The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta Read Free Book Online

that she was an alcoholic who’d disappeared on October 14th, leaving her teenage daughter alone with a stepfather she didn’t like or trust.
    “You want a bite?” Jill held out her jelly donut. “It’s really good.”
    “That’s okay. I’m stuffed. I can’t believe I ate that whole omelette.”
    “Don’t blame me.” Jill licked a tiny jewel of jelly off the tip of her thumb. “I tried to warn you.”
    Aimee’s expression turned serious, even a bit stern.
    “You shouldn’t make fun of your father. He’s a really nice guy.”
    “I know.”
    “And he’s not even a bad cook.”
    Jill didn’t argue. Compared to her mother, her father was a terrible cook, but Aimee had no way of knowing that.
    “He tries,” she said.
    She scarfed down her glazed donut in three quick bites—it was so airy inside, almost like there was nothing beneath the sugary coating—then gathered up her trash.
    “Ugh,” she said, dreading the prospect of the test she was about to take. “I guess we better go.”
    Aimee studied her for a moment. She glanced at the display case behind the counter—tiers of donuts arrayed in their metal baskets, iced and sprinkled and powdered and plain and full of sweet surprises—and then back at Jill. A mischievous smile broke slowly across her face.
    “You know what?” she said. “I think I will have something to eat. Maybe some coffee, too. You want coffee?”
    “We don’t have time.”
    “Sure we do.”
    “What about my test?”
    “What about it?”
    Before Jill could reply, Aimee was out of her seat, moving toward the counter, her jeans so tight and her stride so liquid that everyone in the place turned to stare.
    I have to go, Jill thought.
    A feeling of unreality came over her just then, a sudden awareness of being trapped in a bad dream, that panicky sense of helplessness, as if she possessed no will of her own.
    But this was no dream. All she had to do was stand up and start walking. And yet she remained frozen in her pink plastic seat, smiling foolishly as Aimee turned and mouthed the word Sorry, though it was clear from the look on her face that she wasn’t sorry at all.
    Bitch, Jill thought. She wants me to fail.
    *   *   *
    AT MOMENTS like this—and there were more of them than she would have liked to admit—Jill wondered what she was doing, how she’d allowed herself to get so tangled up with someone as selfish and irresponsible as Aimee. It wasn’t healthy.
    And it had happened so quickly. They’d only gotten to know each other a few months ago, at the beginning of summer, two girls working side by side in a failing frozen yogurt store, chatting during the slow times, some of which lasted for hours.
    They were wary of each other at first, conscious of their membership in different tribes—Aimee sexy and reckless, her life a cluttered saga of bad decisions and emotional melodrama; Jill straitlaced and reliable, an A student and model teenage citizen. I wish I had a whole class of Jills, more than one teacher had written in the comments box on her report card. No one had ever written that about Aimee.
    As the summer wore on, they began to relax into what felt like a genuine friendship, a connection that made their differences seem increasingly trivial. For all her social and sexual confidence, Aimee turned out to be surprisingly fragile, quick to tears and violent bouts of self-loathing; she required a lot of cheering up. Jill was better at hiding her sadness, but Aimee had a way of coaxing it out of her, getting her to open up about things she hadn’t discussed with anyone else—her bitterness toward her mother, her trouble communicating with her father, the feeling that she’d been cheated, that the world she’d been raised to live in no longer existed.
    Aimee took Jill under her wing, bringing her to parties after work, introducing her to what she’d been missing. Jill was intimidated at first—everybody she met seemed a little older and a little cooler