Love All: A Novel by Callie Wright Read Free Book Online

two ever thought of leaving for school five minutes earlier?”
    Teddy smiled his killer smile, his black hair sleep-swirled. My brother had our mom’s eyes, and though he was tall like her, he was also broad like Dad. Teddy’s only visible blemish was a thin scar through his left eyebrow, courtesy of me, from where I’d stabbed him with my scissors when we were kids. I’d been slaving over a birthday card for Dad when Teddy grabbed a black crayon and signed his name in cakey block letters. I could still see his grin, like we were both in on the joke, and then there was blood running over his eye, drizzling the carpet. Girls loved that story, Teddy had told me, and it was true that Kim was always touching the white line in his brow, pressing it with her fingers.
    In homeroom, as I slid into my desk between Sam and Carl, Mrs. Boulanger made a show of marking me tardy, but it didn’t matter that I was late. My friends were on the tennis team—Sam at second singles and Carl as an alternate/team manager—while I was only a disgruntled groupie.
    “Hey,” said Sam, face plastered to hand, elbow nailed to desk. Fresh from Myrtle Beach, his nose and ear tips had begun to peel and his buzzed blond hair was bleached white. A tan line from his Syracuse cap crossed his forehead an inch above his eyebrows, but Sam was mayhi tall—6 feet 3½ inches—so when he stood, no one would be able to see it.
    “How was it?” I asked.
    “Profesh.” Sam spoke into his hand, mashing the word.
    “It provided,” said Carl. His copper curls flopped over his eyes and he pushed them back, revealing loads of new freckles. Carl was the boyish image of his mom, who still spoke in a gentle brogue though she’d moved to America with her family thirty years ago, when she was fifteen. Older girls loved Carl’s hair and freckles. They were always saying what a hottie he’d be when he grew up. For now, Carl looked like a red-cheeked cherub, topping out near the bridge of my nose at an even five foot three.
    Half of Cooperstown went to Myrtle Beach for spring break—the half that didn’t include my family, because Mom couldn’t take a week off from work. Carl went with his uncle’s family, and Sam went with his dad, stepmom, and six-year-old half brother, Curtis. This year, Sam’s dad had said I could go with them, but my parents thought it was an imposition, even if Sam’s dad said it wasn’t.
    I looked around our homeroom at the tan faces, the peeling noses. The girls had returned with locks of their hair wrapped in brightly colored string, tiny silver charms—a fish for Renee English, a turtle for Stacey Michaelson—dangling from the ends. With only eighty kids in our grade—four homerooms of twenty—most of us had been in school together since we were five years old. Occasionally families moved away, occasionally new families moved in, but mostly the fabric of CHS didn’t change. Stacey and Sam had gone out for three months at the beginning of the ninth grade, and the three stalks of lavender and sea-foam thread now streaking her blond hair made me certain that I’d missed something in Myrtle Beach, certain that everyone had tried something new. Nicky Rivera—who used to skate up to my front door in his Vision Street Wear hat and balance on the back wheels of his board so that its vibrant belly was bared for all the world to see—now wore a T-shirt that said COED NAKED MYRTLE BEACH VOLLEYBALL , and I thought back to the ninth-grade homecoming dance, when Nicky and I had made out behind the high school gymnasium, while Sam slow-danced with Stacey, and Carl helped Izzie Adams run the concession stand. So far this year there hadn’t been any new talk of crushes.
    When Mrs. Boulanger dismissed us from homeroom, Sam and Carl and I went out to our nunnery behind the propane tank just off school property, crossing the unlined football field side by side. We’d been gone for only a week but it was like returning to a different world.