A Novel Idea Read Online Free Page A

Scott told me, not only was he into the book group—which he’d heard about from Audre earlier that evening—but he’d already gotten Tuesday Levine and another friend of ours, Olivia Ramirez, to sign up. He’d created fifteen flyers, posted the news on Friendster, and drafted a permission statement for Mr. Whitmore to sign in the morning.
     
    This is why I love Scott: He’s crazy, but he gets things done. I was totally relieved that he’d taken care of all the messy details, and told him so.
     
    “Oh, and I hope you don’t mind,” he added breezily. “I decided on a date: February twenty-fourth. Cool?”
     
    “Uh, not so cool,” I said, my stomach tightening. Suddenly, the whole thing felt all too real. “Scott, that’s ten days away! I still need to—”
     
    “What?” he challenged. “Everything’s set.”
     
    I glanced down at Dangerous Embraces . “Well, we have to pick the books….” I trailed off, wondering, for one nutty moment, if the group could start off by reading some classic Irene O’Dell.
     
    “Chill, baby,” Scott laughed. “ That stresses you? You’re like a walking library. Just don’t assign us anything too smarty-pants, okay? I bet you’re in the middle of War and Peace right now. Or the collected works of James Joyce?”
     
    I snapped Dangerous Embraces shut, feeling a stab of shame. “Close,” I lied. I had to keep my passion for paperback romances separate from my book group. This was, after all, an actual, serious, after-school club. My very own. And I couldn’t allow anything to ruin what could be the most important undertaking of my life.
     
    Well, next to convincing my mom to let me buy that green army jacket I’d been eyeing on eBay.
     
    “Does this look decent up there?” I asked Audre the next afternoon, pinning the final thumbtack into Scott’s flyer, and taking a step back. Scott had handed us a bunch of flyers at school that morning, and Audre and I had gone straight to the Book Nook that afternoon.
     
    Now we studied the flyer’s bright yellow color and bold, block letters, which stood out against the cluttered bulletin board:
     
SEARCHING FOR SMART NEW FRIENDS … AND SOME JUICY READS? JOIN NORAH BLOOM’S BROOKLYN BOOK GROUP!
     
THE BOOK NOOK, PARK SLOPE, SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 12 P.M. BRING JUST YOURSELF, YOUR IDEAS, AND LOTS OF ENTHUSIASM!
     
    “Better than decent,” Griffin said, swinging by and playfully tugging Audre’s pouffy ponytail. “I’m impressed.”
     
    “Our friend Scott did them,” Audre said, beaming at her love. “You’ll get to meet him next Sunday.”
     
    “Thanks for the reminder,” Griffin said, grabbing an extra flyer from the stack at my feet. “I need to tell my friend about this.”
     
    “Right,” Audre said, and shot me an impish grin. When Griffin had walked off, she sidled up to me and murmured, “Watch out, Nors. Between Griffin and his hot friend, we’re so getting ourselves some Book Nook nookie.”
     
    I tried to grin back, but my stomach was in knots. My minor freak-out on the phone last night was slowly mushrooming into a full-on panic attack. What if Griffin’s hot friend brought still another friend? What if, like, five hundred total strangers showed up, all wanting to read different books? I’m not exactly good at meeting new people. I had a nightmarish vision of random teen, adult, and elderly readers gathered around a table at the Book Nook, their faces all turned eagerly toward me. What had I gotten myself into?
     
    “Get a grip,” Audre whispered, grabbing my elbow. I realized I’d been reaching up to remove the flyer from the board.
     
    “Sorry,” I whispered back. “I was just thinking, you know, that maybe this was a mistake.”
     
    “Forget it,” Audre said, steering me away from the flyers. “It’s too late now. Griffin knows about it, and, thanks to Scott, so does half of Millay.”
     
    Audre was right. The book group had been set into motion. There was nothing I