Eruption (Yellowblown™ Book 1) Read Free Page A

all sister-lesbians, which they weren’t. At least not all of them.
    Anyway, I knew now I wouldn’t have fit there, either. Some gut instinct pulled me back from the edge to remind me I mostly wanted to be allowed to be me, without my mom or some ditz like Twyla sticking her nose in my business.
    “I gotta go to Lit,” Mia said. “Ta!” She air-kissed both sides of my face. “Hey, Tyson, spot me,” she yelled toward a corner. A guy standing a head taller than anyone else in the room glanced over in time to catch her ball of foil in his plate-sized palm. He jammed it in the trashcan beside him.
    “Yo sexy,” he called.
    “Yo yourself,” she said. “Wanna walk over to Dr. Debra Damasco’s third circle of hell with me?”
    “I might be going that way .” He smiled at her with a flash of stunningly whitened teeth.
    I burst out laughing a s Mia waggled dark purple fingernails over her shoulder at me.
    Most girls didn’t know quite what to think of Mia, but boys loved her. She attracted men like ComicCon attracted gamers, even though she avoided involvement. She didn’t date or fool around, and they all knew it.
    My image of her life at home consisted of vague scenes from crime-drama shows.
    At a youthful thirteen, her virginity had succumbed to a twenty-year-old. She’d made a point of telling me it was consensual, that she hadn’t been raped or anything. I believed her. I also knew she hadn’t had sex with anyone since she’d come to college and probably for a year or two before.
    Her path from her turbulent childhood to Western Case began with a teacher friend of her Gram’s giving Gram the word in church one Sunday. “Mia is growing up wild ,” she’d warned. Gram had quickly removed both grandchildren from her daughter’s home, where crack rated higher than offspring. The takeover suited everyone but young Tony. He thrived on the streets and now probably worked for the dealer who kept his mother supplied. I figured Mia took after her absentee father, a young professional on a business trip who’d tinkered with Mia’s mom long enough to impregnate her before departing out of Philly International.
    Years later, Mia still looked tough, in a way, but she wasn’t a brawler by nature. School and mainstream socializing suited her better than survival on the rough side of Camden. She’d devoured her honors classes in high school, helped on the yearbook, and adjusted to attending church every Wednesday and Sunday. And the celibacy part? I wasn’t sure, but I thought she hoped to revert back to virginity somehow.
    Those few details and the pixelated pictures she showed me of her teen-gangsta brother and stern Gram were all she’d ever shared. I’d tried to invite myself to Easter break at her house last spring, partly out of curiosity and partly to avoid going home. The suggestion earned disapproval on a scale worthy of a slow runner dumb enough to ask to take a field trip to the zombie apocalypse.
    “ Nyet ,” she’d said. “I think Gram has some cousins coming. Or something.”
    Her summer had sucked, too, but when I’d vowed, on our first night back at Head Case U., to never live at home again, she vowed she would get her little brother off the streets.
 
 
    I didn’t use creative nicknames for people in my phone contacts ever since my mom saw I’d named her Voldemort and took my cell away for a month in the middle of my high school senior year. Sometimes I still felt bad, ’cuz I know I hurt her feelings majorly that time, and I think about Mia’s mom who doesn’t care her own children call her Crackhead to her face.
    Anyway, I don’t use nicknames in my phone.
     

     
    It took me longer to write that text than to compose my college application essay. I’d thought about at least using WTW for “what time when” but figured WTW probably meant something else, like “when turkeys write” or “wouldn’t touch whack” or “I’d rather have hot needles stuck in my eyes than go to a