Blest Read Free

Claire had distracted Shane from making fun of him, hadn’t she? What did that mean? He kept his eyes on her, hoping she would turn around again, but she didn’t.
    He glanced back at his notebook and realized that he’d already sketched out the outline of her head, her neck turned toward him. He bit his lip and began shading in her eyes, her small upturned nose. He didn’t even have to look back up—he was already drawing from memory.

2
    Claire shut her locker and jumped when she saw that Gunner had materialized on the other side of it. She looked into her twin’s dark brown eyes and sighed. Her brother had that kid-on-Christmas look. He treated every new school like a big, unopened present. She didn’t know how he had the energy. Pearlton High School wasn’t going to be any different from the other schools they had attended. In another six months, their mom would pull them out and force them to pack their bags, and make them move to some huge new house and some new school. She would shower them with presents in an attempt to appease them, but Claire didn’t care about designer jeans or expensive computers anymore. She just wanted to stay somewhere long enough for it to really matter.
    “Come on, those kids we met on the bus are cool,” Gunner said. “Let’s sit with them at lunch.”
    Claire followed her brother down the orange-and-sherbert tile hallway, watching his broad shoulders and curly, oak-brown hair turn heads as he passed. A year ago, she would have been right there with him. Gunner was the only real friend she had, and as they’d moved from school to school over the years, they’d made it almost a game: finding the most popular group in the school and climbing to the top. Elementary school, middle school, freshman year, that had been fun. But now Claire was sick of it. What was the point of trying if you had to keep starting over again and again?
    The more schools their mom sent them to, the more suburbs they went to, the more Claire realized just how identical everything really was. She could almost predict what everyone in the hall would do when they saw her. There were the jocks, puffing their chests and trying hard to get her to look at them. The geeks, shying away from her like she was toxic. The kids who dressed in black who tried to act rebellious but cried in the bathroom. The girls who already hated her because of her outfit, or the girls who loved her because of it.
    High school was a jungle , Claire thought. There were a lot of creatures wandering through the undergrowth; she had seen so many at this point that she recognized all the species. Except for that cute blond boy who was afraid of the dark—Jim, she remembered. So afraid of the dark that he had to shine his phone underneath tunnels. He hadn’t seemed to care about what anyone had thought, and instead just buried his head in his seat. “No one has ever liked Jim,” Shane had assured her and Gunner, as if his word was law. But why?
    The hallway opened up into a cafeteria full of blue tables and stale food steaming on styrofoam trays. Food was the other thing that was more or less the same in every school. Meatloaf day, Claire saw on the chalkboard, and almost giggled. She turned toward the salad bar, losing Gunner in the flood of other kids and their heavy backpacks, but she knew where the popular kids would be sitting: in the middle of the cafeteria.
    After she’d gotten her food, she stood for a moment on the edge of the room, watching as the other students laughed, shouted, swore, flirted. No one really looked at her. Finally, she shouldered her way through a group of kids talking about Minecraft and made her way to the center, where Gunner was hunched over the table across from Shane. Better to have friends than to have no one, she figured.
    “I’m telling you, man, you go to enough schools and you get a feel for the system,” Gunner was saying. He stuck out his fingers, counting off. “I can already tell you Mrs.