Shade Me by Jennifer Brown Read Free Book Online Page A

Instinctively, I tensed, fixing my eyes on the point on his throat that I would punch if he did something fishy. But then he smiled at me and I relaxed a little. That smile. It was so disarming. Alarmingly disarming.
    â€œNo problem.”
    He pulled open my door and stepped back so I could get in. He licked his lips— God, they looked so soft! —and welocked eyes again, a gaze that swept through me, made me breathless.
    â€œNo, I mean thank you for everything. For being there with Peyton. For reminding me what she’s made of. You made me feel a lot better. I can maybe have a little hope.”
    â€œI’ve sort of been there,” I said. “I get it.”
    His eyes narrowed, as if he were studying me. “You really do, don’t you?”
    I couldn’t answer. I could see the letters on his key fob, a leather souvenir from the Dominican Republic, which hung out of his front pocket, begin to glow lavender, then purple, and then violet so bright I could feel it in my throat.
    I wasn’t the only one feeling that current between us.
    Or was I? That violet could have been all me.
    I swallowed again, tearing my eyes away from the fob, trying to put Cool and Controlled Nikki back in place. “I should go. My dad doesn’t know I’m gone.”
    â€œIt is pretty late,” he said.
    I squeezed past him and got into my car. “See you.”
    â€œYeah. It was nice meeting you, Nikki,” he said. “And thanks for”—he shot me a look that was part grateful, part wary—“everything.” He pushed my door shut with a thud.
    I started the car, put it into gear, and took off, glad to be free of the unnerving Hollis pull.

4
    I TOSSED AND turned all night, seeing Peyton’s face morph into my mom’s, and when I woke up all I could think about was what I’d seen in Dru’s key chain, which I’d regretted about ten seconds after I pulled away from the parking garage. Everything felt wrong, like I was being played. Like I was involved in something I shouldn’t have been. Like I had let myself be sucked in by his charm like some swoony, desperate girl. And I was generally not big on being “involved” in things to begin with.
    I had no idea what I was doing on my chem quiz, but I didn’t have time to care about that. I still had a D in the class, and if I didn’t screw up my finals, I just might pull out enough of a grade to graduate. I had time.
    Not that it was possible to concentrate on schoolwork anyway. Word had already gotten out about what had happened to Peyton, and everyone was talking about it.
    â€œI heard she rolled her car, like, ten times,” a girl said in first period. “They say she was running from drug dealers when she did it. You saw that tattoo on her neck, didn’t you? Who does that?”
    â€œNuh-uh, it was cops she was running from. And I heard she got run over by a truck,” someone else said.
    â€œI thought it was that she was dating some college guy and he beat her up because he caught her cheating. With a girl,” yet another person chimed in.
    Killed themselves to put you up on a pedestal, just so they could watch you lose your balance and fall, and even pull you down when you weren’t falling fast enough.
    I wanted to turn on them, tell them all to shut up because they had no idea what they were talking about, and just yesterday they were all wanting to be her and talking about the neck tattoos they were going to get. But then I remembered I actually had no idea what had happened to Peyton, either, and they could have been right for all I knew, not to mention why on earth would I be sticking up for Peyton Hollis anyway? Stay out of it , Nikki, I told myself about a thousand times. It’s not your business.
    Still, I wondered how her night had gone—if she was still comatose, or if she’d stirred and asked for me, or if shehadn’t made it after all. Would