a delicious, steamy, crunchy bite. “I think I like them more than Twizzlers. Even better than television.”
    “Big words, my friend.” JD grinned at her from between mouthfuls of pork lo mein. “Big words.”
    A day after the text from Zach, she was still floating. Em’s and JD’s families had a tradition of getting together on the night before Christmas, ordering in massive amounts of Chinese food, drinking eggnog, and singing carols while decorating the Winters’ tree. (The Founts usually decorated theirs weeks earlier—Mrs. Fount was one of those people who had a whole closet devoted solely to holiday decorations.) Sure, spring rolls and eggnog were a strange—and gastronomically dangerous—combination, but it was the only way Em knew how to get into the holiday spirit.
    Once the tree was decorated, Em and JD retreated to the den to watch
Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas
while JD’s little sister, Melissa, went off to chat with all her new middle school friends, and the parents cleaned up and talked.
    Em was settling into food-coma mode on the couch. JD—who’d come to the Winters’ this evening dressed in what he kept referring to as a “smoking jacket” (a burgundy-colored velvet blazer that Em could not stop laughing at)—was juggling remotes and trying to turn down the volume on the TV. With his glasses sliding down his nose and his hair spiking up at various angles, he looked like a 1940s mad professor. Just as the opening credits started rolling, Em’s phone blinked and buzzed.
    “Ugh, who could that possibly be,” she moaned, trying to kick the phone toward her hand. “Pass me my phone, Smokey?” But even as the words came out of her mouth, she realized that it could be Zach and she sprang to a sitting position.
    “Wow, I didn’t know you could move that fast after General Tso’s,” JD said, pumping his fist as he figured out which remote was connected to the sound system. Twangy banjoes played in the background as Em flipped open