The Biker (Nightmare Hall) Read Online Free

plenty of other things. Some were trivial, like why every other girl at school ranked the importance of their makeup right up there with three meals a day. Some things, though, were more important, like why it was so crucial for everyone to be the same. To dress the same, talk the same, behave in the same way. If you insisted on being different in any of those areas (and a few others), you were shoved into a box labeled “Not One of Us” or and you stayed in that box until you saw the error of your ways, repented, and became like everyone else.
    Why was that?
    Echo had thought that college would be different. Had hoped, had prayed, that it would be.
    But it wasn’t. Not really. She knew a girl named Johanna, a really pretty girl who was also smart and funny, who had been popular at the beginning of the year. Then, halfway through first semester, she had pierced her nose and hung a tiny gold ring in one nostril.
    Presto chango! Into the “Different” box she went. And as far as Echo knew, there she stayed.
    And there was that boy in her psych class. John Dover. He was short and very, very overweight. She had heard people calling him “Double-Dover.” In class, at his desk, his body hung over the seat like a soufflé baked in a too-small dish.
    He, of course, had gone into the box on the very first day of school. But then, he’d probably been in that same box all through high school and was used to it. Probably hadn’t expected anything else of college.
    “Regular” people on campus didn’t wear boots like the ones she’d seen on the biker. Ever. They wore pretty, heeled boots with skirts and dresses, and ankle boots with jeans. But “regular” people at Salem U. didn’t wear high-heeled cowboy boots made of snakeskin with wine and green diamonds running up the sides and a silver chain fastened around the instep.
    Was the person on whom she had seen those boots in class “different” enough to climb on a motorcycle? She wasn’t sure. He wasn’t very popular. But he was in a fraternity, and Deejay, Marilyn, and Ruthanne all knew him. That didn’t mean they liked him, though. Maybe he was as much of an outsider as she herself was.
    But she just couldn’t picture him in black leather, racing a motorcycle into a crowd.
    Still, Echo thought as she climbed aboard the small, yellow shuttle bus with a group of very shaken, frightened people glad to be out from under the mall canopy, you just could never tell about people. Could you?
    His name was Pruitt. Aaron Pruitt. He was in her psych class. He was tall, and thin, and pale-faced, even this late in the spring. His sandy hair was cut short, precisely parted in the middle and neatly plastered flat with gel, except for the cowlick at the crown, which could probably only be subdued with a hefty application of glue. His glasses were wire-rimmed and he had a nice, straight nose to sit the glasses on. But he was basically an unsmiling, silent creature.
    Maybe he didn’t have anything to smile about, Echo thought.
    He was always neatly dressed. His long-sleeved shirts were perfectly pressed and always tucked in, never without a belt. He didn’t wear jeans, although he had, she was sure, been wearing them last night. Maybe you had to wear jeans on a motorcycle. Even his backpack, she had noticed once in class, was always clean. It was a navy blue canvas affair that looked expensive and was completely free of grease spots and loosely flapping papers and slashes of black or blue or red from felt-tipped pens.
    Pruitt?
    Nah.
    In psych class, she sat behind him and over one row, which was how she’d come to notice the boots. He always slid down in his seat as far as possible without actually lying down, and most often, stuck his long, skinny legs out into the aisle, sometimes propping his feet up on the seat opposite his, even if it was occupied. If a guy was sitting in the seat, the guy might not care, might just ignore the feet at the edge of the seat. But the girls who