Pink & Green is the New Black by Lisa Greenwald Read Free Book Online

I announce. “The staff needs to close up.”
    â€œDo you want to come with us to Scotty’s?” Anthony asks the group, and I have a suspicious feeling that he may have an instant crush on Zoe. It’s just a hunch, but my hunches are usually right.
    I look at Sunny and Sunny looks at me, and we try to speak with our eyes. I don’t want to go to Scotty’s. Not with them, anyway. Everyone thinks Yamir is my boyfriend and that everything is great between us, and I just need them to think that for a little while longer. But if we go to Scotty’s and he acts weird, or hangs out with Sienna more than he hangs out with me, everyone will know. And by everyone I mean Erica and Zoe.
    â€œOh, we can’t,” Sunny says.
Thank God
. “Lucy’s coming back to my house and sleeping over, and we have Evan and some of the other guys meeting us there around nine.”
    Genius. Sunny Ramal: Girl Genius.
    â€œOoh, Evan and some of the other guys,” Clint says. “Well, okay, we’re out. Come on, peeps.”
    And just like that, Yamir and the others walk out of the treatment room and leave the spa.
    â€œIt’s cool that you and Yamir are together but, like, you can do things apart,” Erica says. At first I can’t tell if she’sbeing sincere, but then I decide that she is. She’s not smirking—that’s how I know.
    Zoe and Erica totally believe us about the sleepover, and fortunately they don’t ask to be invited. Zoe’s mom picks them up, and Charise offers to drive Sunny and me home.
    â€œShould I really sleep over?” I ask Sunny.
    â€œSure. Why not?”
    I get to Sunny’s and call my mom to tell her I’m sleeping over.
    â€œLucy, I get worried about this,” she says.
    â€œWorried? Why?”
    She pauses for a second. “You sleeping over there. While you and Yamir are, I don’t know, an item.”
    I laugh. “Mom, it’s fine. I’m hanging out with Sunny.”
    â€œOkay,” she says, reluctantly. “Please behave.”
    I don’t ask her to elaborate on what she means by that. I don’t really want to know. Maybe if I told her what was really going on, she’d realize she doesn’t have much to worry about.
    I know I’ll be up all night thinking about how Yamir is sleeping right there in the next room. I’ll be wondering about that girl Sienna, and what exactly she knows about me.
    But I’d rather be here than at home, thinking about all of this from five blocks away.

Lucy’s tip for surviving eighth grade:
    Keep a journal and write down all the wonderful moments.
    There’s one moment that I replay over and over in my head. It happened in October, and sometimes I wonder if I’ve changed it in my mind, if I remember it differently from the way it actually happened.
    I’m not sure.
    Yamir and I were sitting at my kitchen table eating grapes. Green ones. My favorite. Well,
eating
may not be the right word. We were throwing them, trying to get them into each other’s mouth. It might seem pretty gross to anyone else, but to us it was the best way to eat them.
    His hair was longer than it normally was; I guess he needed a haircut. One strand on the right side of his face was hanging into his eye. I remember his eyes vividly. Golden brown, the color of slightly burnt French toast.
    He was the Yamir I’d always known. But he was different. He was mine now.
    It was an unseasonably warm October day, so we went outside to lie down on the lounge chairs and pretend it was still summer. The pool was closed up but we didn’t mind. We soaked up the last remnants of the summer sun. I stayed sideways on my lounge chair and looked at him, and he stayed the same way on his lounge chair and faced me.
    And we just stared at each other.
    I’m sure we were both thinking the same thing: how perfectly we happy we were.

Lucy’s tip for surviving eighth