Float

Original Edition: Chapter Twenty-Seven

The rain started about five minutes after Rachel and I got home. We were in the kitchen playing fridge Tetris with all the leftovers the Fletcher family had forced upon us when I heard it—little pitter-patters against the roof, like the world's tiniest drum circle.

I gasped in delight and said, "It's raining!"

It was like all my brain cells had jumped ship.

And only Captain Obvious remained on deck.

Rachel shoved the last of our Tupperware containers into the few remaining square inches of fridge space, then stepped back to admire her handiwork.

"Well," she said, "it's a shame the barbecue ended like that—"

With the complete decimation of Blake and Chloe's relationship, she meant.

"—but look at all this food! I think we've got enough leftovers to last us until the end of summer, if we freeze some."

The end of summer.

Which was two and a half weeks away.

"Do you have any books I could read?" I blurted.

I needed to be away from myself for a while.

If I was left to stew in my own thoughts, I'd undoubtedly come up with a laundry list of things I'd miss about Holden. And then I'd end up sitting in the bench under the window in my bedroom with my forehead leaned against the rain-streaked glass, like some kind of early 2000s music video, and I didn't want to be that girl.

It was thus of the utmost importance that I dove headfirst into a book, immediately.

"Sure!" Rachel said. "Check the bookshelf in the living room. I've got some good ones."

Then she winked.

I was a little distracted, so I didn't really stop to think about what Rachel's standards might be for good fiction—or, you know, why she'd winked.

Instead, I loped into the living room and squatted in front of the bookshelf, completely unprepared for the sight that greeted me.

Two words.

Romance. Novels.

We're talking a gross abundance of male torsos. Every book I pulled out had some kind of half-naked man on the cover. Doctors with stethoscopes around their necks. Professional athletes with their biceps flexed around footballs. Firemen carrying hoses in what was clearly an attempt to appeal subliminally to heterosexual women.

And not a single one of them was wearing a shirt.

Isn't that, like, very unprofessional? was my first thought.

The second was, oh my god, my aunt reads porn.

I tugged more books out by their spines and slammed them back into place, searching frantically for something that looked even remotely family-friendly.

And then, on the bottom shelf, I found it.

It was a romance novel, like all the others, with a similarly obscene stock photo of a male model on the cover. But this one particular book caught my eye. And I wish I could say that I pulled it off the shelf and tucked it under my arm because I found the plot summary on the back to be well-written and intriguing. I wish I could say that I recognized the author, or knew, somehow, that I was in for a good story with a fine-tuned plot, complex characters, and feminist undertones.

Nope.

The shirtless pirate on the cover just looked a lot like Blake.

I darted across the living room and bounded up the stairs like a gunslinging bandit on the American frontier who'd just heisted bars of solid gold from a moving locomotive.