Out of the Ashes Read Free Page B

gossip. I concentrated on eating my lunch and not looking at him.
    â€œI wanted to thank you for last week,” he said all of a sudden.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” I’d meant to pretty much ignore him, but curiosity got the better of me.
    â€œYou know, at the soda shop, when your friend was trying to get the goods on me and you talked and talked so she didn’t have a chance to ask a whole lot of questions.”
    I hadn’t realized he’d known what Betts was up to or that I’d been talking so much to save him from her prying. But I wasn’t about to sell my best friend out by admitting that to him. Even though she was being pretty unfair to me at the moment, I wasn’t going to turn on her! Especially not for him.
    â€œI don’t know what you mean,” I said shortly.
    He looked at me carefully and then just said, “Okay, my mistake.”
    I’d like to say that we ate in silence and then he went away and never bothered me again. That didn’t happen.
    â€œIf a tree falls in the woods, and there’s no living thing around to hear it, does it make a sound?” He popped this out of the clear blue as though it was a perfectly normal question.
    â€œWhat?” I asked, startled.
    â€œThat’s a question my dad used to ask his classes at university. He gives me things like that to think about, but he won’t tell me what he thinks the answer is. I just thought you might help me figure it out.”
    â€œIt’s a pretty strange question,” I said and then wondered out loud, “Your dad taught at a university?”
    â€œUntil last year,” he told me.
    I wanted to ask him why his father had left a good job like that and come to Little River. There had to be a pretty big reason for anyone to make that kind of change in their life. But I didn’t want to seem like Betts, digging for information, so I said nothing and hoped he would offer to tell me about it. He didn’t. It was starting to look as though Greg and his father had something to hide, the way he kept things to himself.
    â€œSo, about that tree, Shelby. What do you think? Is there a sound when it falls if no one is there to hear it?”
    â€œI guess so.” I felt like I’d been trapped into a trick question and he was going to tell me I was wrong.
    â€œWhy do you think so?”
    â€œWell, because there is always sound when a tree falls, I guess. How could there be no sound? Just because no one hears it, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.” I was warming to the question.
    â€œI think scholars believe there’s no sound,” Greg said, looking puzzled at the idea. “It seems that a person is supposed to think their way through to that idea. I have to admit though, I could never see it that way either. What you’re saying makes sense to me, and yet I think there’s more to it than what seems obvious.”
    â€œIn science class one time we did an experiment with an alarm clock and a jar,” I said, trying to remember the details. “If you pump all the air out of the jar, you can’t hear the clock ringing because sound can’t exist in a vacuum. I guess that’s a different thing though, isn’t it?”
    Before he could answer, Nick passed by the table. When he did, he stopped for a few seconds and said, “Hi, Shelby.”
    My stomach did flip-flops all over the place. I tried to sound calm when I answered, “Hi, Nick,” but my voice was trembling.
    Greg looked hard at me after Nick had left. I guess he saw something on my face that he didn’t like,because he was silent after that. I was too, because I was angry that he was sitting there when Nick finally spoke to me. He was going to ruin my chances with Nick if he didn’t leave me alone.
    He finished his lunch and stood, picking up his wrappers and brushing crumbs off the table.
    â€œWell, I’ll see you later then.”
    â€œYeah,