The Worst of Me Read Online Free Page B

. cause, you know, there are
some
people who could be a bit offended by that, too.’
    ‘But not you.’
    But I would be. If someone said it about me in school, like a girl, especially a girl, I would probably crumple up and stay in a ball until they let us go home. But his voice was low and those black coffee eyes were soft and it seemed like one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to me.
    ‘How come you missed your bus?’ I asked him. I knew it must have come and gone because there was no one else from school at the stop.
    ‘I stayed behind to talk about changing one of my courses.’
    ‘Really? What to what?’
    ‘Oh, um, maths to economics.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘Yeah, it’s not very interesting.’
    There’s a point when you’re getting to know someone and you’re still on the edge of them. Maybe you already know that this person is right for you,
your kind
. You can sense it: behind the words, something in you is speaking to something in them. But to get to that place where you can let go, you have to say enough of the things that other people say. And I was so desperate to get to the next stage that I almost couldn’t come up with anything for this stage – it felt like a waste of time. I always, with Jonah, right from the start, felt that I was running out of time.
    Jonah swallowed. ‘So look, do you have to go straight home?’
    Probably.
    ‘No,’ I said.
    ‘Wanna grab a coffee?’
    ‘Yeah.’ I wrapped the chocolate ball in its paper bag and stuffed it in my rucksack, and wondered how chocolatey my mouth was. I was looking at the ground as we walked, watching our feet, perfectly in step. I thought about my legs looking sort of all right in my shoe-boots, which were quite high-heeled, and hoped he was looking at my legs, just so he could seethey could look all right. He started telling me a funny story about the teacher he’d just seen, doing his voice, the way it went from really quiet to really loud. Sometimes I stopped listening to him because my head was just having a stupid conversation on its own, going,
Ooh, look at you then! You’re walking down the road with Jonah as if you weren’t some Year 11 kid he wouldn’t look twice at. You’d better not be boring him
! But between his story and me trying to tell my head to shut up so I could
listen
to the story, we got to the coffee shop and we got to that next stage too.
    ‘I wanted to talk to you before today,’ Jonah said. ‘But you were always on your own.’
    ‘Isn’t it harder to talk to people when they’re with other people?’ I said, trying to sound as if what he’d just said hadn’t embarrassed me.
Excuse me, I couldn’t help noticing you appear to have VERY FEW FRIENDS.
I thought about him seeing me alone, and how carefully I worked at seeming relaxed and confident when I was alone. Had there been moments when I forgot, when I let my guard down and looked lonely, or didn’t it work at all?
    He laughed. ‘It’s just hard to talk to you.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘It’s not hard to
talk
to you. You know I don’t mean
that
. I didn’t know how much you’d want me charging up to you in school.’
    ‘Quite a lot, it turns out.’
    ‘Well, that’s good to know. I may try it again. Look, for all I knew, what you said about us having to pretend last Saturday hadn’t happened wasn’t a joke. When you’re on your own, you don’t exactly look like you need rescuing.’
    ‘I don’t need rescuing,’ I said. ‘What
do
I look like?’ It’s awful how interested I was in talking about myself, but I was desperate to know what he thought of me. My heart stopped beating so all of me could concentrate on his answer.
    ‘You look . . . like the pretty girl who’s tired of everyone and needs to get away.’ He sipped his coffee and I tried to think of something to say – and was too excited by the word pretty to respond to this – but he hadn’t finished. ‘But, you know, always a little bit sad, too. It’s funny, how you’re so