Dear Opl Read Online Free Page A

school play. My part was to walk around looking miserable and guilty. Sometimes I feel like I’m still playing her part.
    â€œHey, Opal? What would happen if you stood on your head and threw up?”
    I looked at Ollie. “Why, don’t you remember?”
    His eyes went wide. “Did I see it happen?”
    â€œExperienced it, you big doofus. Three years ago after Thanksgiving dinner. You bounced around way too much and then hung upside down on your swing set with cousin Pearl.”
    â€œCool,” he said with a face-splitting grin.
    â€œEww. Not cool, Ollie. Icky. Very icky.”
    He licked his lips. “I think I remember now.” He sprinted up the stairs to his room and I threw my backpack onto the kitchen table. G-pa snoozed in his chair, his late-afternoon nap in full swing, but I didn’t have to tiptoe around. He said if you can’t sleep through a little noise, you weren’t tired enough to begin with.
    I walked into the pantry—my favorite room in the house—and scanned the shelves for something to ditch Ollie’s awful memory dredging. Chocolate usually helped. What was I saying? Chocolate always helped.
    Mom kept all the really good stuff on the top shelf, but you needed the pantry steps to reach it, and she hadn’t figured out that I’ve found her hiding spot. Toblerone and Ghirardelli live up there side by side, eyeing one another and competing for my attention. I told them I wasn’t here to judge and grabbed some of each. You had to treat chocolate fairly and you had to eat it super quick. Otherwise it would turn on you and go all white and gross looking. Mom said it wasn’t mold, just old. So I made sure our chocolate never felt neglected.
    Once I’d gotten my other afterschool snack of G-pa’s potato chips and the diet root beer Mom bought for me, I made a dash to my room, laptop under one arm, food under the other. That way, Mom didn’t have to see me eat and G-pa’s snoring wouldn’t bother me.
    I dumped everything on my bed and scrambled to my closet to pull out the one thing I managed to salvage of my dad’s. It was a big sweatshirt. It said, Inconsistency. It has its ups and downs. I stripped off my tee and pulled the sweatshirt over my head. It still smelled of him. Just a little. A bit like soap, but the big green bar he’d used, not the kind I have. I had to remember to be extra careful so it won’t need washing. I didn’t want to lose that too.
    I rolled over on my scrappy blue-and-green checkerboard quilt and looked up at the ceiling. It was September, which meant it was ladybug season. They scrunched together along the ceiling above my window, a convention of crimson-colored beetles chatting about the unusually warm weather. Dad used to stalk them with a Dustbuster. He looked so smug afterward, holding the vacuum up with one hand. The ladybugs buzzed around in a bright red panic inside the clear plastic case that had a wad of tissue stuffed in the end to keep them from escaping. “Now beware to the rest of you!” he’d shout. “Let this be a lesson! We will not harbor squatters!”
    I counted the ladybugs. When finished, I pulled out my bedside drawer and the bag of M&M’s inside it. “Twenty-four, twenty-five…twenty-six. That’s one for each bug you’re not here to take care of.”
    I scooped them up from my bed and popped them all in my mouth. I closed my eyes and tasted nothing but the sugar-crisp coating as the multicolored pebbles slowly dissolved. Then their flavor bloomed into the gooey thickness of melting chocolate. That’s how I felt: easy to break on the outside, heavy and dark on the inside. Suddenly I had a horrible feeling like there was a giant fist squeezing my heart.
    â€œYou’re supposed to be here. Why aren’t you here?” My eyes went hot and a huge bubble of breath shot up from my stomach. I couldn’t breathe.