Last Night at the Circle Cinema by Emily Franklin Read Free Book Online

principal’s office with so much popcorn she couldn’t open the door—but with girls, I was lost. I lacked a plan for what to do with Livvy or even Ruby Benson, one of the ridiculously airbrushed twins who lived next to Codman and with whom I had hooked up on multiple occasions, never managing to formulate a plan beyond each time.
    â€œYou know Lissa Matthews?” Livvy asked. She breathed into the window and, in the steam, wrote Lissa in script.
    I scrambled for this life preserver. “Part-time eco group leader, field hockey filly, perpetual tan?”
    Livvy nodded. “You left off ‘kind to animals’ and ‘founder of Lost & Found & Found Again.’”
    I hadn’t forgotten the last part. I’d left it off because I could tell Livvy wanted me to disregard Lissa Matthews, which I did in many ways, as she was a semi-undistinguishable part of the sheep-lemming herd of which Codman was a sideliner. But she’d done one good thing by starting Lost & Found & Found Again, taking all of the unclaimed items each term and donating them to the local shelters so families had hoodies in various sizes, binders, textbooks, sneakers, sometimes even T-shirts with the tags still on. I liked the idea of finding homes for these misplaced items, the stray socks and gloves making their way onto someone who might appreciate them. “What about her?” The life preserver suddenly suspiciously like an anchor.
    Livvy looked at me with her lovely mouth and parenthetical raised eyebrows.
    â€œOh. She and Codman?” I watched as Livvy nodded. Her lips twitched like she couldn’t make up her mind about laughing or sobbing. It sort of hit me then that she wouldn’t cry over me in that way. I knew I mattered to her, but at the same time I felt apart from the whole Brookville High scene. “And you care a lot or a little?” I adjusted and readjusted the rearview mirror as though I’d suddenly seen something of interest.
    â€œIt’s not that I want to be Lissa. I don’t. We used to be friends in seventh grade and, trust me, she isn’t ... No. Wait. I am not going to be that girl.” She touched the steam-coated window again.
    â€œWhat girl?”
    â€œThe girl who picks apart other girls because of some emotional thing. So, never mind. Yes, Codman and Lissa are supposedly an item now, whatever that entails. But.” She looked at her left hand, the one that’d started this, and I wondered if that was guilt.
    â€œBut.” I started the car again and felt a rush of energy building in me. The life preserver. “But ... that doesn’t mean we can’t spontaneously pick Codman up from his therapist’s office, which is where he is on Friday afternoons at this time, and kidnap him and have the three of us do something.”
    Livvy smiled.
    â€œDo you need to get home? I don’t want to impose my potentially criminal actions on you if your parents will mind.”
    â€œMy mother will not mind at all if I do,” Livvy said in her best Cat in the Hat voice. “In fact, my parents are away all weekend so if—and I’m not saying we have to, but if—we wind up at my house for forty-eight hours, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.”
    â€œYes. Yes!” I said and slammed my hand down on the wheel, which of course made the horn blare and the car in front of me stop short so I also stopped short. The woman in the car ahead gave me the finger, but I just waved to her. “So here’s the thing about planning. It’s the process by which chess players take advantage of their position’s advantages and try to minimize the drawbacks of the faults of that position.”
    Livvy tried to follow along, riding the passenger seat of both my actual car and my theoretical train of thought as I swerved away from her house and the elegant Victorians around it toward the newer but still just-as-large houses on the