Girl Against the Universe Read Free

time some Rollerbladers fell down while I was running past them.”
    â€œOkay, but maybe these events were just an unfortunate set of circumstances? You were in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
    â€œWell, if so, people should probably not be in the same place as me. That’s like being hit by lightning five or six times.” Only it’s not. It’s worse. It’s like being with your friends and family and watching them get hit by lightning while you just stand there, unscathed, wishing you’d never suggested leaving the house in the first place.
    â€œSo you really believe that you’re . . . cursed?”
    â€œI know it sounds crazy.”
    â€œâ€˜Crazy’ is a word that has been overused to the point of becoming meaningless,” Dr. Leed says. “It sounds like a lot for any one person to deal with.”
    â€œAll I know is my being around other people puts them at risk.”
    â€œSo then how do you handle that?” he asks.
    â€œI keep to myself,” I mutter.
    Once I accepted the fact that I was bad luck, I shied away from group activities. And groups. And activities. I started spending a lot of time in my room, tucked under my covers reading books. There’s only so much damage a book can do, and I wasn’t worried about hurting myself. Accidentally hurting yourself is way better than hurting other people.
    Sure, I got lonely for a while. But getting invited to slumber parties just wasn’t worth the stress of wondering if I might accidentally burn down the house with my flat iron or be the only survivor of a freak sleepover massacre. And loneliness is just like everything else—if you endure it long enough, you get used to it.
    Perfectly Assembled Boy is in the waiting room again, this time looking a little less perfectly assembled. He’s wearing shiny basketball shorts and a hoodie. His wet hair is slicked back behind his ears, making his blond streaks look painted on.
    He looks up from his magazine and catches me staring. “You can take a picture if you want,” he says, his voice perfectly level.
    â€œI’ll pass,” I snap as I hurry for the door. What an ass. It’s not like he wasn’t checking me out last week, talking all that crap about my hair.
    I switch my phone off silent as I head for the stairs. There’s a text from my mom. I swear under my breath as Iread it. I dropped her car off for routine maintenance at the shop across the street before my appointment, but it turns out they found a bigger problem and are going to keep it until tomorrow. My stepdad is working late, and Mom won’t be able to pick me up for an hour and a half. If I were normal, I would just take a bus or a taxi home.
    I am not normal.
    I text her back and let her know it’s no problem, that I’ll just find a place to read and she can text me when she gets here.
    I find a comfy chair in a deserted corner of the lobby and drop my purse on the small wooden table next to it. As I settle into the chair, I do what I call a five-second check. I scan the furniture, the floor, the ceiling, and everywhere in between. There are people going in and out of the bathrooms, but no obvious hazards. No lurking strangers. When you’re a disaster magnet like me, it makes sense to constantly be assessing your environment for danger. I’m not too worried about anything bad happening inside Dr. Leed’s inner office because it’s just the two of us, but any time I’m stuck in public I try to do a quick check of my surroundings every few minutes.
    I knock three times on the wooden table and then pull the book I’m reading out of my purse. I open to the page where I left off and set my special Irish-penny good luck bookmark on the table. Seven chapters and seven five-second checks later, I’m just about to get to a reallygood part when a shadow falls over my page.
    â€œYou’re still here.”
    I look up. Perfectly