Goodbye, Rebel Blue Hardcover by Shelley Coriell

Author:Shelley Coriell [Coriell, Shelley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781419709302
Amazon: 1419709305
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Published: 2013-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

“WHAT’S YOUR TIME?” PEN ASKS FROM HER PERCH on the top step of the bungalow’s front porch. Her backpack and gym bag sit at her feet.

I press my palms against the small of my back and walk up the brick path. I breathe deeply, forcing the cool, early-morning air into my lungs. “Nine. Forty. Two.” My hair hangs damp against my neck, and there’s an ache in my chest. My body feels spent but good, a nice buzz tingling along my limbs. I’ve been running every morning for two weeks, pushing myself to go farther and faster each time, and I’ve smoked only six cigarettes in twelve days. Ms. Lungren would be proud of this lifestyle change.

Pen plucks at the paper crane dangling from the zipper pull of her backpack. If she glanced at me, I wonder if she could see the other change—if she could tell that I’d kissed Nate. Nate’s kiss had warmed me to the tips of my blue hair. It made me forget about failing math grades and a dead girl’s bucket list. It felt right.

A yellow VW Bug with daisy hubcaps pulls up in front of the house. The driver, a Cupcake, honks. Pen straightens the crane’s wings. “So here’s the deal.” She unfolds and refolds the crane’s tail and doesn’t say anything else.

I lift my hair, letting the breeze fan my neck. “Sometime this decade would be nice.”

Pen stands and heaves her backpack, crane and all, onto her shoulder. “With Kennedy gone, we’re down a member on the track team. We have two more meets and regionals. After doing the math, it’s clear that if we want to go into regionals as top seed”—she sighs and finally looks at me—“we need another body.”

The post-run buzz bubbling through my veins ices. “Pen, I’m not a runner, and I’m certainly not a team player. Can you say ‘soccer’?”

Aunt Evelyn made me play soccer the first year I was here to help me “make lifelong friends and get physically fit.” I joined Penelope’s club team of little soccer superstars who’d been playing since being drop-kicked from the womb. At first I loved soccer. I loved running and booting the ball. I loved how the lead scorer performed a funky little dance every time she made a goal, and I couldn’t wait to show everyone my funky little dance. But there were so many rules and flags and whistles that no one bothered to explain, and I never got to perform my happy I-made-a-goal dance, not even when I kicked the ball through the posts for my first and only point. Unfortunately, I’d kicked the ball into the other team’s goal. Coach pulled me from the game, and my teammates snickered and started calling me Wrong-Way Reb. Cousin Pen was mortified.

“Track-and-field isn’t like soccer,” Pen says. “In soccer, if you score more goals, you win. In track-and-field, it’s a numbers game. We need to participate in X number of events with Y number of people and earn Z number of points.

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