The Diary Read Free

didn’t have a crop of his own to bring in was recruited to work in the neighboring fields. She took a mincing step in his direction, one hand on her straw hat to keep it anchored in place, though the breeze was a mild one, just enough to flutter its ribbons. “How much are you charging?” she inquired.
    â€œFive bucks a pop.”
    â€œIsn’t that kind of steep?”
    He flashed her a lazy grin, somehow all the more appealing because of a crooked eyetooth that had never benefited from orthodontia. Under the snugly fitting white T-shirt he wore with his jeans, the muscles in his arms and chest were clearly defined. He reminded her of a mountain lion, lithe and sinewy and built for speed; he seemed coiled to spring even while sitting perfectly still. “You can always frame it and hang it on your wall,” he told her. “Can’t put a price on that.”
    â€œYou seem to have a high opinion of your artistic talent,” she observed coolly.
    â€œOh, I wouldn’t say that,” he demurred with what she might have deemed modesty if she hadn’t known him to be proud to the point of arrogance. “It’s just a little parlor trick I picked up along the way.”
    A reminder that while she was going to football games and dances, he was spending the second semester of their senior year at the Silas Kingston Youth Detention Facility in Riverton. AJ, for reasons known only to him, had set his uncle’s car on fire. The act had sent shock waves through their small community and catapulted him overnight from an aloof and somewhat disreputable figure on the fringes of the sock-hop/pep-rally world Elizabeth inhabited to the most-talked-about kid in school. Yet despite all the talk, nobody seemed to have a handle on AJ. Although gossip swirled around him, mostly having to do with girls with whom he was rumored to have had his way, he was a mystery even to classmates who’d known him as long as she had.
    Elizabeth knew him better than most, she supposed. They’d been playmates as children. He’d been just another kid back then, if a bit more free-spirited than most. But the tragedy that left him orphaned at the age of nine altered him in other ways. After he went to live with his grandparents, he became withdrawn to the point of being antisocial. His only friends, if you could call them that, were class troublemakers Gunnar Nielson and Del Hannigan. With Elizabeth, who’d once ridden on the back of his bike and with whom he’d shared Orange Crushes and played kick-the-can, he grew more and more distant with each passing year. In class he seldom acknowledged her presence, and if their eyes happened to meet when they passed each other in the halls, he never greeted her with anything more than a half-cocked smile or ironic arch of the brow. During their junior year, when they were briefly thrown together as lab partners in biology, she made an attempt to rekindle their old friendship, but it was met with a coolness that bordered on disdain. Convinced that he found her silly and frivolous, not worthy of his time or attention, she decided he wasn’t worthy of hers, either. Still, she remained curious about him, and at times that curiosity drove her to distraction. Why, she wondered, was he the only boy immune to her charms? She’d see him with other girls not half as pretty as she and feel oddly rejected. Then she’d tell herself it was silly to feel that way when she already had a boyfriend—one who was sweet and caring—and she had no romantic interest in AJ in any event.
    It was the same curiosity that kept her rooted to the spot now, any thoughts of the boyfriend she’d been on her way to meet far from her mind. “Are you any good at it?” she asked, edging a step closer.
    AJ cocked his head, studying her with a keen, professional eye. The canvas tarp shielding him from the sun was torn in spots, and with each new gust of wind, little