Loud Awake and Lost Read Online Free

“by the trail of
Oh
my
God
there’s Ember
s.”
    I smiled. “Everyone’s been amazing.” I’d been pretty embarrassed by it. I’d walked in to find my locker festooned with foil balloons. There was a fruit-and-cookie basket for me at the yearbook meeting, and a box of chocolates personally delivered to me by Mr. Singh, our school principal. I’d been bombarded with hugs from kids I hardly knew. It had been a veritable outpouring.
    What I didn’t trust myself to tell Rachel was how it had all seemed…
off.
Lafayette was a huge high school, nearly thirteen hundred kids strong, and in my time here I hadn’t exactly distinguished myself with my unique brand of fabulous. I’d been a good dancer, I knew I was cute, I had friends—but I wasn’t some physics genius or
Vogue
beauty or star athlete or the Campus-Hot-Guy’s girlfriend.
    Even my standout identifying feature—my long, coppery hair—was gone. Mermaid hair, Holden had called it, though I’d usually kept it pinned up in a heavy dancer’s bun. After the accident they’d cut it short, and now it was chin length, with my bangs shaggy to hide my scar and with short, raggedy patches behind each ear where squares had been shaved for all my EEG scans.
    My hair hadn’t made me famous. But my accident had.
    Crazy as it was, it was kind of like I really
had
died last February. All day, I’d been treated almost as if I were a hologram. All day I’d had this jittery sense that kids were waiting for my Tales from the Other Side. I’d wanted to find Rachel, to cling to her a little, to explain my fear of being this spectacle—a freak-show apparition at my own homecoming.
    Instead I’d hid in a bathroom stall, letting the panic rip through my body in short jagged breaths. It was too much. It was too much to rejoin this slipstream of kids and classes and after-school pep rallies, caught in a dazed half-smiling, half-pretend state that just because I hadn’t died, I was all the way here.
    Maybe Mom was right. Maybe I wasn’t ready to handle it just yet.
    Emotion was a rush and roar, and I let it sweep over me. Splashed water on my face. Pulled the Shetland lock of bangs over my scar. Made it to the cafeteria in a basic state of okay.
    But Rachel had her eyes on me. She always did. “
You’re
amazing,” she told me now. “Go, Embie! You are strong like bull.” Another old joke, because I was a Taurus, a sign that I’d never felt kinship with. Rachel was always trying to make it better for me, probably acting on her instinct as a fair, justice-seeking Libra.
    Soon enough, like clockwork, like I’d never been gone, the roundtable began to gather with all my best school friends. Kids I’d been sharing lunch with since middle school. It stunned me to see them. My eyes and cheeks were hot. Junior year seemed like both a week and a decade ago.
    Sadie Anderson, Perrin Seymour, Tom Haas, and Keiji Takana. We were eight in all, including Claude McKechnie and his new Italian girlfriend, Lucia, an exchange student who even made sentences like “pass the salt” sound cranked-up sexy.
    Lucia kept stealing covert glances at me. Sadie, Keiji, and Perrin were hyper-smiley, but whenever Tom met my eyes, his were careful with concern. Nobody was sure how to act.
    “I’m a phone call away, Ember,” Mom had advised last night, slipping into my room with a mug of tea. “If you need me tomorrow, for any reason. Any reason at all.” Her good-night kiss was deeply familiar as always, but there’d been something strange in her tone. Something that kept me up, tossing in bed for another hour. She hadn’t said anything strange. Not really. But there was something hidden in the cracks, the weight of what she’d left unspoken, that worried me.
    And now here it was again. That squiggle of a question mark. That itchiness just outside my reach.
    I sipped my Sprite and attempted to listen to the lunch conversations zipping past. Everyone seemed to be talking so fast, with an