Flat-Out Love Read Free Page A

toward a phone ringing from another room. “Do you like Thai?”
    “That’s great. Thank you.”
    “Take your time getting settled. There are empty drawers if you want to unpack,” Erin said, backing out of the room to take the call.
    Julie sat down on the bed and scanned the room. Yup, this had
boy
written all over it. Not that she minded. She liked boys, after all. But she was looking forward to making a run to Target and picking out her own girlie room accessories with some of the money she had left over from the summer. Thank God she’d won that essay contest the school district had run, or she would have had to use all her savings on a computer. It’d taken her weeks to write her piece on the United States’ responses to natural disasters, but it was not a bad trade for a new Mac laptop.It was a good thing that her friends didn’t follow high school news—unless it had to do with sports, dances, or a battle of the bands—because she would have been teased mercilessly for having participated in such a socially warped endeavor.
    The truth was that her friends didn’t entirely
get
her. Her mom didn’t
get
her either, although she was certainly proud of how well Julie did in her classes. In fact, her mom had kept secret the fact that Julie had stayed after school to do extra-credit work for her English class. Her friends would have snorted with laughter. And while Julie had been happy to sacrifice time after school to hear her teacher’s thoughts on Graham Greene, she hadn’t been willing to try to explain to her less academic friends why she had done so. They just didn’t care about school the way she did and half the time didn’t seem to understand what she was talking about. Jared, her ex, would have rolled his eyes at the notion of volunteering to spend more time studying.
    Speaking of Jared, Julie wondered what he was doing right now. Probably sporting a toga and doing keg stands at the miserable state university he was attending. She hoped he was lost in a crowd of dumb jocks and getting rejected by every busty, tank-top-wearing, fake-tanned airhead he hit on. Arizona could have him. And yet Julie couldn’t resist seeing if he’d commented on her Facebook status.
    She set her laptop on the desk and turned it on. Yes, she had her fancy phone; she just wasn’t a big fan of typing on the miniature keyboard if she didn’t have to. She liked capital letters and some semblance of punctuation, and the margin for error on the handheld device was too great. Julie was a traditional typist.
    She realized that she needed a password to access the Watkinses’ network. Great. She’d intruded on their house and now needed to ask for this. Internet access came before pride. Julie caught Erin as she was getting off the phone.
    “Mrs. Watkins? I hate to bother you, but I was wondering if I could get the password to go online?”
    “Call me Erin. Please. And of course you can. Let me get it from Matthew. He generated a random, meaningless code so that none of the neighbors would be able to pilfer our service. He is our own private security expert. Hold on.” Erin disappeared for a moment and returned holding a scrap of paper.
    “Thank you.” Julie took the paper and looked at the fifteen-digit password. Paranoid much? No one could remember this. Except, it seems, Matthew.
    “I’ll let you know when dinner is here.” Erin shut the door.
    Julie opened her Facebook profile page and frowned. Already eight comments under her status from concerned friends who actually gave a damn about her (“What happened????” “What R U going to do?” “Ack! Call me!”), but nothing from Jared.
    Jared had up and announced that they shouldn’t even attempt to maintain a long-distance relationship, and so he was preemptively breaking up with her. Not that it really mattered. He wasn’t the guy for her, and Julie should have dumped him herself months ago. It was her own fault for letting that mundane relationship go on too