Jade Moon (Celestial War Book 1) by Julia Richards Read Free Book Online Page B

anything. But our car was all banged up and my parents blamed me. I think someone hit it while it was in the parking lot here or something and I just didn’t notice.”
    “Well bummer, guess we have to walk it then. It’s freaking cold here.”
    He nodded.
    We walked together all the way into town.
    ***
    The restaurant was in an upscale strip mall. Ivy encircled the homey front window. Thousands of white christmas lights hung from the ceiling making the entire place glow with warmth. Inside, it was toasty and the air smelled like sweet coconut. I almost cried with joy.
    “Rafael Aracan, I haven’t seen you in years? How is your mother?” the plump, very Italian looking hostess came out from behind the counter and pulled him in for a hug.
    “She’s great Mrs. Wattana,” he said, voice muffled by her shoulder against his face.
    She took a step back, still grasping his shoulders. The woman’s silvery-white hair was barely contained in a tousled bun. Her golden peasant dress and laugh-lined face made her look like the kind of woman you want to crawl into their lap so they could tell you everything was okay. She looked at me with a warm smile.
    “Is this a new friend?” she asked.
    “This is Harper. She’s new to the area.”
    “Nice to meet you Harper.” She reached out and shook my hand. “You’ve found yourself the best young man to show you around.”
    “Thanks.” I smiled back.
    “Let me get you two a table.” She led us to a little nook in the back and handed us menus before giving Raf a loving hair tousle. Which is hard to do with a springy thatch of purple hair.
    I looked down at the menu and knew I was in trouble. I’d heard of curry, but a lot of it was in what I assumed was Thai. Lot’s of Tom this and Pad that. I stared, hoping that it might begin to make sense if I read the words enough times.
    Raf was watching me and I had that horrible moment where I knew the gig was up. He would now see that I was some back-country bumpkin, raised in the jungle, with no idea how the real world worked.
    “You had Thai food before?” he asked.
    “Not really,” I hedged.
    Raf laughed at me for the second time that night. “Harper, you know it’s totally cool that you lived in the jungle, right? Much more cool that knowing how to order Thai food, which might be my only real skill.”
    “No way, Raf.  I saw that drawing you did. That is an amazing skill.”
    Raf’s smile slammed down like a wall. “Yeah, whatever. The curries are my favorite. Let’s just get a few things and you can try them all.”
    I blinked at the rapid transformation. I had almost forgotten that I found him on the roof the night before talking about killing himself. Clearly Raf had issues. Thankfully, I didn’t have any. Ha ha.
    “Sorry, didn’t know your art was off limits, Raf. That sounds like a great plan but I don’t have much money.” I pulled the crumpled bills out of my pocket.
    “No worries, Harper. I’ve got dinner. In exchange, I want to know more about Belize. It really does sound cool.”
    “Sure, what do you want to know?”
    “Well, I guess, what was it like? Some people are saying you didn’t even go to school?”
    “Yeah, there was no school nearby, but an old school teacher lived in the village so he just taught the kids. We sometimes met in a little building, but mostly he came by my house, gave me some books to read. He had a stack of workbooks for math and science. But we also did projects. Experiments. Real life math problems like figuring out the size of corn fields we would need to have enough food for the village. Mr. Ek was really great.” I smiled at the memory.
    I realized that Mr. Silver reminded me a lot of Mr. Ek, which was probably why I liked him so much.
    Raf seemed totally interested. “So, he just let you learn whatever you wanted?”
    “Um, yeah he made me do some basics, trigonometry and some other stuff I wasn’t that into. But then we mostly read and talked about whatever I was