Trace (TraceWorld Book 1) by Letitia L. Moffitt Read Free Book Online Page B

of wife, girlfriend, and business by a man who supposedly wanted to do right by everyone?
    They had reached a busy intersection and, by some unspoken common impulse, turned simultaneously to walk back to Javaland. Grayson gave her a faint smile. “I take it all these questions are for your own private investigation, since the boys in blue no doubt weren’t too pleased with the false lead you gave them.”
            “The boys in blue—the girls, too, for that matter—know that most leads are false ones. They’re hardly going to expect me or anyone else to be right 100 percent of the time.”
    “But you do need to be right 100 percent of the time, and you know that. Otherwise they won’t ever believe you. They didn’t believe you right from the start. Correct?” She said nothing. “They don’t listen. They don’t understand.”
    “And you do?” she snapped.
    “Maybe. Certainly, in one very important way, I understand you better than anyone else you know.”
    This was impossible to deny, even if she would have loved to deny it. All her life she had felt like part of a freak show, separated from the normal world by virtue of this one strange thing she could do, like the guy who swallowed swords or the woman who twisted her limbs into complicated knots.
    They were back at the Javaland parking lot. Leaning forward slightly, Grayson seemed to be reading her thoughts again. “We are different from other people. That’s always hard. It’s hard to try to fit in and it’s hard to decide not to fit in. Either way you feel like you lose. But it doesn’t have to be that way all the time, Nola.”
    Nola knew she had to get into her car and leave now before her head exploded from everything Grayson said. Again she hesitated—what in the world could she say?
    Grayson either rescued her or took advantage of the moment by speaking again. “There’s someplace I want to take you Tuesday night. It’s a special dinner party I’ve been invited to. I can’t describe it, not because I’m trying to be coy but because it’s a bit hard to describe. Honestly, I’m not all that sure what it’s going to be like myself—I prefer to think of it as an interesting experiment.”
    “Dinner and experiment. Not two words I’d put together unless I was the one doing the cooking.” She was pleased at her quip, in large part because the invitation had flustered her.
    He smiled but was clearly waiting for a definite answer. “I’m inviting you because I think you should come with me—I hope you’ll come with me—so you can see what I’m saying about this: you don’t have to play by everyone else’s rules.”
    She had not thought of herself as a person who was especially rule-bound. After all, she did not have to be sitting here with Grayson, she had not needed to become a tracist, she could have just gone about the ordinary parts of her life very easily. But she was also suspicious of people who sneered at “the rules,” who proclaimed themselves rebels, when in fact most of the time they were merely privileged enough to escape the kinds of consequences other people had to suffer. And she was still suspicious of Grayson in general, for no reason she could put to words beyond the fact that she’d spent no more than a couple of hours with him over two days and already he seemed to have worked his way quite thoroughly into her life.
    With all this going on in her mind, she simply said, “OK. I’ll go.”
     
    ___________
     
    A few weeks after her presentation on ghosts, some students from her class dared Nola to go to a cemetery at night and dance on a grave. Everyone in this group of kids got a dare at some point, and they’d picked this task specifically for her because of her ghost report, though mostly they just thought it would be fun to make someone do something that would have scared themselves shitless. Funny thing was, they couldn’t have picked an easier dare. Nola was far more worried about being