Changing Leads by Bonnie Bryant

Author:Bonnie Bryant
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497653887
Publisher: Open Road Media Teen & Tween

TWELVE

Stevie drummed her fingers on her desk. Her chemistry teacher was droning on and on about the periodic table of the elements and all sorts of other things that Stevie was sure were going to turn up on the next test, but she just couldn’t concentrate on any of it.

Why do we have to go to school on Mondays, anyway? she thought irritably. She glanced through the wavy glass of the classroom’s old-fashioned bay window to the sunny afternoon sky. Especially gorgeous, perfect, sunny, summerlike Mondays like this one.

It was a familiar thought—Stevie had entertained some version of it for each of the last eleven Septembers of her life—but today it wasn’t holding her full attention any more than Ms. Rourke’s lecture about cadmium and selenium and who knew what else. She was distracted by nagging thoughts about Phil—more specifically, her phone conversation with Phil the evening before.

I still can’t believe he had such a great time at that stupid football game yesterday, she thought. But I guess he must have. Heaven knows he couldn’t stop talking about it for more than two seconds at a time.

Her gaze wandered to a certain broad, polo-shirt-covered back in the front row of the classroom. She still found the idea that her boyfriend could be friends with Scott Forester more than a little irritating. When she thought about it rationally, she knew she shouldn’t feel threatened or angry or peevish about it. But Stevie wasn’t always good at looking at things rationally. All she knew for sure was that she wished that Phil had decided not to go to that Redskins game—that he and Scott had never had that first friendly chat in the locker room at Pine Hollow.

Or better yet, Stevie added, that Scott had never moved here in the first place.

She immediately took back that wish. If Scott’s family hadn’t moved there, she would never have met Callie. And despite the accident and all the heartache it had caused Stevie and other people, she couldn’t honestly wish for that.

Besides, last night after hanging up with Phil, Stevie had convinced herself—almost, anyway—to cut him some slack and not worry too much about the whole Scott thing. For starters, Scott seemed to have some kind of hereditary politician’s compulsion to befriend everyone he met. He would probably forget all about Phil soon and move on to someone else. As for Phil, he would almost certainly be less interested in hanging out with Scott once A.J. returned to normal.

Stevie sighed and leaned her chin on one hand, propping her elbow on her desk. Ms. Rourke had moved on to a description of an upcoming lab assignment, and Stevie knew she should probably try to pay attention. But there were just too many other things to think about.

Her mind wandered back to A.J. On the phone, Phil had expressed as much concern as ever about his friend’s increasingly odd behavior.

“He hardly talks to me anymore,” he’d told Stevie. “Sometimes when I say hi in the halls at school, he just looks through me like I’m not even there.

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