My Soul to Keep (The Soul Keeper Series - Young Adult Paranormal Romance) Read Online Free Page B

myself.   He finally manages to swallow, chasing it down with half of a Dr.
Pepper.  
    “I’m pretty sure that was possum.” He makes a bleh
motion with his mouth. I give a quiet chuckle to his joke.
    “Salad?” I offer.
    “Doritos!” he says triumphantly. I smile at his
victory over the ambiguous burger.
    Emily has found us as well and joins our little
picnic.
    “Emily, Sam, Sam, Emily,” I introduce them and
wonder if they would hit it off. I don’t know either of them well enough to
gauge that sort of thing yet.
    We make small talk and eat our lunch. I enjoy my
dark chocolate a little too much. It makes me think of him and I don’t need to
daydream about those sapphire blue eyes. I need to get into Harvard and that is
going to take every ounce of my time this year.   My mind wanders to the difficulty of all of the
A.P classes I have undertaken this year. I hope with all sincerity I make it
through without drowning in my coffee cup one late night when I am all alone.
They may not find my body for weeks. I digress – consuming myself with school work on a daily basis is the only way that I know how to get
through each day without snapping.
    Once it is quiet for a moment Emily breaks the
silence. I can tell by the absence of her smile that she is going there . The question I had managed to
avoid all day from her and concerned teachers alike, is coming. I feel trapped,
ensnared by one toe, dangling from the tree above me with no knife to free me
from the rope she is about to strangle me with.
    “So Bren, I’ve been meaning to ask, how are you
holding up?” She is sincere and I know she means well. But I do better not
thinking about what I have lost. She is a good person; I could see us being
great friends maybe even lifelong friends. She wants to know how I am coping
with losing my dad. She has no clue about my grandmother and I intend for it to
stay that way. Come to think of it she has no clue about my mother either. I am
by all accounts an orphan. Even the word orphan sounds sorrowful.
    My mother was in a fatal car wreck the same summer I
survived the plane crash. The ironic part was that I was supposed to go with
her on the short trip to visit her Aunt. I should have been in the car with her
when she crashed, but at the last minute I asked to stay home. I don’t know
what made me change my mind. I know I was an emotional wreck that summer
already, so maybe I wasn’t in the mood to be canoodled by my estranged family.
She was only going two miles down the road. The weather was clear the drunk
driver’s head was not. He struck her head on, killing her instantly.
    My father was on a classified mission that went
terribly wrong when he died, which means he was in a place that never existed,
doing things that never happened, for a cause that most likely carried over
into shades of gray in terms of right and wrong.   That’s about all I know. He was my light and
now I am forever in the black room.
    As for Grandma, my sole living relative, the
doctor’s called it rapidly progressing Alzheimer’s. They say one day soon her
body will forget how to swallow and how to breathe. So how am I?
    “Oh I get by one day, one hour or one minute at a
time.” Just like the rest of us I suppose.
    “Bren’s dad died last year,” she tells Sam. I furrow
my brows at her. My dad and I were stationed in Japan for a couple of years
when we got the news he was being deployed for a month long excursion. Grandma
flew in to stay with me until I finished school for the semester of my
sophomore year, like she had done many times before. She was always my back up
parent when my dad was deployed. I even spent a year with her here when my dad
went to Afghanistan. Grandma liked Japan, and she liked getting to see new
places. Two weeks went by, and then I got the knock on the door. And just like that, my Daddy was gone.   I still feel like a piece of me is missing
without him. I moved to Sandbridge with my grandmother and we helped