Summerlost by Ally Condie Read Free Book Online Page A

the words
Barnaby Chesterfield
I felt like I had been punched in the stomach.
    â€œWe bought the tickets last year right when they went on sale,” Leo said. “With my dad’s credit card. I had the money so he let me do it and we got one for him too. So I can go, and my dad’s going to come with me, but I have to earn the money for my own airfare. I’m not there yet, but I’m getting close.”
    â€œAnd if you don’t?”
    â€œWe can sell the
Hamlet
tickets to someone else, no problem,” Leo said. “The theater will buy them back because the demand is so high. But the deadline my dad set for me tohave the money for the plane tickets is coming up. I don’t have enough money yet.”
    â€œAnd we don’t make very much money selling concessions.”
    â€œRight,” Leo said. “I need to supplement my income. That’s why I came up with the tour.”
    We were almost to our street. “Do you want to come eat breakfast at my house?” Leo asked.
    I did and I didn’t. Mostly I didn’t want to see him with his normal family eating breakfast together. My family ate cold cereal on our own whenever we felt like it because my mom, who used to get up super early, now got up at the last possible minute. She stayed up too late. This summer because she was building the deck; during the school year it had been lesson plans and grading. She had to tire herself all the way out, she said, before she could fall asleep.
    â€œThanks,” I said. “Maybe another time.”
    â€œOkay,” Leo said. “I’ll see you at work.” I watched him go the rest of the way home and walk up the steps to his house.
    As soon as he’d gone inside I wished I’d said yes instead.

17.
    I sat out in the backyard eating a bowl of cereal and looking at the mess that was our deck. My mom came outside. She had her gym clothes on.
    â€œAll done running?” she asked.
    I nodded. It seemed less like lying if I didn’t
say
the lie. “Look,” I said. The birds had started swooping around, big and dark and freaky. “Do you think they might be eagles?” I asked, even though I knew they weren’t.
    â€œTurkey vultures,” my mom said. She gave me a kiss on the top of my head and said, “I’m going to be late. I’ll see you soon, sweetie.”
    The vultures hovered for a minute more, and then they started to settle in the tree. Once they were deep in the leaves, I couldn’t see them.

18.
    Every day my mom went to her exercise class and then to run errands and I was in charge of Miles.
    Every day we did the same thing. We made peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches with chocolate milk for lunch and then we watched a really bad soap opera that my mother would never in a million years have let us watch. But she didn’t know. We pretended we did crafts and played games. That’s what we always said we’d been doing when she came home.
    The soap opera was called
Times of Our Seasons
, which didn’t actually make sense when you thought too hard about it. It always started with the scene of a beautiful woman and a handsome man walking along a beach and then a ticking clock was superimposed over them.
    Our favorite character was named Harley, and she had been buried alive (and I mean buried, like in a coffin in the ground and everything) by her archnemesis, Celeste. Inside the coffin, there was this walkie-talkie thing that Celeste used to talk to Harley and a tube where Celeste sent food down. That was it. Harley had to lie inside that box, day after day.
    We
had
to see her get out.
    Times of Our Seasons
had lots of other drama too. Death and divorce and everything else besides.
    You might think this would be a bad choice for two kids who had lost a parent and a sibling in an accident.
    But it was so fake it was perfect.
    â€œHurry!” Miles shouted from the family room. “It’s starting!”
    I