Love You Hate You Miss You by Elizabeth Scott Read Free Book Online Page B

that I knew she knew nothing about me.
    I liked that.
    I liked that she had to see that, J. And I like that every day brings a whole lot of time with my parents. I know how it sounds, okay? But I like that it’s not them and then me anymore.
    I like that they finally have to face the fact that I’m here.

EIGHT
    IN ENGLISH CLASS TODAY (109 days without Julia—I can only measure time by that, by how long she’s been gone), I got stuck in yet another group thing with Mel and Caro and Patrick. We were still discussing The Scarlet Letter , and I watched Corn Syrup twirl a piece of her hair around one finger as she argued with Mel. So far, they’d argued about what the A really meant (I hadn’t realized that was up for debate) and then the symbolism of the color red. I’d drawn squares in my notebook. Patrick had fiddled with his book, then picked his fingernails, and then fiddled with his book some more.
    Then—and this is where things started to get strange—Mel looked at Patrick and cleared his throat. Patrick stopped picking his fingernails and glared at him. Watching them do that reminded me of how Julia and I used totalk without words. I started thinking about her and then Mel sighed, turned to me, and said, “What are you doing Friday night?”
    “What?” I said, completely thrown and positive I hadn’t heard him right.
    I had, though, because Caro stopped the hair twirling so fast her finger got caught and she had to yank it free. And Patrick was—well, he was fiddling with his book again.
    “Maybe we could go to a movie,” Mel continued. “I was thinking that you and me and maybe…” He cleared his throat again and then, I swear, flinched like someone had kicked him or something.
    He glared at Patrick and then looked back at me. “You wanna go?”
    “Um,” I said, and realized that:
    1. At sixteen, I was finally getting asked out on an honest-to-God date.
    2. I was asked on said date by someone who, as far as I could tell, wasn’t even interested in me. Mel never checked out my (admittedly small) chest, tried to grope me, or even seemed interested in my answers to the questions he was always asking.
    3. I was clearly taking too long to reply because Caro was staring at me and Mel like we both had two heads.
    Mel was blinking a lot and had turned bright red, and Patrick had actually stopped flipping through his book and was watching all of us.
    I knew I had to say something, but I had no idea what. I tried to think of the right thing, but nothing came to mind and I panicked.
    I panicked, and said the worst possible thing.
    I panicked and said, “When?”
    “Friday,” Caro snapped. “He said Friday.”
    “Caro,” Mel said, glancing at her. He looked upset.
    “What?” Caro said, her voice full of challenge and hurt, and she looked about ten times more upset then Mel did.
    Mel opened his mouth, then closed it. His face was still bright red. I didn’t get what was going on, but it was clear I needed to say something else.
    “Okay,” I said. I meant it as, “Okay, I understand you mean Friday, now will you please explain what the hell is going on?” but Mel must have taken my “okay” as a “yes” because he nodded at me.
    “Great, I’ll see you then,” he said, and then looked at Caro and told her he didn’t agree with what she’d said about Reverend What’s-His-Bucket.
    After a moment of extremely awkward silence Caro said, “Of course you’d say that, because you didn’t read the book right,” and then they started arguing again.
    I spent the rest of class trying to figure out why the hell I was going on a date with Mel, who was hot but short and clearly more than a little strange. Patrick flipped through his book and picked his fingernails. No surprise there. Caro and Mel kept arguing. No surprise there either.
    When the bell rang, I’d decided that I’d probably hallucinated the whole thing out of sheer boredom, but then Mel said, “I’ll pick you up around seven,