The School For Dangerous Girls by Eliot Schrefer

Author:Eliot Schrefer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

Chapter Twenty-four

Carmen reached into the sack and picked the busted pen. Her hand was shaking so much it looked almost like she was using it to scribble on the air. If she hadn’t seemed so vulnerable and so serious, I might’ve laughed. If Juin were here, I bet she would’ve…but then again, if Juin were here, I don’t think Carmen would have gone where she went next.

“I’ve been best friends with Ingrid since I first moved to Connecticut. My dad was born there, so we went to live in his big old family house when he got his New York job. I was twelve.

“The town we moved to was posh, full of old money. Right away I knew I’d never fit in. My mom offered to take me shopping for some fancier clothes now that Dad had his new job, but I wasn’t really interested. All I wanted to do was sit out back and read or walk my dog. Her name is Josephine. Well, she was my grandparents’ dog, but they’d died, so she was mine. My mom started getting on me about my weight—”

“Are you serious?” I said. “You’re not fat.”

“I was heavier then. Or maybe not. Whatever—I felt bad. I couldn’t run because it made my boobs hurt, so she made me go to the community pool every afternoon. I got myself this fifties-style one-piece, one of the kinds with the frilly skirts, and brought a book, and as soon as she drove off I’d be settled on the folding chair by the bathrooms, reading. I’d do a lap right before she picked me up, to look wet.

“Well, let me tell you, you get to know the other people at the community pool really well. There was the old lady who was super tan and wrinkly and kept patting her hair and hitting on the crippled younger guy. There was the old man with the big heart-surgery scar, always doing laps. And there was Ingrid.

“She was always in the same spot, in the shallow end in front of the jets, her arms hitched over the side, her hair in a ridiculous bun—ridiculous because she was my age—reading a book that she’d propped up on the concrete, the lower half of the pages huge and waterlogged. Her shoulders were always burnt, but she never covered them or anything; she concentrated on her reading.

“I’d glance at her whenever I walked by. Sometimes she was reading books I’d already read, and sometimes they were books way beyond me, adult books with cloth bindings while I was reading, you know, Narnia. So one day I picked a random impressive-looking book off my parents’ shelf and brought it to the pool and stood near to her, reading. It turned out the book was some history of Austria, and I could barely make myself read a page. So that helped me pluck up the courage to talk to her, just to give myself something to do.

“It ended up that she lived around the

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