Wish by Alexandra Bullen Read Free Book Online Page A

ducked back through the door onto the redwood porch, where a crowd of guys in homemade togas stood around a keg. Bowie held up a finger to say that she’d be right back, and gestured to Miles, who was talking to a girl in overalls by the breakfast nook.
    Olivia’s eyes flitted anxiously around the kitchen, a tight, twisting feeling clenching at her insides. Even at home, she’d never felt 100 percent comfortable at parties. She never knew what she was supposed to be doing or saying, or how she should be standing to look like she was having a good time. But Violet was always there to save her a seat, or bring her a drink in a red plastic cup.
    After the summer, she’d pretty much stopped going out altogether. And when school started up in the fall, their friends had tried to include her, calling her on Friday nights to hang out in Morgan Jennings’s basement when his parents were out of town. But they had quickly given up. Which only proved to Olivia what she’d feared all along: They weren’t really their friends at all. They were Violet’s friends. And Violet was gone.
    “Here,” Bowie said, passing Olivia a cup of foamy beer. “Come on, we have to save that poor girl from Miles. He turns into an eco-crusader at these things. It’s not pretty.”
    Bowie maneuvered through a crowd of girls by the industrial-size kitchen sink, joining Miles and the girl he’d cornered in the pantry.
    “Let’s go, Al Bore,” Bowie murmured, linking her arm into Miles’s elbow and dragging him through a high-ceilinged hallway, beckoning for Olivia to follow along. “The music’s this way.”
    They shouldered their way through an endless, narrow hall, the insistent plodding of a bass guitar beckoning them into a sunken living room on the other side of the house. The space had been cleared of all furniture, save the tree-size potted plants sandwiching a wide brick fireplace. Against one windowed wall at the back of the room, with the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge twinkling in the background, a band was playing on an improvised stage.
    “These guys rock,” Bowie said, as Miles sulked against the mantel, a floppy palm frond sticking out from behind his frazzled hair. “That’s Graham singing. Don’t they kind of remind you of Kings of Leon?”
    Olivia squinted at the stage and nodded, even though Bowie might as well have been speaking in tongues. The music sounded like just about every indie band Violet had been obsessed with over the past two years, and Olivia struggled to remember her sister cutting out photo spreads from the pages of Nylon and plastering them onto her notebooks and locker. Basically, the recipe for Violet’s approval involved long, shaggy hair, skinny jeans, altered vocals, and heavy bass.
    Graham’s band passed with flying colors on all counts.
    Bowie squeezed into the crowd, tossing the points of her hair from side to side, her shoulders dipping up and down to the beat. All around her, kids were laughing, dancing, toastingeach other with easy smiles and half-empty glasses of colorful drinks. Bowie motioned for Olivia to join her, but Olivia pretended to be lost in the music, staring intently at the band as if she were studying the complexities of their compositional arrangements or instrumental breaks.
    Onstage, Graham, whom she quickly recognized as one of the lounging hipsters from the courtyard, was sing-screeching into a handheld microphone, his damp, orange hair sticking to his face. He stood on the tips of his sneakers for one last earsplitting wail, before dropping dramatically to his knees and bowing toward the back of the stage, in a gesture that said either (A) I’m praying to Mecca; please don’t interrupt, or (B) It’s time for a drum solo. I’m spent.
    And that’s when Olivia saw him.
    All inverted elbows and flying drumsticks was the skater boy from school. His face was flushed in an expression of blissful concentration, his green eyes blinking ferociously as loose locks of sandy