Playing Keira Read Free Page A

the party. He’d seen me from time to time when I visited Alex, and I’d seen him back. He’d check me out in a way American middle-school guys would never dare, full of obvious wonder and appetite.
    At the party, Olivier waited until the first slow song and pulled me onto the dance floor, and I was so surprised, I didn’t think to say no. He held my hips and I looked around, panicky, to see what the other kids were doing so I could copy them. I reached out and wrapped my arms around his neck like the girl next to me was doing with her partner, and we swayed to the music. He rested his chin on my shoulder; we were exactly the same height. I pressed my face into his neck, and he smelled like the handmade soap shop I liked to stop into on my way to school.
    I was just beginning to relax, to get past the half terror, half thrill of being so close to a guy I barely knew, when the song changed. Without a word, Olivier took my hand and led me to a corner. He put one arm on each wall, and I should have felt trapped but it was a totally exciting gesture, like he was holding up the room for me. Then he kissed me, in front of everyone. Not with a gentle buildup but instantly rough, urgent, with a tongue down my throat. It wasn’t exciting anymore. It was disgusting, and I didn’t want it. I pushed him away but he clung on, as if he knew this was his only chance. Then he let go and laughed, saying something in French about how I was just as he’d imagined, “ une Américaine froide .”
    A cold American. That stung, because I felt like all I had inside me was heat. Burning me up, radiating from my fingertips, desperate for somewhere to go.
    What do you do with that kind of fire? When you don’t understand it, and nobody’s shown you how to use it? You can try to put it out, but that doesn’t always work. So you seal it up in some cold, cold metal chamber of your heart. The shiver starts there and moves through your whole body and after a while, you don’t notice it anymore. It just becomes part of who you are.
    When my father and I came back to our lives in Mountain Ridge, the Ice Queen thing served me well. People assumed I didn’t care what had happened, so they stopped caring themselves, and eventually forgot.
    The funny thing about the Ice Queen is that some guys want her. She’s a challenge, or they figure the chill is a small price to pay for hooking up with a person everyone thinks is attractive. The few guys who’ve summoned the guts to ask me out get the answer that my father doesn’t let me date, which is true. I let them think what they want to about Nate and me; they can wrongly assume we are “friends with benefits,” if it makes them feel better about something in the world.
    Lately, I’ve realized that the chamber where I sealed up that fire is not airtight. It has cracks in it. The flames lick out when I least expect them, like this moment with Garrett and his hands.
    If I find my mother in the city, if she wants to see me, maybe she’ll hug me. Maybe she’ll put her hands and arms around me and press them against my body to make sure I’m real, to commit the shape of me to her memory. If this happens, it will be the first time in five years that a parent has held me.
    My dad is not a bad man. He just lacks certain things to give. Don’t we all?
    A cell phone blares into the quiet of the bus, and several heads turn to see which passenger is the bonehead who forgot to turn off their ringer. An elderly man a few rows up scrambles for his phone, answers in what he probably thinks is a whisper but is actually louder than most normal conversations. “What?” he hoarse-hollers. “I’m on the bus!”
    Garrett and I look at each other, and it happens. We laugh. It feels good, like for that one second, we’re friends. Then I reach into my purse to make sure the ringers on both cell phones are turned off. On each of them, there’s a missed call from the same number. I don’t recognize it, but I’m