The Worst of Me Read Online Free

I said.
    ‘I probably wouldn’t have
more
of a chance.’
    The door opened and the librarian came in. She said hi to both of us, but looked at me suspiciously. Recognising me – I’d been in there before to talk at Sam for the whole lunch hour. I shuffled my chair back a bit, as if I was there to read.
    ‘So who
are
you hiding from?’ Sam said, in a whisper.
    ‘I’m not hiding!’ I said. ‘I’m just tired today. Well . . .’ I told him about all the party talk. I had to keep remembering to whisper, even though we were the only people in the library. I kept getting more agitated, doing impressions of my friends’ voices.
    ‘So what, it’s one party!’ Sam said. ‘Will the boy be there?’
    ‘Probably not. I mean, he
might
, but there’s no reason he would be.’
    ‘It’d be a waste of a new outfit, then.’
    But the closer we got to Friday, the day of Josette’s party, the more that thought of ‘saving’ a new outfit – which, by the way, I didn’t own – didn’t really feel like an upside. And just because it was finally about to happen, that didn’t mean an end of it. There’d be the analysis – which would last at least a week – and then references to it that went on for ever, just like that concert I’d missed.
    When you’re in the middle of something it seems a lot bigger than it is, and although it sounds nothingy and meaningless now, it was getting to me. I wanted to sleep and stay asleep and only wake up when things were nicer: when my mum had broken up with Paul and no one could even remember being that excited about Josette’s party, and some boy was waiting for me to wake up so he could ask me out. Trying to concentrate on homework was tiring me out, and I went to bed early and woke up with only just enough time to get ready and had to go to classes unprepared and feeling thick.
    I was paired up with my friend Dee in English – we were once best friends, when we were really little, but had drifted quite a bit in the last few years. We hadn’tfallen out or anything, just made other friends that we saw more of. It was great getting some time to talk to just her again, on her own. We were supposed to be writing a modern version of a scene from
Wuthering Heights
as a read-aloud play and halfway through the class, Dee was asking me what I thought about a bit with a grave and I was trying to bluff, and she said, ‘Why do I get the feeling you haven’t read this?’
    ‘Well, the thing about that is . . .’
    ‘Ah, come on, Cass,
naugh-tee
!’ Her eyes flashed with humour. Dee had this way of telling me off and making me feel better at the same time, I’d forgotten that about her. She always looked like she was trying not to laugh. This time she really
was
trying not to laugh: she explained the plot to me and the fact that I seemed to have confused it with
Jane Eyre
, which I also hadn’t read but had seen the film of. We both cracked up.
    ‘What’s up? Have you been having too much fun to stay in and read?’
    I gave a long sigh. ‘I wish!’
    She looked up from her book and studied my face. ‘Oh. You know what, a few of us are going to the pictures Saturday evening – do you fancy coming along?’
    ‘I’d
like
to, yeah.’ I was happy to be asked. I didn’t think my mum would be mad about the idea after mylast
un
scheduled cinema visit. Even though she hadn’t made a fuss when I came in, there was no way of telling she wouldn’t use it against me when she wanted an excuse to be angry. ‘Listen, I’ll let you know if I can make it, but right now I’m not sure. My mum’s a bit mental at the moment.’
    Dee rolled her eyes. ‘They don’t let you become a mother unless you fail the psychological evaluation. Crap, we’re supposed to have finished! Can I just write it for us?’
    ‘Oh, I’m going to say no to that!’
    She put her head down and scribbled away with a pencil for about a minute, stopping sometimes to cross things out with zig-zagged lines, filling the