Reunion by Meg Cabot Read Free Book Online Page A

I mean, before you came to school at the Mission, no one ever stood up to Brad Ackerman. He got away with everything. With murder, practically.”
    “Well,” I said. “Not anymore.”
    “No,” Michael said with a nervous laugh. “No, not anymore.”
    The person ahead of me stepped up to the cashier, and I moved into her place. Michael moved, too, only he went a little too far, and ended up colliding with me. He said, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and backed up.
    “That’s okay,” I said. I began to wish, even if it had meant risking a brain hemorrhage, that I’d stayed with Gina.
    “Your hair,” Michael said in a soft voice, “smells really good.”
    Oh my God. I thought I was going to have an aneurysm right there in line.
Your hair smells really good? Your hair smells really good?
Who did he think he was? James Bond? You don’t tell someone their hair smells good. Not in a
mall.
    Fortunately, the cashier yelled, “Next,” and I hurried up to pay for my purchase, thinking that by the time I turned around again, Michael would be gone.
    Wrong. So wrong.
    Not only was he still there, but it turned out he already owned the book on computer programming — he was just
carrying it around
— so he didn’t even have to make a stop at the cashier’s counter…which was where I’d planned on ditching him.
    No. Oh, no. Instead, he followed me right out of the store.
    Okay, I told myself. The guy’s sister is in a coma. She went to a pool party, and ended up on life support. That’s gotta screw a person up. And what about the car accident? The guy was just in a horrifying car accident. It’s entirely possible that he may have killed four people. Four people! Not on purpose, of course. But four people, dead, while you yourself escaped perfectly unscathed. That and the comatose sister…well, that’s gotta give a guy issues, right?
    So cut him a little slack. Be a little nice to him.
    The trouble was that I had already been a little nice to him, and look what had happened: he was practically stalking me.
    Michael followed me right into Victoria’s Secret, where I’d instinctively headed, thinking no boy would follow a girl into a place where bras were on such prominent display. Boy, was I ever wrong.
    “So, what’d you think,” Michael wanted to know as I stood there fingering a cheetah-print number in rayon, “about our group report? Do you agree with your, uh, friend that Kelly’s argument was fatuous?”
    Fatuous?
What sort of word was
that
?
    A saleslady came up to us before I had a chance to reply. “Hello,” she said, brightly. “Have you noticed our sale table? Buy three pairs of panties, get a fourth pair free.”
    I couldn’t believe she’d said the word
panties
in front of Michael. And I couldn’t believe that Michael just kept standing there
smiling
! I couldn’t even say the word
panties
in front of my
mother
! I whirled around and headed out of the store.
    “I don’t normally come to the mall,” Michael was saying. He was sticking to me like a leech. “But when I heard you were going to be here, well, I thought I’d come over and see what it’s all about. Do you come here a lot?”
    I was trying to head in the general direction of the food court, in the vague hope that I might be able to ditch Michael in the throng in front of Chick-fil-A. It was tough going, though. For one thing, it looked as if just about every kid in the peninsula had decided to go to the mall after school. And for another, the mall had had one of those events, you know, that malls are always having. This one had been some kind of screwed-up mardi gras, with floats and gold masks and necklaces and all. I guess it had been a success, since they’d left a lot of the stuff up, like these big shiny purple and gold puppets. Bigger than life-size, the puppets were suspended from the mall’s glass atrium ceiling. Some of them were fifteen or twenty feet long. Their appendages dangled down in what I suppose was intended to be