The Cemetery Boys Read Free Page B

doing this.”
    Martha gestured to the patrons dramatically with a sweep of her right arm. The hostess rolled her eyes. Something told me she’d heard this punch line so many times, she was just waiting for the joke to be over. “I have to warn them. I have to tell them.”
    The hostess spoke up again, her already-pinched face pinching even more in irritation. “Cara, I’ve had aboutenough of this. You’ve got to get her home and keep her there. Every Sunday, for crying out loud.”
    â€œI know, Mary. I’m sorry.” The girl—Cara, I instantly memorized—turned back to her mom then, and my sympathy for her grew. It had to be hard to be the parent to your parent. It had to be hard to be the girl with the crazy mom. Especially when everyone in town seemed to know that was your lot in life. At least Dad had spared me that embarrassment.
    Cara sighed, and then something sparked in her eyes. “Come on, Mom. What are you always saying we should do on the Sabbath? Stay home with our family, right?”
    Her mom nodded eagerly. At last, someone was starting to listen to her. “Home and hearth. Family and home.”
    Cara tugged her sleeve and nodded at the door. “Well, come on, then. We’re family. It’s the Sabbath. Let’s go home.”
    At first, Martha didn’t move an inch. But then, with a distrusting gleam in her eyes and a furrowed brow, she edged toward the door, letting her daughter lead the way. As they exited, Cara glanced over her left shoulder, like she’d heard a sound or was checking to see if anyone else had anything to say about her crazy mother. When she did, our eyes met. I nodded a hello, and hoped she noticed, but I couldn’t be certain. In seconds, she was gone. Off to take her mother home, on the Sabbath, like any good girl would.

chapter 2
    After a full day of residing in Spencer, and a full three hours of lying awake in bed, I was beginning to worry that I might never sleep again. I was sure I wasn’t the only restless person in our new house. I could hear my dad pacing down the hall, the sound only briefly accented by the ruffling of a newspaper. He was looking through the classifieds, if I had to put money on it.
    Maybe my restlessness had something to do with the fact that my bedroom was stuffed so full of boxes that it felt more like some kid’s cardboard fort than a place to sleep. Or maybe it was because every time I closed my eyes, I sawCara’s nails scraping lightly against her thigh—shortly accompanied by Martha’s words: “YOU’RE GONNA BURN!”
    Whatever the reason, I was getting pretty sick of this bout of insomnia, and as far as I could tell, it had only just begun. Lucky me.
    I wasn’t sure why I kept thinking about Cara, anyway. She probably had a boyfriend. Girls like her always did. She was smokin’ hot and a little bit badass. Her boyfriend was probably a biker or a thug or the leader of some gang. I wasn’t anything so cool. My friends in Denver had all been nerds of one kind or another, but I couldn’t really be defined by them. I wasn’t a gamer, because I didn’t own every system on the planet and beat every game the day it was released. I wasn’t a book nerd, because I didn’t enjoy the classics and had never met an author in person before. I wasn’t a history geek, because the parts of history I enjoyed were the kinds of stories that qualified as useless trivia. I wasn’t really anything at all.
    And if I wasn’t anything, how was I supposed to attract the attention of a girl who was probably looking for everything in a guy?
    It didn’t matter. That’s what I told myself as I tossed and turned and tried not to think about the mysterious girl that occupied my thoughts. It didn’t matter what she wanted or didn’t want. I didn’t even know her. For all I knew, she couldbe a real psycho. After all, didn’t