Autumn Read Free Page A

while he was at it.
    Extra pulp.
    Gross .
    He put it back on the shelf and closed the door, plunking the syrup down next to the bacon plate.
    “Are you guys getting excited for school next week?”
    Cooper’s gaze wandered to the family calendar on the fridge door where First Day of School was written in big red marker on September third. He wasn’t sure if Mom had written it that big because she was excited to be rid of them, or so she wouldn’t forget. It could have gone either way.
    “Meh,” Mia said, her fifteen-year-old grasp on linguistics managing to summarize both their feelings in one syllable.
    Technically, Cooper had already been back for a couple of weeks. Team practices started in the height of August heat because the football team had to be ready for games when school began. If there was one thing his school took seriously, it was the pride of their athletics department.
    A football season in Texas was no laughing matter.
    Cooper crunched on his bacon until he realized his mother was staring at him, waiting for his response. “Oh. Yeah, sure. I guess.”
    She turned back to the skillet, sighing, “My son, the wordsmith.”
    It was Cooper’s senior year, so perhaps she was expecting more jubilance, but it was hard to be psyched about going to school when no one really talked to him.
    He’d done what he could to fit in, joined the right teams, did well in class—but not so well he’d be branded a nerd—and avoided stepping on toes, but sometimes he felt his mere presence was a problem for those around him.
    Mia had taken a different route. After Jeremy left, she’d dyed her hair black, gotten rid of any color in her wardrobe and started spending her time with Max Dawson and his clan of weirdo goth kids. It seemed to work okay for her. She had people to sit with at lunch, and Max always had spare eyeliner for her to borrow.
    They ate breakfast in relative silence, since Mom seemed to understand she wasn’t going to get too much out of them as far as chitchat went. She was out of practice with them, considering they only saw her once or twice a week when there wasn’t some emergency situation at the Poisonfoot Sheriff’s office.
    “ Oh ,” she exclaimed, taken by a sudden thought. “Do you guys need school supplies?”
    “Mom, we’re not seven,” Mia said. “We don’t need new colored pencils.”
    “But new binders? I don’t even know what you might need. Pens?”
    “We have pens,” Cooper assured her.
    It didn’t matter. She was on her feet and looking in her purse before they could convince her they were fine using last year’s binders and calculators. When she returned to the table, she was holding her wallet. “Cooper, take your sister shopping.”
    “ Mom ,” Mia protested, clearly horrified by the idea of being at the mall with her brother. For Cooper, his only complaint was missing an afternoon watching baseball when the Rangers were playing the Yankees. He didn’t much care who saw him out shopping with Mia.
    Their mother handed Cooper her credit card. “Don’t go too crazy, but get some new notebooks, and pick out some new clothes. Something with a little color ,” she added pointedly to Mia.
    “Black is a color.”
    “Black is the absence of color,” Cooper corrected. “Don’t they teach you anything in science anymore?”
    Mia stuck out her tongue. “Why does he get the credit card?”
    “Because he won’t spend it getting something pierced,” their mother replied.
     
     
    Mall was a polite term for what Poisonfoot had. The closest real shopping was in Laredo, and that was too much of a drive on a normal day, let alone one Cooper hoped to salvage in some way. He so rarely got a break from practice, all he wanted to do was sit on the couch, snarf Doritos and watch baseball.
    The mall had a Walmart—quite a scandalous addition when it had moved in three years earlier—a hair salon, a grocery store, and a handful of specialty clothing and goods stores. The