Smashed Read Free Page A

knew.”
    “He just showed up here, Matt. He asked me to swim across. It was no big deal. There was nobody else around.”
    “He’s an idiot,” Matt said.
    “How do you know? Do you even know the guy?” My words surprised me, even as they spilled out of my mouth.
    “What’s to know? The way he struts down the hall at school?The way he uses girls? The way his buddy Scott Richardson tried to kill me in seventh grade by suffocating me in a snowbank?”
    “That his mother died when he was four?” I said.
    Matt looked at me like I had lost my mind. “And that means . . . ?”
    “It means you might not know him as well as you think you do. Maybe none of us do.” I turned and walked across the beach toward my things, then headed for my bike. I was tired and hungry and irritable. I didn’t want to think about dead mothers or disappearing fathers or argue with Matt about who was—or wasn’t—a nice guy. When Matt had an opinion, he stuck with it. There was no use arguing, anyway. Especially over Alec Osborne.
    I climbed onto my bike and rode away without waiting for him, but Matt followed, pushing hard with his back foot to pick up speed until his skateboard rumbled along beside me. We passed Cassie’s house, then turned onto Main Street, where the store, the church, the town hall, and the post office sat clustered around an island of green and a statue of a Civil War soldier. Five minutes later, we turned down the dead-end road where we lived.
    “Katie!” Matt called after me as I sped ahead of him. I’d reached the spot where the road separated our two houses. I stopped and turned to look at him.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not your fault Alec showed up.”
    Matt’s face was grim. I thought about what he’d said back atthe beach, about Scott trying to suffocate him in that snowbank— his buddy Scott , he’d said. They were best friends, Scott and Alec, practically inseparable at school. None of us—Cassie, me, Matt—ever liked them. But with Matt, it went deeper. To Matt, anyone who hung out with Scott Richardson was a bully, too.
    “It’s okay,” I said.
    I looked at my empty house, a small Cape, at least a hundred and fifty years old, paint peeling, windows black against the late afternoon sunlight. A hollow feeling crept through me.
    Matt’s eyes followed mine. He knew I hated staying home alone at night, knew I’d rather do anything else—even work—to avoid it. But my night job at the Big Scoop hadn’t started yet.
    “Sorry I can’t hang out tonight,” Matt said. “I’ve got to work. . . .”
    “I know.”
    “Is Will at the McSherrys’?”
    “Yeah.” My little brother would spend the night at his best friend’s house again. He stayed there a lot these days. The McSherrys had a barn full of animals and five kids—what was one more? They loved having him. And who could blame Will for wanting to be part of their family?
    “Your mom working?” Matt asked.
    I nodded. “Then at the boyfriend’s.”
    Matt shook his head. “I’ll come over if I get off early, okay?” He reached out, wrapped his long arms around me, and squeezed me tight.
    I wondered if he knew how much I needed that.

3
    Suddenly, Alec was everywhere.
    That’s how it seemed, anyway. He came to the beach a few more times that week, parking himself next to me in the sand like we were old friends, not two people who had coexisted at the same high school, at the same parties, for three years without speaking three words to each other. He showed up as I finished my last lesson, talked about rebuilding stone walls, and asked questions about teaching kids to swim. And he listened—like he was actually interested in how using a hoop helped get the littlest kids to dare put their faces under the water.
    Who is this guy? I thought.
    By three o’clock, he’d be gone, his siesta as he called it, over, and missing Matt by a half hour.
    Now he was at the Big Scoop, his blond hair visible above the crowd, his