Three Quarters Dead by Richard Peck Read Free Book Online Page A

that you don’t make new friends in high school. Not at Pondfield High School. You’re lucky if you hang on to the ones you have.
    “Honey, there must be plenty of kids who’d be glad to—”
    But I had to cut him off. He didn’t get it. It wasn’t his fault, but he didn’t get it.
    Also, he couldn’t see what an honor it had been. I was only this first-semester sophomore last fall when Tanya and Natalie and Makenzie took me in. Me. A nothing little tenth grader who knew zero about layering or labels or who was in charge. Even Dad didn’t see the miracle of it.
    My mother was way worse, of course. “Honey,” she said, “Tanya and Natalie were seniors. They wouldn’t have even been here next—”
    “So you’re saying they might as well be dead because they were going to graduate anyway?” I said, really screaming at her. Besides, Makenzie was a junior, and she’d have—
    “I’m not saying that,” my mother said. “But you can’t blame me for being grateful you weren’t in the car with them. And I think you need to use this time to—”
    “Don’t tell me to go out and get new friends!” I screamed. “Don’t you start.”
    “I wasn’t going to tell you that,” my mother said. “I was going to say that maybe now you can begin to find out who you are.”
    Me? Who was I without them? My mother so didn’t get it. My clueless mother. She couldn’t see I was three-quarters dead myself.

    TODAY, THOUGH—NOW—everything was different.
    I was smiling inside, grinning from ear to ear, all the way along the hall of the counseling wing. I’d turned my frown upside down because this big rock had rolled off me. Because Tanya had texted, and the nightmare was over, almost.

    THE GRIEF COUNSELOR was Ms. Gordon, but she’d asked me to call her Rosemary. I didn’t want to, so I hadn’t called her anything. She seemed to live and work out of an oversized tote bag with her other shoes in it. The only thing on her desk was a box of Kleenex.
    I was braced for her when I heard voices coming out of her office. I’d forgotten this was a session with parents. They were there early, talking about me behind my back, which I didn’t particularly like. I stopped outside the door because my mother was talking.
    “I should have done something sooner,” she was saying. “I should have nipped this in the bud. After that business last Halloween at the latest. Kerry was just too . . . grateful to be accepted. She was swept off her feet and didn’t know which way was up. She didn’t know what was real. These girls were too old for her. I was so busy playing hands-off suburban single parent and giving her all the freedom she—”
    “Why are you overanalyzing this?” my dad said, breaking in. “You overanalyze everything. We’re talking kids here. Kids. They’re resilient. They move on. I never had a friend in high school I couldn’t do without. All Kerry needs is time to—”
    I walked in then. Dad was on one side, his chair tipped back, having his say. And looking at his watch. My mother was on the other side, as far from him as she could get. She was wearing her quilted Burberry and her concerned look.
    I walked in, and I didn’t need this now. I so totally didn’t need any of this.
    “I’m fine,” I said to them in the old voice I hadn’t used in weeks. “I’m done here.”
    Then I spun around and got out before anybody could say anything. Ms. Gordon could keep her Kleenex. I wasn’t even numb now. I could feel my feet, slapping along the floor tiles. And where was my backpack? And my books? And what class did I have third period? Language Arts? Something. And what were we discussing in that class? Lord of the Flies? Whatever.
    I was fine because Tanya had texted. And everything else had been a . . . mistake. A cosmic mistake. And I had to be on the 3:50 train into the city because in another miracle, Tanya had texted me.
    I’d known all along this entire . . . situation had been too bad to be