I'm Not Your Other Half Read Free

prettier than my old glasses), I’m sometimes embarrassed by my eyes.
    Michael glanced at me, and suddenly I felt like a doll named Viola Maude, a porcelain doll with eyes too green, staring glassily out from behind too-long black eyelashes.
    I began blushing. Must look like a Christmas tree, I thought. Scarlet and green.
    Michael said, “Are you going to the football game on the chartered bus Saturday?”
    Our high school sends a great many graduates on to State, and there’s quite a strong State following. Each home football game, the high school charters a bus. You can sign up for the season or for a single game. I don’t care enough for football to bother with the whole season, but Annie and I always go once. We had, indeed, chosen this Saturday. “Yes, I am,” I told him.
    Michael smiled again, and I drowned in the smile, but he didn’t notice. He stood up, taking Katurah’s hand. “That’ll be nice,” he said. “I’ll see you there. Thanks for helping my sister.”
    â€œYou’re welcome,” I said.
    â€œGoodbye, Fraser.” He said it nicely, with the zh sound I use, instead of the z. Frazhure. It’s softer that way, less demanding of a person who expected you to be named Susan or Kimberley.
    A little girl took home a Noisy Number Robot Electronic Teacher, and a little boy went for a Rough Rider Impossible Super Devil Roadway Loop, and then it was time to close up. Annie was laughing a rippling chuckle that kept on going, like a brook. “Do you have a problem?” I said mildly.
    â€œNo. You do. Your crush is developing like a car at the Indianapolis Speedway, Fraser. Zero to one hundred in sixty seconds.”
    â€œYou know,” she said over the phone, “I was jealous that night.”
    â€œYou were ?” Impossible to imagine Annie having unpleasant thoughts about me or anyone else. “It didn’t show.”
    â€œI could just see you with the perfect boy. Off you’d go, dancing down the sand, your honey hair flying in the breeze, your hand in his, laughing together. I’d be stranded there without a boy. Alone and cold.”
    I shivered slightly before I laughed it off. More than once, the same scene had appeared in my mind. About our friendship and what could happen to it if one of us started dating and the other did not. All those offerings in the gazebo paid off, I thought. We’ve not only started dating terrific boys—we’re double dating them.
    â€œWe,” said Annie contentedly, “will be chapter nine of every paperback romance we ever read. Where the laughing foursome sits in the booth at the ice-cream parlor, their heads close together. There’s always a photograph like that in the yearbook.”
    Annie and I talked till nearly midnight, while I twirled the cord and jumped mentally. Fraser and Michael, sitting in a tree, k, i, s, s, i, n, g.
    As surely as spring follows winter, I thought, life will be better for having the boys in it. Annie and I will be like flowers in the sun, full of color and joy.
    I did not remember then that not all flowers bloom at once. Some of them fade and die.

Chapter 2
    S ATURDAY WAS COLD. THE thermometer was in the high teens when we assembled at the school to get on the bus. Presumably there was a sun in the sky, but it seemed very far away. In another galaxy, perhaps. The sky was the color of lint—white, gray and limp. The wind came in gusts and penetrated to the marrow of our bones.
    The front of Chapman High is beautiful—three stories of brick, with immense stone columns and finely proportioned stone steps. Unfortunately, buses load in the back, where there are no rows of softly swaying hemlocks, no gentle brick walls, no delicate tracery of birch and dogwood. Just a parking lot, a row of dumpsters and a generator in a wire enclosure. The pavement is pockmarked from last winter’s frost heaves, and pieces of newspaper blow in