Dread Locks by Neal Shusterman

Author:Neal Shusterman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

Like I told Tara, I didn’t know Leticia very well, but she knew me. She was one of the cheerleaders who had cheered me on when I was the star of the basketball team last year.

“Hey, Leticia,” I said to her later that day. I was sitting on a bench near the entrance to the gym, pretending to study, pretending I wasn’t lying in wait. I’d probably never spoken to her the entire time we’d been at school together. If she was surprised that I was talking to her now, she didn’t show it.

“Hi, Parker. What’s up?”

“The usual. You know. Where are you headed?”

“Um, lunch? The cafeteria?”

“Hey, cool, I’ll walk over with you.” I felt like an absolute idiot. I didn’t know what I was saying, or what I was going to say next, but it was too late to stop. “It’s been a while since we talked, huh?”

“I don’t think we ever talked. I didn’t think you even knew I was alive.”

“Sure I knew,” I said. “I always saw you, cheering on the sidelines. You were the one who jumped the highest.”

Leticia smiled and shook her head. “No,” she said, “you were the one who jumped the highest. I’m sorry you’re not playing anymore.”

I don’t know why I’d never talked to her before. She seemed nice. And she was pretty, too. How come I’d never really noticed her until now? Until it was too late.

Too late? Why did I think that?

When we entered the cafeteria, I saw Tara not far away, sitting with her back to us, eating by herself at a table. Like we had planned.

For about five minutes my life had seemed normal again, a feeling I hadn’t realized I’d been missing.

“Nowhere to sit,” Leticia said, scanning the cafeteria.

“Hey,” I said casually, “there’s Tara. Do you know her?”

“No,” Leticia said, “we haven’t met. Although I’ve heard a lot about her.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Rumors, mostly—she’s filthy rich, and her family dumped her here.”

“Actually, she’s a friend of mine,” I said. “She’s not that bad.”

“I’m sure she’s not,” Leticia said quickly. “They were just rumors. I’m really curious about her. It seems to me like she must be very lonely. Why don’t we go sit with her?”

“You want to?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“Okay. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

And that was that. I had led this pretty, unsuspecting fly into the web, and she never even knew. As we walked toward Tara’s table, I had a mixture of feelings in the pit of my stomach: so many different feelings that I couldn’t pick them apart. The strongest was a feeling of dread, followed by the feeling that I was doing something incredibly wrong. But there was also a feeling of pride, the feeling that I had accomplished what I had set out to do, and a warm glow that came from making Tara happy I pushed all the feelings, good and bad, farther down into the pit of my stomach, hoping that I could just quietly digest them.

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