The Taming Read Online Free Page B

anybody,” I said, as I stopped eyeballing Evan.
    “Lie to me if you want, honey, but don’t lie to yourself,” Travis sighed.
    Hey, it was the eighth wonder of the world that I had any friends, period. I sucked at the bonding stuff at the best of times. Yet Travis had been my best friend from the moment I came to the school last year in grade ten. He’d picked me out even as I was trying to blend into the lockers and even though he was a year ahead of me. We found Lisa three weeks before Christmas. Also new to the school, Lisa came from a number of places, the most recent being a boarding school called Rigby College. She’d had enough with the wilderness of Port Henry and the aggressive idiocy of entitled trust fund kids. She liked me and Travis better, way better. Go figure. So by early December of last year, I had a “group” and guaranteed survivability. It had been a long time since I’d had either. It took some getting used to.
    Lisa joined me and Travis that day for a late lunch in the cafeteria, which was not so affectionately known as the Droopy Diaper Café. I wasn’t sure but I thought the smell of the place had a lot to do with the name. Even in the soup of what passes for your modern urban high school student body, my friends were noticeable. I was their beige-on-beige wallpaper; they stood out even more with me as their backdrop. Although Travis and Lisa would have hotly denied it, the two of them were as much “in uniform” as our site-specific crop of nerds, goths, preps, orange fashionistas, druggies, gangstas, band kids, jocks, players and that whole shambling army of kids called the silent majority. That’s probably where I would have belonged, except even they were too visible for me.
    Travis doled out our lunches. It was his turn to wait in line. There was macaroni and french fries for him, and organic mystery meat for Lisa and me. Travis had been Emo-boy since grade nine. Danny—sitting across the way with Josh and Evan—liked to point out, on a daily basis, that “Emo is over,” but Travis insisted, on the same daily basis, that he was going to single-handedly revive the movement, skinny jeans, swept hair, foo-foo music and all.
    Lisa was a different story altogether. She was barely civil. Somehow that added to her allure. Lisa’s “tell it like it is” method of communication had earned her respect and a fair bit of fear from her immediate peer group, us. I personally thought she slid somewhere onto the Asperger’s scale, but her folks had therapied her into what passed for almost normal. The other thing that got her respect was that she was smarter than anyone else in the school, including the teachers, and the teachers knew it. Lisa’s “uniform” consisted of some combination of a “this season” skirt her mother brought back from Bloomingdale’s mixed in with something from the Goodwill slush pile. Travis finished off Lisa’s look by colouring her hair a deep burgundy with brilliant fuchsia in alternating sections.
    Uniforms aside, Lisa’s best feature, like Travis’s, was that she liked me. This year I’d really tried to accept that. Like I said, I didn’t “do friends” at the other schools. This was weird, but good weird.
    I was probably smiling vacantly at the two of them as I tried to drown out Mom’s voice, which was Velcroed in my brain all day. Lisa called it my “middle-distance” look, the one immortalized by a hundred million girls’ junior fiction novels where the plucky heroine on the cover is looking stupidly into pretty much nowhere. Lisa said my stupid look intrigued her. She said she wanted to know where I go.
    Trust me, she didn’t. I went to a lot of places, but lately, I’d been going to Mom with a can of hairspray in one hand and a scotch in the other. She’s smoking and spraying and she’s angry.
    “You think it’s easy being a single mother when your kid keeps scaring off any half-decent prospect that comes sniffing around? Not this