The Guy Not Taken Read Online Free Page B

Foreign Wars to pay for my books sophomore year.
    “Look, Miguel, the shark’s coming!” Nicki pointed at the screen as violins screeched in the background. She shook her head and spooned up a mouthful of Swiss Miss pudding from a plastic cup. “I don’t know why those people went waterskiing on that beach in the first place. Didn’t they see the first movie?”
    Jaws surfaced and made quick work of the pyramid of scantily clad lady waterskiiers. Milo rested his snout against my bare leg, and Mike, whose summer job in construction started at six a.m., let his spiky blond head fall back on a stack of pillows. His lips parted and he began, almost imperceptibly, to snore. Nicki gazed at the carnage, face lit by the blue glow from the screen, her spoon in her hand, the pudding forgotten.
    “Wow,” she breathed as blood clouded the water. She grabbed the remote, rewound the tape, and replayed the massacre in slow motion, scrutinizing each shriek and severed limb.
    “Fake,” she concluded in disgust. “Josie, look . . . you can see that the blood was just painted on that leg there. . . . Hey!”she barked as she noticed that my eyes were on my application. “You’re not watching!”
    I acknowledged that the scene is, if anything, too realistic for my tastes, and pointed out that her boyfriend was asleep.
    “No, he isn’t,” Nicki proclaimed. She leaned back until her head reclined on Mike’s chest and began to prod his midsection vigorously with her elbow. His eyes flew open, and his hands went first to his carefully gelled hair, then to Nicki’s shoulders.
    “Ow, quit it!” he begged.
    Nicki beamed at him angelically. “Wake up,” she coaxed, “or I’ll get the dog to lick your face. You,” she said, pointing at me. “Wimpy. Make us popcorn.”
    Mom entered the room wearing a swimsuit, wrapped in a towel, frowning and smelling of chlorine. She had a stack of mail in her hands and a letter pinched between her fingers. “Nicki,” she said, peering at the letter. “Did you tell someone from Chase that Dad was in the hospital, dying of testicular cancer?”
    “Perhaps,” Nicki allowed.
    “You can’t lie,” Mom said.
    “They lie,” said Nicki.
    “Well, don’t you want to be better than a bunch of underpaid collection agents?” my mother asked.
    Nicki scowled, then turned back to the screen, where a handsome man was lying on the beach beside a woman in a bikini, caressing her arm. Mike couldn’t resist teasing my sister, who loathed skin-on-skin contact above almost everything else. “Look, Nicki. Unnecessary touch!”
    “She gets eaten soon,” Nicki snapped. She pointed at me again. “Popcorn!” I hurried to go make it as Mom drifted out the back door. I’d gathered the popcorn and the big red bowl when Jon’s bike came crunching up the driveway. He walkedthrough the garage door, loped into the kitchen, and stood in front of the refrigerator, considering his options.
    “I heard Mom on the phone today,” he said. He pulled a stick of butter out of the refrigerator and tossed it to me. I unwrapped it, put it in a bowl and then into the microwave to melt. Mom had left the lights in the pool on, and the greenish glow of the water filtered through the window over the sink. The Hendersons two doors down had one of those electronic bug zappers, and its sizzling sound punctuated the hot, still night.
    “What’d she say?”
    “That she’s going to have to put the house on the market in the fall. She can’t afford to keep it.”
    I pulled the steaming butter out of the microwave. I’d known that things were bad from the creditors’ ceaseless calling, from the absence of the lawn service and the pool guys and the cleaning ladies. Late at night, I’d woken up from bad dreams listening to the sound of my mother walking downstairs, from room to room, past the painting my father had bought for their tenth anniversary, past the kitchen table where we’d all had hundreds of meals together, up to