Lock and Key by Sarah Dessen Read Free Book Online Page B

care what the people at Perkins Day thought about me or my stupid sweater. Everything was just temporary anyway. Me being there, or here. Or anywhere, for that matter.
    A moment later, though, when Jamie yelled up that it was time to go, I suddenly found myself pulling on Cora’s T-shirt, which was clearly expensive and fit me perfectly, and then her sweater, soft and warm, over it. On my way downstairs, in clothes that weren’t mine, to go to a school I’d never claim, I stopped and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. You couldn’t see the key around my neck: it hung too low under both collars. But if I leaned in close, I could make it out, buried deep beneath. Out of sight, hard to recognize, but still able to be found, even if I was the only one to ever look for it.
    Cora was right. We got stuck in traffic. After hitting every red light between the house and Perkins Day, we finally pulled into the parking lot just as a bell was ringing.
    All the visitor spaces were taken, so Jamie swung his car—a sporty little Audi with all-leather interior—into one in the student lot. I looked to my left—sure enough, parked there was a Mercedes sedan that looked brand-new. On our other side was another Audi, this one a bright red convertible.
    My stomach, which had for most of the ride been pretty much working on rejecting my breakfast, now turned in on itself with an audible clench. According to the dashboard clock, it was 8:10, which meant that in a run-down classroom about twenty miles away, Mr. Barrett-Hahn, my homeroom teacher, was beginning his slow, flat-toned read of the day’s announcements. This would be roundly ignored by my classmates, who five minutes from now would shuffle out, voices rising, to fight their way through a corridor designed for a student body a fraction the size of the current one to first period. I wondered if my English teacher, Ms. Valhalla—she of the high-waisted jeans and endless array of oversized polo shirts—knew what had happened to me, or if she just assumed I’d dropped out, like a fair amount of her students did during the course of a year. We’d been just about to start Wuthering Heights , a novel she’d promised would be a vast improvement over David Copperfield , which she’d dragged us through like a death march for the last few weeks. I’d been wondering if this was just talk or the truth. Now I’d never know.
    “Ready to face the firing squad?”
    I jumped, suddenly jerked back to the present and Jamie, who’d pulled his keys from the ignition and was now just sitting there expectantly, hand on the door handle.
    “Oops. Bad choice of words,” he said. “Sorry.”
    He pushed his door open and, feeling my stomach twist again, I forced myself to do the same. As soon as I stepped out of the car, I heard another bell sound.
    “Office is this way,” Jamie said as we started walking along the line of cars. He pointed to a covered walkway to our right, beyond which was a big green space, more buildings visible on the other side. “That’s the quad,” he said. “Classrooms are all around it. Auditorium and gym are those two big buildings you see over there. And the caf is here, closest to us. Or at least it used to be. It’s been a while since I had a sloppy joe here.”
    We stepped up on a curb, heading toward a long, flat building with a bunch of windows. I’d just followed him, ducking under an overhang, when I heard a familiar rat-a-tat -tat sound. At first, I couldn’t place it, but then I turned and saw an old model Toyota bumping into the parking lot, engine backfiring. My mom’s car did the same thing, usually at stoplights or when I was trying to quietly drop a bag off at someone’s house late at night.
    The Toyota, which was white with a sagging bumper, zoomed past us, brake lights flashing as it entered the student parking lot and whipped into a space. I heard a door slam and then footsteps slapping across the pavement. A moment later, a black girl