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

true.

    ONLY TWO OR three people got on at our station. I kept my head down. The train was mostly empty, running against rush hour. I wrestled out of my backpack and settled next to a window. The train jerked and rolled, and it dawned on me that at this particular moment in time nobody on earth knew where I was. The plastic seat sighed under me.
    And in that exact second my phone rang. I froze. Why hadn’t I shut it off? I didn’t need anybody trying to stop me. I didn’t even want another message from Tanya because I’d already had the one I wanted. Needed.
    I rummaged in my backpack for the phone. It was my mother’s number. I tapped her straight to voice mail. I’d already left her a message that I was going to Dad’s up in White Plains. Which was enough. The White Plains train flashed past this one right now, loaded with commuters heading home.
    From the corner of my eye I glimpsed my reflection in the window here on the shadowy side of the aisle. I sat shoulder to shoulder with myself. The two of me, the dead one I’d been and the live one now that Tanya had texted.
    Tanya and Natalie and Makenzie. Their names sang in my heart and hip-hopped in my head. If only I’d known this morning that I was going to meet up with them, I’d have kicked myself up a little when I was getting dressed. Put forth a little effort on my hair. I wore it long and smooth, longer than shoulder-length, like Natalie’s. But I hadn’t done anything about it for days. I hadn’t cared what I looked like for weeks. I’d have worn the same top two days running if I could have made it past my mother. I just didn’t care. I kept to the dress code with a collar on my shirt. I tied a sweatshirt type top around my waist. I just didn’t care.
    The week after Easter there’d been a school day hot as June. One of those days when you can almost see the buds popping on the trees. Tanya had pulled her shirttails out of her waistband and tied them in a knot. You couldn’t be sure if you were seeing her belly button or not.
    She cut the dress code that close, and by lunch every girl in school had tied her shirttails in a knot and was showing skin. Every girl and three or four guys from the art department.

    THE TRAIN WAS braking for the Riverdale station already. My throat began to close up a little bit. The city was just ahead, tall and gray into the sky. I wanted to fast-forward and be there because doubts were creeping into my head. They nagged me like a mother.
    What if that message Tanya texted was just . . . in my mind?
    What if it was only something I wanted, not something that was?
    Maybe when you’re as lonely as I’d been, you hear things and see things that aren’t true. Maybe I was losing my—
    No. That message was real. Totally. And nothing else was. That message had . . . punched the restart button and changed everything back to the way things were supposed to be.
    The train lurched and rolled on, and just ahead across a river Manhattan rose. The windows at the tops of the high-rises burned with gold fire from the sinking sun.
    125th Street then, and the plunge into the tunnel under Park Avenue. I could find my way around the city, more or less. As a family, when we’d been a family, we used to come in for The Nutcracker and ice-skating at Bryant Park and Dylan’s Candy Bar at Sixtieth and Third. Only this past Christmastime Tanya and Natalie and Makenzie and I had come in for the Rockettes’ holiday show. We’d changed clothes at the apartment where Tanya’s aunt Lily lived. It wasn’t that long ago. It was when things were real. I knew my way. I just didn’t know what I’d find when I got there.
    If anything.
    The doubts nagged, and my heart pounded. We were coasting to a stop along the platform way down under Grand Central Station.
    Just as I was struggling into my backpack, a guy stood up from his seat ahead. We’d meet at the door.
    He was a blond-headed guy in Lacoste and long shorts, carrying a see-through garment