Going Dark Read Online Free Page A

put her hand on my forehead and then told me to take my temperature.
    â€œI just drank milk,” I said. “I think I’m supposed to wait.”
    â€œTake your temperature. You’ll be late for the bus.”
    I put the thermometer under my tongue and stood up from the table. My backpack was waiting on the counter, and I pulled it on as my brothers scrambled around me.
    â€œThith apartment ith too thmall,” I said out of the side of my mouth, keeping the thermometer in place.
    â€œIt’s the best we can do under the circumstances,” Mama said, obviously frazzled.
    I tried to watch the ticking numbers with crossed eyes, and I moved to the door to get out of the way. After twenty more seconds it beeped.
    â€œOne hundred and one,” I read to Mama. “I need to go to the doctor, not to school.”
    She put bowls in front of the boys and poured out cereal. “You need to go to school, Krezi.”
    â€œOne hundred and one!” I said again, holding out the thermometer. “That’s not normal. That’s, like, supersick.”
    â€œDo you have any other symptoms?” Mama asked, shoving the Froot Loops box back on the shelf and reaching for the milk. “Anything else the doctors told you to watch out for?”
    â€œI have a headache,” I said. “And doesn’t a high fever count as a symptom?”
    â€œKrezi,” she said, slamming the milk jug down. “Do you want to know why I’m not taking you to the doctor? Because our house just burned down. Because we’re still paying our mortgage and also paying rent for this apartment that you think is too small. Because your papa has to work double shifts to try to put food on the table. Because the insurance company doesn’t want to pay for the house, because they think you girls must have had something in your room that started the fire.”
    I didn’t say anything. Everyone was quiet except for Cesar, who was slurping his cereal.
    â€œI love you, baby,” Mama said. “I’m praying for you. I pray for you every minute of the day. But go to school.”
    I nodded. She turned back to the sink, and I opened the door and walked slowly to the bus stop.
    Â 
    First period was boring. I sat next to a girl I’d known from middle school, but we didn’t talk. I was too busy thinking about everything Mama had said. The teacher was going over vocabulary words and I was mindlessly writing them down and doodling on the page as she defined each one and used it in a sentence. When she got to the third, I felt my heart drop.
    â€œInsolvency,” Mrs. Romney said. “An inability to pay a debt. Of, or relating to, bankruptcy.”
    The kids around me were scribbling down the word, but I just stared at the teacher and the list she was reading from.
    â€œThe man’s small business was failing, and he was in insolvency,” she said, giving an example sentence.
    Were my parents going to go bankrupt? I’d read Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations in eighth grade, so I knew about bankruptcies in the old days. They used to send people to prison if they couldn’t pay their debts. I was sure they didn’t do that anymore, but what did they do?
    What was my family going to lose besides the house? What were they going to lose because of me?
    I’d get a job. Even if it was something terrible, even if it was just working at the Pollos Hermanos on the corner. I could earn money. Maybe I could get a job with Celia—how hard was it to be an usher at a dumb casino magic show? We used to joke that Celia got the job because it was at the Luxor Casino and she was so pretty, but it wasn’t like her uniform was revealing or anything like that. A fifteen-year-old could take tickets just as well as a nineteen-year-old.
    After class I went to the computer lab and started searching for minimum-wage after-school jobs. There seemed to be plenty of them, though most