Autumn Read Online Free

senior year of high school, so he opted for a few basic colored ones and some fancy pens he’d probably lose by Homecoming.
    He was investigating a graphing calculator when a familiar voice asked, “Hey, Reynolds.”
    Twisting his neck, he peered over his shoulder to see the football team’s starting defenseman, Lyndon Fletcher, staring at him. Lyndon looked as if he’d just staggered out of the stone ages. He was a big guy for any age, well over Cooper’s six-foot height, and pushing three hundred pounds. He had a broad, flat nose and a Cro-Magnon sloped forehead that made him look permanently puzzled. Which was pretty accurate, all things considered. His hair was shoulder length and stringy, and he always smelled like Slim Jims.
    “Lyndon,” Cooper replied. He didn’t feel like chatting with the other guy for too long, but it would have been rude to just walk away. Not that Lyndon was too big on social graces.
    “You getting your school shit?”
    Cooper glanced down at the calculator in his hands. Mia had wandered off down one of the other aisles—which probably meant she was actually in cosmetics—leaving him no easy escape route from the conversation.
    “Yeah, helping my sister get some stuff, figured I’d grab a few things. You?”
    Lyndon stared into the basket in his hands as if he’d only then realized he was carrying it. A case of Red Bull and a bag of sour cream and onion chips were partially covered by a single spiral-bound notebook.
    “Sure.” Ever the scintillating conversationalist.
    “Well, good to see you.” Cooper turned back to the shelf and replaced the calculator, then pretended to study another one.
    “Hey, you hear the news?”
    For a moment Cooper considered acting as if he hadn’t heard the question, but it seemed unlikely to deter the course Lyndon was on, so instead Cooper asked, “What news?”
    “Libby took a summer job at the school office to add some sort of, like, volunteer bullshit to her college applications or whatever.” Libby Tanner was Lyndon’s on-and-off-and-on-and-off girlfriend. Last Cooper had heard they were off, but apparently that didn’t stop Libby from talking to her ex. “Anyway, she said yesterday they got a new transcript.”
    “Okay.” Cooper had no idea what the point of this was, and it hardly qualified as news .
    “New transcript means new student,” Lyndon explained, like Cooper was the slow one of the two of them.
    That was news. “Did Libby get a name?” The last time they’d had a new student had been in middle school, and in spite of four years passing since Malik had come to them from Pittsburgh, he was still called the new kid . That was how rarely new students came to Poisonfoot.
    “Eloise something.”
    “Eloise?” Cooper wrinkled up his nose, conjuring a mental image of a chubby girl with pigtails and Coke-bottle glasses. For some reason his mental Eloise also had a French beret. He blamed Mia’s childhood storybooks for that one. “That doesn’t sound too promising.”
    Lyndon shrugged. “I dunno, man. It’s just a name. Doesn’t mean she can’t be a hottie.”
    There were scarce pickings at their school to begin with, and those girls were ones Cooper had spent his whole life around. It barely mattered that he’d known them almost since the womb, because none of them spoke more than five words a week to him.
    If there was a new girl, it might not make a difference if she had six eyes and a mustache. If she was willing to talk to him, she’d already be an improvement.
    “She’s a junior. Coming from California.”
    California? Why in God’s name would someone leave California to come to Poisonfoot ? “Why?” was all Cooper managed to verbalize.
    “Libby said there was something in the transcript about counseling for bereve…um, ber…you know. When someone croaks?”
    “Bereavement?” Cooper offered.
    “Yeah, that.”
    So this mystery Eloise was coming here because someone she knew had died. Awesome. A broken