You Are Here by Jennifer E. Smith Read Free Book Online

age, who clung to friendships like lifeboats, terrified of drifting too far. But Emma knew that if she were to allow someone into her life, then they might just discover what she secretly feared: that perhaps she was just as odd as the rest of her family, only without the brains to back it up.
    The way she figured, it was okay for poets to be quirky. Professors are supposed to be absentminded, and geniuses are notorious loners. But Emma wasn’t any of these things, and still she found herself easily distracted, prone to daydreaming and wandering, with a habit of zoning out when anyone attempted to explain things to her. She hated directions and instructions and had little patience for studying. She was almost seventeen and had no real friends. She wasn’t exactly normal, but she wasn’t exactly abnormal enough either.
    Lately she’d begun to wonder whether her twin brother would have been the same way. She liked to imagine that he might have been the sort of person to appreciate silly jokes and funny movies, the kinds of things that evoked blank stares from the rest of the family. He would have scoffed at science and laughed at math. He would have found poetry to be pretentious and confusing. He would have been her accomplice, her cohort, her partner in crime.
    In fact, in the days since her discovery of the short and presumably tragic existence of Thomas Quinn Healy, Emma had begun to reflect on her life with the eye of a filmmaker. It was far easier than she might have expected to conjure up the brother she’d never known—a bit taller than herself, slightly less skinny, same dark hair and pale eyes—and she found herself simply adding him into all those places in her past where it had seemed something was missing.
    Like the time Jimmy Winters gave her a bloody nose in the third grade. Emma had been in the process of explaining to him the difference between apes and humans—only very subtly implying that he might come closer to the former—when he knocked her cold on the wood chips. But if her brother had been there, standing at her side the way twin brothers do, she felt sure he would have stepped in between them, clocking Jimmy before he even had a chance to close his meaty little hand—opposable thumb and all—into a fist.
    In much the same way, Thomas Quinn Healy—Tommy, for short—was now inserted into every family Christmas, every trial of summer camp, every day she’d endured alone in the school cafeteria, surrounded by the pretentious children of other professors or the too-rowdy kids belonging to the townies.
    None of this was particularly difficult to imagine. The surprise wasn’t how easily he fit into the gaps in her life. It was how naturally he took up residence there, quickly becoming a permanent fixture in her short history, a welcome revision of her past.

chapter six
     
    There’d been an edge of static in the air as Peter walked home from the Healys’ house after breakfast yesterday, that undercurrent of electricity that precedes summer storms. The sky had turned a sallow green in the distance, and the trees waved recklessly at the gathering winds. Peter kept his head low and his hands in his pockets, blinking away the bits of dust that were blown carelessly about. He paused at the end of his driveway, frowning at the squat and darkened house, then continued around it and toward the backyard.
    Where a plot of grass should have been—a swing set or a barbecue, a basketball hoop or a bench—was instead a second driveway, a haphazard and bulging circle of asphalt like a tumor growing off the main one. There were three cars parked there at the moment, lined up neatly with their headlights pointing at the kitchen window like a cavalry awaiting charge. There was an ancient, rusted-out Chevy that had been there as long as Peter could remember, a maroon minivan his dad had recently impounded after it had been left for two weeks in front of the grocery store, and a blue Mustang convertible, not