The Book of Luke by Jenny O'Connell Read Free Book Online

me up, or catch a ride with Josie. There was no contest. “Consider it done.”
     
    After last period I went to meet Lucy and Josie by their lockers, but only Lucy was there. She didn’t see me at first, and I didn’t call out her name or do anything so she’d notice I was walking toward her. Instead I stopped and watched her sort through her books as she obviously tried to decide which ones she needed to take home. Not that it mattered. It wasn’t like Duke or UNC or any other school that was recruiting Lucy would turn her down because she didn’t do well on a French quiz. Which was ironic, now that I thought about it. Here I was, the one who used to help Lucy conjugate French verbs—even though I took Spanish—and yet she was being wooed by schools while all I had was a wrinkled letter with a tear-smeared Brown University logo. Standing there watching Lucy spend so much time figuring out which books she needed, I felt something so unexpected, so urgent, I almost didn’t know what it was. It was like how all of a sudden you’re not hungry until someone mentions a cheeseburger and fries, and then it’s all you can do to keep your stomach from growling. But what I was feeling weren’t pangs of hunger. They were worse. They were pangs of jealousy.
    I’d never envied Lucy before. Not when she’d be waiting at the finish line, barely out of breath, long before the rest of us completed our run around the soccer field. Not when she was asked to be on the varsity team when most freshmen were just hoping to sit on the JV bench in a uniform. And not even when she stood up at school assemblies and accepted yet another athletic award for “outstanding this” and “extraordinary that.” It never bothered me because each of us seemed to have our place, our little niche where we fit. I was the good one, the nice girl who got good grades. Lucy was the amazing athlete. And Josie was the scholarship student who made decent grades and didn’t stand out in any particular way except that she seemed to have a confidence that made her seem special, like how some stars seem to shine brighter or twinkle faster than others when you look at the sky, even though you can’t quite figure out why. Which is why it was even more unbelievable that Luke Preston would ditch her for some random St. Michael’s sophomore. Nobody ever ditched Josie. She was always the one who did the ditching.
    “Hey, what are you doing?” Lucy asked, finally noticing me standing there watching her.
    “Nothing.” I went over to her. “I thought we were all meeting here after last class.”
    “Josie’s finishing up in the art room; she’s still got some pictures developing or something.”
    Josie is fanatical about her photographs. I’d say that more than half of all the yearbook pictures from our freshman year were taken by her, which is why there’s only one candid picture of Josie and about a million of me and Lucy. And even in that one picture, Josie isn’t alone. Lucy and I are standing right next to her, laughing as the shutter of the camera snapped closed.
    “I don’t know why she just doesn’t do it at home,” Lucy wondered aloud, moving aside so I could grab my coat out of her locker. “She has her own photo lab in the new house, you know.”
    No, I did not know. “Really? An entire photo lab?”
    “Oh yeah. Wait until you see the Holdens’ new place. You’re not going to believe it.”
    Even more unbelievable than a house with a photography lab was the fact that Josie was actually one of the few scholarship students at Heywood before I left. Not that it made her any different from the rest of us, at least not in any real noticeable way. We all had to follow a dress code, so Josie didn’t stand out from anyone else. I don’t even know if anyone besides me and Lucy knew Josie received a scholarship to attend Heywood Academy; it was that much of a nonissue. There were only a few times when I can really remember thinking that Josie