True Colors Read Online Free Page A

like her racehorse, Velvet.
    Nadine couldn’t get over how small the school was.
    “It only has one room!” she exclaimed.
    “I told you it’s a
one-room
schoolhouse,” I said.
    “I know, but I didn’t think you meant it,” Nadine said. “Where do you go when you get sent to the principal’s office?”
    “We don’t have a principal,” I told her. “It’s just Miss Paisley.”
    “Where do you go to the bathroom?” she wanted to know, so I led her to the outhouse behind the school.
    Nadine’s mouth dropped open.
    “You have to go in there?” she whispered. “How positively provincial!”
    Nadine was always throwing out big words I didn’t know. She was twelve going on twenty, as Hannah liked tosay. She was book-smart, but Nadine didn’t know the first thing about making maple syrup (she couldn’t even tell the difference between a red maple and a sugar maple), or how to milk a cow (she was too afraid of them to even
try
), or the difference between a Duchess apple and a Yellow Transparent. Nadine actually thought haying was
fun
, but that was only because she could go home when she was tired and didn’t have to stick with it till it was all done.
    Our rooms were as different as could be, too. Walking into Nadine’s room was like being swept up into a swirl of cotton candy. Everything was pink—from the walls to her frilly bed to her closet filled with even frillier clothes—and her shelves were lined with dolls and Nancy Drew books. My room was like the outdoors: blue walls, a green braided rug, and shelves filled with birds’ nests and rocks and my baseball card collection. I had a closet, but most of the time, my clothes were scattered around on the floor.
    But as different as Nadine and I were, we had things in common too. We both liked movies and animals and being outdoors. S’mores and ice cream and ghost stories. Shooting stars and fireflies.
    And Shadow Lake. Hardly a day went by that we didn’t spend part of it either on or in the water: paddling the old canoe along the shoreline, fishing (though I had to put the worm on her hook and take off any fish she caught), or swimming (even though Nadine proclaimed the water to be “like ice” every time). We’d cannonball off the raft and playleapfrog and Marco Polo in the water until our skin was shriveled and our lips were blue. Nadine was a better swimmer than I was, because she’d had swimming lessons, in a pool, but I could hold my breath underwater a lot longer than she could, one reason being that Nadine hardly ever put her head underwater.
    “You never know what’s under there,” she said, meaning fish, frogs, and crayfish. Nadine yelped every time anything so much as a minnow swam past her legs.
    Nadine was right about the water being cold, too. She’d inch into the water, a step at a time, squealing like a pig, but I just dove in. Better to get it over quick.
    That’s how Nadine’s older brother, Keith, swam, too. He’d barrel into the water, splashing us, which only made Nadine squeal louder.
    “I’m telling Mom,” Nadine shouted.
    “Oh, for crying out loud, it’s just water,” Keith said. “C’mon, Blue, I’ll race you to the raft.”
    I liked feeling I was part of Nadine’s family, even if it was just for the summer. I especially loved the nights when I got to sleep over. Mr. Tilton would build us a campfire by the lake, and Nadine and I roasted marshmallows for s’mores and watched for shooting stars zipping across the sky. We lay tucked into musty army sleeping bags, slathered with bug repellent, whispering and giggling and telling ghost stories to each other until we were both too scared to sleep. One night, while Nadine was telling the story aboutthe escaped murderer with a hook for an arm, Keith snuck up on us, and just as Nadine got to the part where the woman hears the
scrape, scrape, scrape
of the hook on the roof of the car, Keith tapped both of us on the shoulders. Nadine screamed so loud I thought