Tips on Having a Gay (ex) Boyfriend Read Online Free

Mallory.”
    I raise my hand. I swear. I raise Muffin’s paw, make her swear too. Emily grimaces, checks her nails, shakes her head, and says, “You’re losing it. That poor cat.”
    She grabs Muffin, who climbs onto her shoulder and settles there. They both seem to purr. She pulls out her digital camera and snaps a picture of me, even though my nose is red from crying and my hair is a mess. She’s always taking pictures ever since her dad died. She’s afraid of losing people, afraid she’ll forget things about them, if she doesn’t snap what they look like happy, sad, angry, bloated from eating too many buffalo wings. She says she can’t remember how her dad looked except for how he looked smiling. So, I let her take her pictures and think of how brave she is, how brave I should be.
    “A week?” I ask Emily.
    She nods, checks out the photo but doesn’t show me. She snaps another one of my lonely Gabriel guitar, leaning against the wall. Em throws her sexy brown supermodel hair behind her cat-free shoulder. “A week.”

    After Em leaves, I yell to my mom that I’m going out on my bike.
    She looks up from her computer. She’s paying bills and her hair’s flopped out of her weekend ponytail, looking all scraggly in her face. “It’s cold out.”
    “Yeah.”
    She has worry stuck behind her eyes the way she always does when I go out alone, but she’s a good mom, she knows that I hardly have seizures, that they don’t run my life and she wants me to have a life. “You have your cell phone?”
    “Yep.”
    I kiss her on the top of her head and she wraps her arms around my trunk. “You bundle up, okay?”
    I pull away. “I promise.”
    She smiles and something shifts behind her eyes. It turns out it’s a memory. “Do you remember when you were little and you and Mimi Cote rode bikes all the way out to the Washington Junction Road and you both got flats and that guy, Pete, from R.F. Jordan picked you up and put your bikes in the back of the dump truck?”
    I clench my teeth. I hate thinking about Mimi Cote. We used to be good friends when we were little and then kind of friends in middle school, but then she went out with Tom Tanner and everything changed. “Yeah.”
    “You ever talk to Mimi?” my mom asks, but she’s already turning back to her computer screen filled with check numbers and deposit statements.
    I don’t even think she hears me when I say, “No.”
    I take my bike out and ride until my mind is like the blueberry barrens—this nothing field full of rocks, scrappy bushes, and dried-out fruit. Old footprints in the sand. Abandoned blue jay feathers. A worker’s gray t-shirt soaked with sweat.
    I know that beyond the barrens is a world of forest with sloping trees, limbs reaching toward the sky, birds flittering from nest to home, to nest. I know that beyond the barrens is a world with nice subdivision houses full of wagging-tail dogs and happy kids, comfy beds, family photos on walls featuring smiles and laughs and hugs, magical stories of love and hope, and refrigerators full of chocolate milk and good leftovers waiting to be rewarmed.
    I know, I know that it is all out there, beyond the barrens, beyond my mind and when I ride my bike up and down the Maine hills and around the potholes, over the frost heaves, all I can do is think about wanting, wanting, wanting.
    Each want puffs out with my cold breath, making a cloud in the frigid air. Each want stomps itself into my heart as I pedal harder and faster.
    I want a life that I can trust. I want a life where there are four stable walls and the people I love are who I expect them to be. Is that too much to ask? I want no one to know about Dylan and me. I want it not to be true.

    Before Emily or Dylan could drive, we all used to walk home from school to Dylan’s house, because he lived the closest, only a mile or so away. Dylan would laugh at Emily and how girlie she could be sometimes, quoting from Cosmopolitan or Vogue . We would all