Livvie Owen Lived Here Read Online Free Page A

possible for me to settle back into my chair. If Natasha believed me, it didn’t matter what Lanie thought. I scooted my chair farther away from Lanie’s.
    â€œSo, what are you doing at school today, Livvie?” My mother was halfway through her coffee and still blinking sleep out of her eyes. She looked eager to steer the conversation in a new direction.
    â€œI don’t know, not much,” I grumped. “The new sub is stupid. But the speech therapist said she would come and get me and we can play UNO.”
    â€œWhat’s wrong with the new sub this time?” Lanie asked. “Is her hair the wrong color, or does she just not like putting up with all your—”
    â€œMelanie Elizabeth!” Simon sat back with a thump and pointed at the sink. “Get your dishes rinsed. Get your mouse. Get going. Now.”
    â€œBut I’m not finished with my—”
    â€œ
Now!
”
    Lanie sighed a loud, dramatic sigh, the kind Miss Mandy used to say was impolite when I did it to her and Mr. Raldy. “Fine,” she grumbled. “Don’t mind me. I’m going to go win one for science. Just see if I share my prize money with any of you crazy people.” She banged out of the room with Bentley swinging in his cage.
    I took a last bite of my bagel—bringing the grand total of bites I’d taken to three—and dumped the rest in the trash. Turning back to the table, I caught Natasha staring.
    â€œYou used to eat,” she observed drily. “Do you remember those days?”
    â€œI eat,” I said defensively.
    â€œThree bites. When you were a baby, you always finished first. Then you launched yourself mouth-first at whatever was still left on my plate. Usually pumpkin pie.” Turning to our parents, she added, “Does it seem like we had pumpkin pie a lot back then?”
    â€œYour grandmother gave us about eighteen cans of pie filling that winter.” Karen drained her coffee mug and rolled her shoulders to wake up. “I think it must have been on sale. Either that or expired. We used to eat it on crackers. It was better than the canned meat—that’s the other thing she gave us.”
    My father whisked his plate and coffee cup tothe sink. “I’m going to pretend I don’t hear you talking about my mother,” he said in a joking sort of voice. Joking voices, I was pretty good at recognizing, after years of growing up with my parents and my sisters. It was the more serious emotions I had a hard time labeling. The ones my family didn’t talk about.

Chapter 3
    Simon eyed Lanie and me warily as we piled into the car, but we were finished fighting, mostly. Lanie grabbed the front seat and I huffed a sigh and settled into the back, next to Simon’s Walmart apron. Karen was off today and would pick us up on foot, me from the high school and Lanie from her car pool. These were my favorite days because Karen never made us walk straight home. We roamed up through the pinewoods or down to the swings at the elementary school. Sometimes we wound through downtown Nabor to buy an ice cream at the U-Save.
    Natasha waved a peaceful-looking good-bye from her bike as she pedaled down the drive. Even in winter, Natasha loved to bike to school if we lived close enough. I watched her go, wistfully. I would love nothing more than to bike to school—my hair, whichI pictured longer and thinner in my daydreams, drifting back in the gentle wind, eyes watering with the cold, but in a good way. It would sure beat sitting here in this backseat behind Lanie, listening to her huff and sigh and yawn giant fake yawns that made my ears dizzy.
    There was a time, way back—not quite as way back as the Sun House, but almost—when Lanie and I were friends. Not when she was a baby. When she was a baby, she was so loud she hurt my ears, and she always had Karen’s and Simon’s attention when she wanted it, while they told me to be a big