Lost in the Sun by Lisa Graff Read Free Book Online

like that from a Frisbee.
    â€œHuh,” I said. I pretended to think about that, pretty hard.
    â€œYou don’t believe me?” she asked. She seemed mad that I didn’tbelieve her obvious lie about her scar. Like she’d told me just so she could get mad at me for not believing her.
    â€œNo,” I said slowly. “I believe you. It’s just that it wasn’t what I was expecting, that’s all. I thought it was something even crazier. I thought maybe you got it in a nuclear power plant explosion.” Fallon raised an eyebrow. “And that now you have mutant superpowers or something.”
    â€œOoh, I
like
that one,” she said. She pointed to my notebook again. “That’s the one you should draw.”
    â€œSorry?”
    â€œThat’s what I want a picture of,” she told me. “How I got my scar. And that’s my favorite story yet.”
    â€œI’m not drawing that,” I said. My notebook wasn’t for weird lies about Fallon Little’s scar. My notebook was for thoughts.
My
thoughts. “Leave me alone, all right?”
    â€œNot till you draw me a picture.”
    â€œI’m going to get my mom to come over here,” I threatened. Which, all right, was pretty lame, but what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t even leave the stupid register.
    â€œOh, please do,” Fallon said, leaning way too far over the counter, so that I had to step back and almost tripped. “Moms
love
me. Hey, Mrs. Zimmerman!” she called over to my mom, who turned around and gave another friendly wave. “Is it Mrs. or Ms.?” Fallon asked me. “Your parents are divorced, right?”
    â€œGo away now,” I answered.
    I thought maybe Fallon would stay in the store until we had todrag her out by her frizzy hair just so we could lock up, but just as quickly as she’d appeared, she decided to leave. “You’re going to draw me that picture, Trent,” she told me as she backed her way toward the door. “Just you wait and see. I’m going to keep bugging you until you do.”
    â€œCan’t wait,” I muttered.
    Mom came back to the counter right after Fallon left, which just showed what terrible instincts she had as a mother.
    â€œShe seems nice,” Mom said. “Friend of yours?”
    â€œNot even a little,” I told her.
    And then Mom smiled at me in this way I could only interpret to mean that she thought Fallon and I were in love or something, and wasn’t that just the cutest? And I had to roll my eyes at her, because that was the only way to stop myself from barfing in my own mouth.
    Mom joined me behind the register. She sat on top of her stool and examined the sheet of voids.
    â€œHow do you think she got that scar?” she asked me, still reading the voids sheet.
    I looked at her. I was surprised, I guess, that she would wonder, too. That even a mom could be so curious about a thing like that.
    â€œMaybe it’s none of our business,” I said. As soon as I said it, I felt like I’d figured something out about Fallon Little. Something real. “People must ask her about it all the time,” I said, running a finger on the edge of my stool top. For all that Fallon talked about her scar, I realized, she didn’t really want anyone to know the truth. “I bet it gets really annoying.”
    Mom looked up from the voids sheet and smiled in that way shedid when one of us scored really well on a test. “You’re a pretty good kid, Trent, you know that?” she said.
    I shrugged. I wasn’t nearly half as good a kid as Mom thought. Because even though Fallon didn’t want me to know the truth about her scar, I still wondered about it. Actually, the fact that she didn’t want me to know made me wonder even more. It was like that enormous, mysterious scar across Fallon’s face was the end of some great, interesting, terrifying story. The very last line of