Dark Blue: Color Me Lonely with Bonus Content Read Free

would do under these same circumstances (not that she’s ever been in these circumstances). But I decided to proceed. I hurried past the security gates and through the front door, by myself, making it to my English class just as the last bell rang. I didn’t even have time to stop by my locker first. Coming in late forced me to take a seat right up front, but maybe that was good because I never had to actually look at Jordan, who usually sits in the back row, plus I was able to leave quickly.
    From there I managed to make it to economics class, but by then I felt like someone had pulled the plug on me as I slumped into an empty seat in the back of the stuffy room. I pretended to listen as Mr. Lee droned on and on about stocks and bonds and stupid financial things that no one in their right mind gives a flying fig about.
    Like a zombie I maneuvered through my next class. Find a desk, sit down, look attentive, don’t keep looking at the clock.
Just let this day end,
I kept telling myself as I walked alone down the hall.
Just let this day end.
Only when I went to art did I feel like I could almost breathe again. I allowed my mind to take a slight vacationfrom grief as I absently worked on a pathetic sketch of my Doc Marten sandal. Even my shoes looked like they were frowning.
    I never even ran into Jordan until lunchtime and then, to my surprise, she acted like everything was just fine. Peachy even.
    “Hey, Kara,” she said with what seemed to me an increasingly white smile. What was she using on her teeth anyway? “What’s up?” she asked, as if nothing had changed.
    “What’s up?” I stupidly echoed back, obviously regressing to my kindergarten phase where Jordan took charge of all conversations.
    “Are you okay, Kara?”
    “Okay?”
    She frowned now. “Really, you don’t look too good. Are you sick or something?”
    I shook my head. “No, I’m okay.”
    Then, chattering on like everything was normal, she apologized for not meeting me before school, claiming that her little sister, Leah, had been experiencing a middle-school meltdown.
    “I don’t know what gets into that girl’s head,” said Jordan as we got in the lunch line. “She had this zit, just one little, tiny, barely noticeable zit on her chin, and she was just totally freaked. It’s like it was cancer or something.”
    “Uh-huh,” I nodded, thinking I knew exactly how Leah felt.
    “Hey, Jordan!” called Amber Elliot from a nearby table —
the popular table
, or so the kids who sit there like to believe. “Come sit with us.”
    I felt a tightness growing in my throat as I selected a cup of vegetable soup and a bottle of juice. Somehow I thought perhaps liquids would go down more easily today. Then, like a dummy, I followed Jordan over to the “popular” table. Fortunately, or not, there were still a couple of available seats. No one said a singleword to me as I sat down next to Jordan. Not only did they silently ignore me, but I could feel their eyes on me—not staring, but these furtive glances that feel almost worse. And I knew what they were thinking.
She doesn’t belong here with us. Who does she think she is, anyway?
But Jordan seemed oblivious as she chatted and joked with her new friends. Before long I began to feel invisible. But not the good kind of invisible where people simply can’t see you. It was more like the kind of invisible where someone has spinach in her teeth but no one says anything. Just the same, I suppose I was somewhat relieved to be ignored. Attention was the last thing I wanted right now.
    Somehow I managed to slurp down part of my pathetic-looking liquid lunch before I mumbled a lame-sounding excuse and picked up my tray to casually exit. Naturally, on this day, of all days, my tray began to tilt precariously and the half-empty (or half-full, depending on how you look at it) cup of soup went sliding directly toward Jordan’s lap.
    She let out a bad word and leaped to her feet as the brown-orange mix of