The Snowball Effect by Holly Nicole Hoxter Read Free Book Online Page A

Mom died. Why did she have to make that so difficult?
    â€œAre you going back?” I asked. I didn’t know what I’d do if she said yes. If Riley and I would get the house. If I’d ever see her or Collin again.
    â€œHow could I go back, when I have to take care of you guys?”
    She wasn’t going back. That was good. “You don’t have to take care of me. I’ll be eighteen soon.”
    â€œOh, right. You’ll be able to magically support yourself when you turn eighteen.”
    â€œExactly. So why don’t you want to go back?”
    â€œWell, I didn’t love it there or anything. I had a job I wasn’t too crazy about. I had a few friends. Nothing that I’ll really miss.”
    â€œYou won’t miss your friends?”
    She shrugged. “I moved a lot, so I have friends all over the place. Dallas is just another place. And I was born in Baltimore, so I guess this is home. Kind of.”
    â€œWhat about all your stuff?”
    She pointed behind her at the trash bags. “There it is.”
    â€œYou didn’t have furniture or anything?”
    She shrugged. “I let my roommate keep all that stuff.”
    Vallery pulled a red dress off a hanger. She held it in front of her and looked at it. I looked, too. I remembered that dress. Mom had worn it to a Christmas party we’d all gone to the year before. She’d bought Carl and Collin matching dress shirts and nice new pants. I hadn’t wanted to go, but she’d said I could bring Riley, so we went. Mom bought a new dress for me to wear. She picked it out. It was red, like hers.
    â€œThat one,” I said to Vallery.
    â€œThis one?” She tugged at the neckline. “It plunges. Don’t you think it might look a little trampy?”
    â€œNo,” I said.
    That night at the Christmas party had been one of the last times I remembered Mom being happy.
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    I knew from Carl’s funeral that a funeral wasn’t just the funeral. First they had to lay the dead body out at a funeral home for two days so people could come by and stare at it. And the immediate family had to be there for hours on both days, just standing around with the dead body and greeting everyone. And then they had the funeral service and you caravaned to the cemetery and stuck the body in the ground. And then sometimes you even had a party afterward. I really didn’t understand why it had to be so drawn out. Who really wanted to be in a room with a dead body for hours at a time, for days? Why wasn’t the stupid funeral service enough?
    Unfortunately, Lainey Pike didn’t make the rules, so Mabel and Vallery arranged for Mom to be laid out for two days at the Lee-Johnson Funeral Home, the same place where we’d had Carl’s funeral. I hoped they were giving us some kind of discount for being loyal customers.
    The viewing at the funeral home both days was packed. I didn’t own much black, so I’d thought for a second about wearing the red dress Mom had bought me for the Christmas party, but then I realized that’d be ridiculous. No one else but Mom would be wearing red. I wore the same black dress that I’d bought for Carl’s funeral.
    I’d known that Mom had worked with a ton of women, but it was crazy to see them all gathered together like that. All those women who reminded me of the way Mom used to be.
    Mom always said she knew exactly how her problemsstarted. She said her life was happy and great until I was four (which I didn’t believe, because she’d already been divorced twice by then). When I was four, she was in a car accident while driving to work with her best friend. Well, that’s how she told it. For all I knew it was some random woman she’d picked up at the 7-Eleven. Or maybe it never happened at all. But for the sake of argument, Mom and her best friend were on their way to work when a pickup jackknifed them. Mom had a concussion and the best