The Bookworm Next Door: The Expanded and Revised Edition Read Online Free Page A

point.  Part of her worried about how she was sounding; she didn’t sound at all like the old Aimee but like something her sister had sculpted.  Most of the time her words mimicked something her sister would say.  It bothered her.
                  Last year she would have been wearing the exact same thing.  Clothes didn’t matter to her.  They still didn’t except as a means of keeping Amanda off her back and keeping David’s interest. 
                  Amanda had pointed out that Aimee needed to get herself in position to become the leader of her class before somebody else had taken the job.  Somebody needed to be the prettiest and most popular female.  And she needed a male counterpart. 
                  Looking over at Kyle Goldman’s table, with the other freshman football players, she briefly wondered if she should have focused on the golden boy instead of the dark headed one sitting right next to her.  “Will, why aren’t you sitting with the other football players?”
                  “The table is already full,” he answered, shoveling the rest of his burger into his mouth.  Aimee was not the same Aimee as she had been last year and it worried him.  He didn’t understand her chase for popularity or why she kept using him in that pursuit.  Making the decision to watch after her was a no brainer. 
                  David looked at everybody else sitting around them.  A few of the freshmen cheerleaders were busy chatting about their cheer routine.  A few other freshmen football players were on the other side of Will, so neither boy could figure out why it mattered which table Will was sitting at during lunch.  The freshmen football players frequently rotated where they sat. 
                  He’d preferred sitting next to Will anyway.  While he didn’t know what Aimee was like in middle school, he did know that Will couldn’t have changed too much from the eighth grade to now.  David had encountered Will during travel ball and while the guy was rough around the edges and a bit liable towards suggestion, he knew that Will wasn’t all bad. 
                  A muffled scream caught his attention.  Grace was standing up, covered in something – probably lemonade – and crying.  Jennifer was getting up and into the Junior’s face.  “Why the hell would you dump a drink on somebody’s head?  What did she do to you?”  She didn’t notice that a few of the Junior’s friends were moving closer to the bully. 
                  “Oh, you made me miss it,” Aimee whispered, standing up along with the other cheerleaders at the table.  “Amanda told me she was going to do that.”
                  Will and David turned and looked at the girl.  “Your sister purposely poured that drink on Grace’s head?” one of them unbelievingly asked. 
                  “What’s wrong?  Sometimes somebody has to learn her place.”  Aimee repeated her sister’s words from when Aimee had asked Amanda what the purpose of bullying Grace was.
                  They’d been dating for six weeks and David had no clue about how mean Aimee could be.  “Grace is a sweetheart.  Why would she need to be put in her place?”
                  Once again parroting her sister, Aimee answered him, “Grace isn’t one of us.  She needs to know that and so do the other lesser freshmen.”
                  Looking back to where Delilah and her new friends were sitting, David caught his neighbor’s eye.  Without a second thought, he’d wondered if Aimee had seen him being nice to the shy girl – not everybody dealt well in unfamiliar settings – and sent her sister after Grace. 
                  Confirming his suspicions, “She isn’t worth your time,” she mumbled. 
                  Turning to Aimee, David made a sacrifice of