Shade Me by Jennifer Brown Read Free Book Online Page B

anyone have found a way to tell me if she’d died? And should I even care? Before last night, would I have cared? I thought probably not.
    By the end of the day, people were talking about going to visit her after school. Some of her friends had collected money during lunch shift for flowers. There was going to be a carpool. A caravan of carpools. So predictable. They’d probably show up with entire greenhouses full of flowers, with cashmere teddy bears, these people who’d spent the day relentlessly passing around rumors about her. Brentwood was dangerously close to Hollywood in so many ways.
    The last thing I wanted to do was be in the middle of that bullshit. Especially if Dru was there. Awkward City.
    So instead of going to the hospital with everyone else, I went to open gym at LightningKick, the tae kwon do academy where I’d been training since I was twelve. I liked LightningKick. It centered me, made me feel strong and powerful, capable. I couldn’t score an A on anything at school to save my life, but I could kick the ass of a grown man without breaking much of a sweat. Knowing I could do that didn’t make the bad guys who’d killed my mom go away, but it made me less scared of them. Plus, when I was perfecting an eagle strike or memorizing my patterns, the synesthesia didn’t matter, because I wasn’t even seeing letters or numbers. I wasn’t feeling emotions. I was focused inside my head, inside myself. Maybe the vacation from acolor-coded world was why I was so good at tae kwon do. I didn’t do it to be good, though; I did it to be myself. And myself liked to beat the snot out of unwitting sparring partners on a Tuesday afternoon at the dojang .
    I pulled open the glass doors and inhaled the familiar smell of LightningKick—a mixture of sweat, muscle ointment, and bare feet. A gross combination, but one that I associated with taking control, with self-preservation; so immediately, I felt better. I couldn’t pinpoint it, but something about the events of the night before made me feel like I needed to brush up on my self-protection skills. I headed for the changing room, where I unloaded my backpack and cell phone, took off my shoes, and changed into my dobok . My muscles twitched with anticipation.
    â€œEverything okay, Nik?” Gunner, my kyo sah nim , asked as I walked across the padded floor toward the heavy bag.
    â€œYes, sir, fine,” I said. I squared myself up next to the bag and roundhoused it so hard it swung back and forth on its hook. The connection rattled my whole body. It felt good, so I did it again. And again. And another dozen times, before switching to my left foot and starting over. Peyton’s face flashed in my mind, the crusted blood around her nostrils and crimson monitors trying to edge in on me, shake me up. The memory of how Peyton blurred into my mother stirred into focus. I blitzed the bag with everything I had—royal-blue strength bubbles popping around me—grittingmy teeth to keep them from clacking together with the impact, and the image shattered to pieces and floated away. I tried, instead, to imagine her perpetrator, who had somehow, in my mind, morphed into my mom’s nameless, faceless culprit, fantasize about finding him in Bay 19 and kicking him over and over until he coughed blood and teeth. But it was impossible to conjure an image of someone you had no clue about. I’d been trying to take down an anonymous bad guy since the day I slid in my mom’s blood on the tile entryway floor. The frustration ramped me up and I kicked harder and harder—blue, blue, blue—my foot stinging and then going numb.
    Kyo Sah Nim Gunner appeared on the other side of the bag and held on to it to stop its swing. I paused, bouncing on my toes, breathing hard. “You sure you’re all right?” he asked. “This bag is crying uncle.”
    â€œSorry,” I said. I felt sweat trickle down my back and