Girl Saves Boy Read Free

have planned. You know, after you solve infinity.’
    Little Al drummed his fingers on the wooden arm of the chair. ‘Believe me, Duck, they’ll need to keep you in far longer to make any sense of you.’
    I raised my eyebrows. ‘You’re the love child of Freud and Paris Hilton. Maybe you ought to help them out.’
    ‘Hey, maybe I just got my mother’s good looks.’ Al shrugged.
    I opened my mouth to speak but my friend True Grisham made a sudden appearance, whirling into the room and slamming the door behind her.
    ‘Michael,’ she greeted Al crisply—she was the only person, including Al’s parents, who ever called him by his real name.
    ‘True.’ Al flashed a grin. ‘You’re just in time for strip poker.’
    She tapped her foot and glared at me. ‘What the hell do you think you were doing?’
    She had her Betty Boop laptop bag strung over her shoulder and her hair was loose, her sparkly ladybug bun clip drooping miserably amidst her long blonde hair.
    An old man in a bed diagonally opposite me waved feebly to Al. ‘Deal me a hand if this lady’s playing.’
    Even wearing her usual ballet flats, True Grisham is very tall—not quite as tall as Little Al, but close enough that the yearbook committee at our school named them our year’s dream couple. Except True would never give any boy the time of day, least of all Al. Her whole world revolved around her ambition to become a journalist—a successful one. She had a plan, too detailed for me to remember, but the gist of it was that she wanted to travel the world and write for the major newspapers. At the moment, she is getting the best possible marks at school so she can get into Journalism at a good uni, all the while building up her portfolio with pieces in local newspapers and magazines. She is very committed and always busy. I don’t think she ever sleeps.
    My friendship with True went back further than my friendship with Al. On the first day of Grade 3 at my new school she recruited me as one of her sub-editors for the first-ever magazine produced there. Needless to say, in spite of eight-year-old True’s dedication, we released only three issues and could never sell our print run of twenty-five, even at the meagre price of fifty cents.
    After that True went on to bigger and better things—editing our school newspaper, a column in our local newspaper, the occasional article in small print-run magazines—and, even though I realised during Grade 3 that I would never go on to a career in journalism, due to a total lack of spelling ability, she had remained my good friend well into this last year of school.
    True would fulfil her dreams for sure—she was intelligent and ruthless and impossible to distract. True was bullet-proof and fearless. True was a constant in my life, especially now, when I didn’t have many.
    ‘Your dad calls me, tells me you’re in the hospital and are refusing to talk to him,’ she went on, picking lint off her pink cardigan and frowning at me. ‘I think…well, you know what I think…’ She sighed and leant against the end of my bed. ‘What’s going on, Sacha? Be honest with me, okay? Did you do this deliberately?’
    ‘I think you’re disturbing Moira.’ I pointed towards the old lady dozing off in the bed beside me. ‘She’s recovering from a knee reconstruction, you know.’
    ‘Not everything is a joke, Sacha,’ said True.
    ‘I wasn’t joking. She really is.’
    True pulled across the curtain beside my bed and the smile fell from Al’s face.
    ‘Jason told me you fell in the lake when you were out walking,’ he said. ‘You didn’t do this on purpose, did you?’
    ‘Mr Carr?’ I asked. ‘He’s here? And since when are you two on a first-name basis?’
    True glared at Al. ‘It isn’t even possible to fall into the lake. It’s about six inches deep and the size of a baby’s paddling pool.’
    Al ignored her. ‘I’ve met him at your place a few times. He always tells me to call him Jason. Most