Halfway Perfect by Julie Cross

Author:Julie Cross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2015-02-27T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 25: Eve

November 28, 9:30 a.m.

I can feel the aches in my muscles and the chills and sneezing that come with the first signs of a cold.

And yet I’m outside, in SoHo to be exact, jogging with Alex.

My toes are numb inside my running shoes. The high-tech running tights I borrowed from a girl in my dorm are not keeping my legs as warm as they claim to.

“I think I might have considered college if I knew there were teachers like Professor Larson,” Alex says. “He seems like the kind of dude who would be above giving grades or some liberal artistic move like that.”

I laugh. “Yeah, right. He grades tough. I’ll be lucky to get an A in his class. Actually, I got an A minus in my independent study course.”

“Well, I guess it is Ivy League. They’re all about grades.”

We get to a street corner and have to wait at the crosswalk. I bend over to catch my breath and then spend thirty seconds coughing into my elbow, like a good citizen.

“You caught that kid’s cold, didn’t you?” Alex says, eyeing me. “I saw the runny nose and knew we were in for some germ exposure.”

“I’m in denial.” He’s talking about Olivia, Professor Larson’s three-year-old granddaughter who was at Thanksgiving dinner. I’d seen the runny nose too and I was worried about it. I probably mentally contracted the virus just from worrying about it. The only cold I got last winter turned into pneumonia. I don’t have time for pneumonia right now.

We cross the street and Alex pauses again and touches my red nose. “We should stop. Let’s go have breakfast somewhere.”

“We’ve only gone two miles.” My protest is weak, because my body is weak at the moment. Then it’s like the world is trying to stop us, or actually give me pneumonia, because the sky opens up and pours icy cold rain on top of us.

Alex covers his head with both arms. “Shit!”

It only takes about thirty seconds for my shoes to get soaked through and my teeth to start chattering. He looks over at me and points in a different direction than the one we were originally headed in. “Change of plans.”

After running another four blocks with shoes that weigh an extra twenty pounds from water, Alex pulls me under the awning of a tall apartment building. His gaze darts around the street, then he removes a pair of sunglasses from his coat pocket and puts them on my face. He pulls the cold, wet hood of my jacket over my head.

“What are we doing?” I ask.

“Going inside.” He’s still looking around as he leads me through a door, nudging me in front of him. He walks in the lobby and bypasses the elevators. “We’ll take the stairs, just to be on the safe side.”

I stop at the first landing. “Is this where you live?”

“No, I like to hang out in stairwells of random apartment buildings.” He’s already charging up the next flight.

I have no choice but to plunge ahead after him.

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