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

grade:
    Spend time with your friends. You need it.
    It’s hard to know when things changed with Yamir. I look around Sunny’s room, trying to figure it out. Sunny has been sleeping for hours while I’ve been staring at the clock, wondering if Yamir is asleep in his room next door.
    It makes me think of souring milk or bread going stale. You don’t know exactly when it happens—you just know it happened. But maybe this is different from stale bread or sour milk. Maybe it can be fixed. The bad can be made good. The wrong can be made right. What’s done can be undone.
    If I just accept that this is how things are, they will never get better. And the next few months will be nowhere close to the perfect I want and need them to be.
    I have to keep trying. I have to figure it out.
    I roll over and sigh and wish that Sunny would wake up so we could talk. I hate when she falls asleep before me, becausethen I know I won’t be able to fall asleep for hours and hours. It’s the way it’s always been at our sleepovers.
    I guess I finally fall asleep, because an hour or so later I hear a knock on Sunny’s door, and it feels like I’ve been zapped out of a sound sleep.
    I wonder if I’m dreaming it. But then I hear another knock, and I hear a whisper through the door. “Luce-Juice.”
    Yamir.
    He’s waking me up. But my hair is all disheveled and I probably have morning breath, even though it’s not morning. Well, I guess it is. I look at the clock. It’s exactly 3:00 A.M .
    I get out of bed as silently as possible, trying to make sure the bed frame doesn’t creak, and tiptoe to the door.
    â€œWere you awake?” Yamir whispers.
    I nod, even though I wasn’t. I’m too scared to talk. I don’t want my breath to make him pass out.
    He takes my hand and leads me down the stairs. It’s a good thing everyone in the Ramal family is a heavy sleeper, or they’d probably wake up from all the creaks the stairs make. I swear they have the loudest stairs in the whole world.
    â€œSorry to wake you,” Yamir whispers when we get downstairs. We sit on the couch, and he turns on the lamp on the end table. His hair is sticking up in weird places and his eyelids are droopy. I wonder if he’s been up all night too.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” I ask. I’m still half-asleep, but I keep telling myself that I need to pay attention. Yamir woke me up. He knew I was sleeping here and he wants to talk to me. If I didn’t look and feel so discombobulated, this could be really romantic.
    â€œI think you’re mad at me,” he says, soft and concerned. I’m not sure if he’s rubbing his eyes because he’s tired or because he can’t look at me. Either way, it’s adorable. Everything he does is adorable.
    I’ve gone from finding him completely annoying when I first knew him, to finding him moderately cute but still annoying, to finding everything he does perfectly cute. Except for the ignoring me part.
    â€œI’m a little bit mad at you.” I don’t look at him.
    â€œWell, a little bit is better than a lot.”
    â€œOkay, I’m a lot mad at you.” I finally look at him, and he’s still rubbing his eyes. I wonder again if he was up all night deciding whether he should come knock on Sunny’s door. I wish I could read his mind. Just for a second. “You’ve been ignoring me for weeks. Since winter break.”
    â€œI haven’t been ignoring you. I’ve just been, I don’t know, busy. I guess.”
    â€œThat’s not a good excuse.”
    â€œI guess not,” he says. As exciting as this conversation is, I want to go back to sleep. It feels like we’re not getting anywhere.I could do this whole thing better if I was more awake. Maybe it’s not a good idea to discuss important things in the middle of the night.
    â€œRemember that day with the grapes?” I