Deadly Little Lessons Read Free Page B

I go to Adam’s office? I open the vinyl menu, thinking back to that first date. After the tree branch broke, I remember how distracted I was, despite how sweet Adam was being. I couldn’t seem to stay in the moment, wondering if nature was trying to send me some message.
    “What can I get you?” the waitress asks.
    I feel a chill, wishing that I had grabbed a sweater on my way out of the house. It may be June, but the air conditioner overhead makes things feel more like late November. I order some food by pointing to the first things I see on the menu: a raspberry muffin, along with a strawberry milk shake, despite knowing I won’t be able to stomach them.
    I look up at the front counter. The old people are taking notes as they watch TV, as if keeping score or solving puzzles, and yet it looks to be a news show. A forty-something-year-old woman appears on the screen and starts sobbing into the camera.
    “Here we are,” the waitress says as she places my order in front of me, along with a couple of containers each of butter and strawberry jam.
    “Thank you,” I say, noticing a man on the TV screen now. The woman’s husband? Her older brother? He’s crying as well, which upsets the woman more. She tries to say something, but I’m too far away to hear.
    “Hello; hello ,” the waitress says in a singsongy voice.
    “What?” I ask. Has she been talking to me?
    “You’re addicted, too, aren’t you?” She laughs.
    “Addicted?”
    “To Open Cases ?” Her pixie haircut reminds me of Kimmie’s, as does her plum purple eye shadow. “It’s one of those unsolved-mystery shows—the kind where they ask the viewers for help. The difference with this show is that the stories are all fairly current, which means that the regulars here are totally obsessed with solving the cases before the police do.” She gestures to the row of note-takers. “Check them out. They come in here daily to watch the show. You’re welcome to join if you like. Just don’t be too insightful, or else you’re apt to piss Rudy off. He likes to think he’s the smartest one of the bunch.”
    I recognize the girl from news reports: Sasha Beckerman, a fifteen-year-old girl from Peachtree, Rhode Island. She’s been missing for six weeks. The photo was taken at the end of Sasha’s eighth grade year and shows her with a fishtail braid and full-lipped smile.
    I grab my food and head up to the counter, eager for distraction.
    “It’s the parents’ fault,” says the guy at the end of the counter to the woman sitting beside him.
    The woman pauses in dunking a butter-slathered cracker into her mug of tea. “Don’t tell me you think they’re the ones behind the kidnapping.”
    “Who says it was a kidnapping?” another guy says, glaring at her over the rims of his bifocals. “I’m telling you: that girl ran away.”
    “Well, I still think people need to cut the parents some slack,” the woman says.
    The guy with bifocals shushes her as the host of the show details what the authorities know about the case. Apparently, Sasha told her parents that she was going to a poetry slam with some new friends. But it turned out to be an underground party with no adults present to speak of—except for the one adult she was last seen with: a good-looking guy with a brown leather jacket.
    My stomach rumbles; I feel hungry and nauseated at the same time. I take a bite of my muffin, trying to tame the thick lead taste in my mouth. A moment later, my cell phone rings. It’s Dad, but I don’t want to pick up.
    “Your phone’s ringing,” the guy with the bifocals says, as if I’d suddenly lost my hearing.
    I reluctantly click my phone on and mutter, “Hello.”
    “Your mother just got home from work,” Dad says. “Where are you? And since when do you leave the house without checking with me first?”
    Since I just found out that for the past seventeen years, you and Mom have been lying to me , I want to tell him. Since I learned that Mom’s