The Ordinary Life of Emily P. Bates Read Online Free Page A

room.
    The days passed slowly, almost too slowly, but finally I got my wish. It was Sunday night, and school would start the next morning. Shannon was lounging on my bed, making good use of my prolific manicure supplies to try to salvage her nails before the fated first day of school.
    “You know, you wouldn’t have to scramble like this if you would just stop biting your nails,” I told her from the floor. I sat surrounded by all of my new school supplies, bought at the last minute that afternoon. I was removing label stickers and filling notebooks with loose leaf paper.
    “Shut up,” Shannon mumbled, distracted as she carefully covered one nail at a time with a fleshy pink shade of polish. She held her hand out to examine her work. “Why do you have all of this stuff anyway? You never use it.”
    I sighed and looked around at the primping and polishing equipment that I usually kept stashed away in a set of white plastic drawers in the back of my closet. Shannon liked to pull those drawers out from time to time and rummage through my beautifying products. I didn’t mind. She was right; I had no use for most of them. If I ever used nail polish, I used the clear kind only.
    “Crazy Aunt June’s been giving me this crap for years,” I replied. “Christmas, birthdays, you know.”
    Shannon shuddered on the bed. “Ugh, Crazy Aunt June!” she groaned in mock horror.
    “Shut up!” I said, throwing a pillow at her. “You don’t have to spend any time with her at all. You have no idea how crazy she really is!”
    “Oh, so she gives you nail polish and outstays her welcome at Christmastime. What’s the big deal?”
    “Just trust me,” I said. “You’ve met her. Don ’t you remember the time when you and Finn came over for my birthday, and Crazy Aunt June showed up?”
    Shannon’s shudder of horror seemed pretty real this time. “Ugh, yes. How long ago was that?”
    “Five years. You guys had just moved here, and you didn’t have any friends yet except for me, and Mom thought it would be a good idea for me to have a big party so you could meet people, remember?”
    “Yes, and Aunt June came.”
    “And Aunt June came,” I confirmed. “She thought she could add some life to the party by making us all sit around while she told us stories.”
    “You know, some of her stories are funny,” Shannon said.
    “What about the one where she described in full detail about her do-it-yourself ingrown toenail surgery?”
    “Oh, my ears!” she wailed, rolling over and clutching at her ears. “Don’t remind me!”
    I held up my old backpack and dumped out the leftover debris from the previous spring into a trash sack. “My toes hurt just thinking about it.”
     
     
     

Three
                  The next morning, I drove to school in a haze of sleepiness. A thick fog hung low over the road, but it would burn off in no time. The weather man had promised us another sunny day, of course. I wouldn’t have used the word sunny, though. Sunny was supposed to infer peaceful, beautiful weather. What we got was angry heat. The kind that fried the hair right off your arms.
    Finn still had not come by to look at my car, but fortunately I hadn’t had a repeat of the stalling-out-nightmare from the previous week. Maybe it was just a fluke. Maybe Oscar was fine after all. I chose to believe that.
                  I was sitting behind a row of cars at a stop light in front of St. John High School when I noticed the vehicle behind me. A red Chevy pickup truck, shiny and new. It looked like the same one that I had stalled in front of the previous week, but I couldn’t be sure.
                  “Don’t worry. It’s not the same truck. It’s not the same truck.” I drummed on the cracked steering wheel and stared at the red truck through my rear view mirror. A glare across its windshield prevented me from seeing the driver’s face. “And if it is, there’s no reason for you to freak out