Unmaking Hunter Kennedy Read Free Page A

airspace.”
    She’d glued her eyes to a spot just beyond Vere’s head.
    Vere choked. All air sucked out of her lungs.
    Jenna lowered her voice, speaking through a smile, “And the summer was good to him. YUM. ME. I love tans on boys. I love boys—and OMG! He’s with most of the football team. Varsity . Football. Team.”
    Vere reached up to check her bun, straightened her back, but didn’t turn to look. “If you make a scene, I’ll kill you. How close is he and... ugh .” She put her hand over her racing heart. “Why are the seniors in here with us? I thought we were safe. I checked. They register from two to four.”
    “Juniors and all sports are now.” She wiggled her brows. “I checked too. They’ve got some sort of special info-assembly. He’s setting up camp on the next row of tables. You’re safe enough. He’ll never spot us in this sardine can.”
    “Should I look? Is it worth it to turn around?”
    Vere had seen Curtis yesterday on her very own front porch. Because the guy had been her brother’s best friend since kindergarten. He’d been riveting with his fresh, new hair cut. So riveting, she’d hidden in her room feeling sick for two hours.
    Am I the only one in the whole world with a crush that makes me physically ill?
    Jenna shrugged, flipped her long braids around again and gave her a pitying look. “I’ll let you know if he does anything worth turning colors and stuttering for, okay?”
    “Thanks,” Vere said, trying unsuccessfully to find Curtis’s reflection in Jenna’s wide eyes, but even that activity had her stomach cramping and sent a warning tingle up the back of her neck.
    No need to fire the cherry-bomb-cheeks for everyone’s entertainment. Stupid blushing.
    Vere wasn’t a natural when it came to school. But she’d learned if she worked hard (sometimes really hard) she could make the grades and hit the goals she wanted.
    So, she’d taken that idea and applied it to her blushing problem.
    Only, the world (and her face) refused to cooperate.
    What works in one area fails in others.
    Where Curtis was concerned, Vere had studied, researched, and followed all the rules. But when he was near, she couldn’t shake her healthy, textbook case of chronic shyness and social anxiety.
    She knew these terms, because she’d looked herself up hundreds of times, searching for a cure that would help her. She’d tried textbooks and any psychology websites she could find.
    For the most part, Vere had discovered she was a classic case.
    A person who was simply shy and who turned red because of it. Not a major thing.
    Vere had also pinpointed her shyness would ramp into what was called social anxiety when she was around boys— guys —she didn’t know very well. Totally normal for her age too. And, a condition that calmed down once she knew the guys better.
    Again, all normal.
    But what hit outside normal was how Vere’s social anxiety spiked to uncontrollable levels when she thought she had a crush on a guy.
    Enter Curtis Wishford. Her forever crush.
    The only guy Vere had ever cared about.
    As though her crush could read her thoughts, Curtis’s shouting laugh fired off somewhere behind her. In response, Vere’s cheeks fired off the burning-red feeling all over again.
    Stupid. Dumb. Crush.
    She slouched into her lab stool as low as possible, turning away even more while she worked to cool down her red-hot ear tips in this two thousand degree room.
    She would only have to survive forty minutes of this pain and then she could escape.
    Please...please...let him NOT see me.
    Before the crush, Vere, Curtis, Charlie and Jenna used to be inseparable. They were all neighbors. Their parents were close friends since before any of them had been born.
    That meant there were whole photo books filled with photos of them all drooling at each other while in diapers.
    From there, they’d moved on to sword fights, mud pies, dressing up in costumes, army battles, decorated hundreds of cookies, attended