The Color of a Promise (The Color of Heaven Series Book 11) Read Free Page B

town, she didn’t have any other friends to fall back on. Needless to say, I felt as if we had been shot by the same gun, and I sympathized. At least I had my best friend Gordon at my side.
    “Look at her,” I said to him as we sat on our usual bench in the basketball court, unwrapping our sandwiches. “She’s sitting all by herself.”
    I glanced across at Jeannie and her sickeningly fashionable entourage. They were watching Millicent and giggling.
    “Why do they have to be so mean?” I asked. “They’re the ones who treated her bad. Now they’re making fun of her.”
    Suddenly, my devastating heartbreak over Jeannie—which had kept me in my room sulking all weekend—turned to rage, and before I had a chance to think about what I was doing, I set down my sandwich and walked straight over to where Millicent was sitting, eating her lunch alone.
    I sat down beside her. “Hey. Do you want to come and eat lunch with me and Gordon?”
    She barely looked up. “Sure.”
    Gathering up her sandwich, she stood and crossed the basketball court with me. I couldn’t help but glance back at Jeannie and the other girls who were watching us with frowns on their faces.
    They turned away after that, left the basketball court, and stopped giggling at Millicent.
    o0o
    After that day, Gordon and I expanded our twosome to a threesome, and Millicent ate lunch with us every day for the rest of the school year. She also came over to my house or Gordon’s house on weekends to play Space Invaders and Pac-man and watch movies with us, and she fit in with the two of us as if she weren’t a girl at all. We didn’t think of her that way because she wasn’t beautiful like Jeannie, and she had no interest in either of us, romantically. After the demoralizing debacle at Mark Hennigar’s party, I think we were all a little gun shy.
    For a time, we commiserated about Jeannie and Aaron, but soon we began to discover that we had a lot more in common than just that. Eventually, we forgot about our broken hearts and all those stupid, mean, giggling girls. We just hung out together and had fun.
    From that moment on, my whole world seemed to expand and become new and interesting, because Millicent was really smart and she talked about interesting things—things Gordon and I had never thought about before. Not just girl stuff, either. She knew things about new technology and medicine because her father was a doctor, and she had a room full of tiny dollhouses she had built. They were detailed and intricate, and she told us she wanted to be an architect when she grew up. She also built model cars and airplanes, and Gordon and I soon started building models, too. Not dollhouses, though. We built space ships.
    I felt lucky to have the two best friends anyone could ever ask for. I only wish it could have lasted longer than it did.
    o0o
    When summer vacation began after seventh grade, the situation improved in the Peterson household. Normally, we all traveled as a family to our summer house on the coast of Maine, but during that particular summer, my mom got a new job with the city and didn’t want to ask for time off. So Dad took Aaron to Maine to go fishing and sailing without us, which was fine by me, since it was never my first choice to be stuck on a sailboat with my brother.
    As a result, it came as no surprise that, with Aaron gone and my mother working full time, it was the best summer of my life. I had more freedom to go places and do things, without having to constantly check in at home.
    Gordon and I spent a lot of time at Millicent’s house, because both her parents worked as well, and she had a pool and giant backyard with a small forest beyond the fence. If we weren’t swimming in her pool on sunny days, we were biking to the corner store for candy, or venturing into the woods to catch fish with our hands in the river, or making plans to build a fort.
    “Why do we have to call it a fort?” Millicent asked. “Let’s call it a