Twisted Read Online Free

down. I threw a bunch of lunch stuff in a grocery bag, grabbed a gallon of iced tea out of the fridge, and headed outside.
    Yoda was waiting for me on the steps, holding the lunch his mother packed for him in an insulated bag. His energy drinks were in the cooler that he was sitting on. He looked up from his comic book. “Thought you might have left the country.”
    Yoda wasn’t his real name, of course. Calvin Hodges was renamed Yoda after he flipped about Star Wars in fifth grade. He spent way too much time gaming (more than me, even) and he could mind-meld hard drives. But Star Wars, that wasn’t a geek thing for him. It was his religion. When the assholes of the world beat him up for this, he’d act like a Buddhist monk being tortured by Communist soldiers. He’d smile. Freaked them out. The Force was with him.
    “You heard?” I asked.
    “Everybody heard, moron.” He picked up the cooler and followed me down the walk. “They heard that you went on a rampage and attacked Bethany Milbury. That you got hauled away in handcuffs again. That Bethany almost died.”
    “It wasn’t like that at all. It was an accident. But I don’t want to talk about it.”
    “Did you punch Chip in the mouth?”
    “I’m going to punch you in the mouth if you don’t shut up.”
    “All right, all right. God, you’re so touchy. There’s the truck.”
     
    It was a fifteen-minute ride in Mr. Pirelli’s pickup to Evergreen Haven, the nursing home where we sent my grandparents to die.
    Pirelli gave out the assignments. The Honduran guys were in charge of mowing. Yoda had to edge the flower beds and blow the sidewalks clean. I had to run the weed whacker and dig a hole for a blue spruce using a pick and a shovel.
    “Ask your buddy for help,” Pirelli said when I complained.
    We both looked at Yoda slathering SPF-50 sunscreen on his arms. He was hired out of desperation after most of the regular crew went back to college.
    “Good luck.” The boss chuckled as he jumped into his truck.
    I decapitated dandelions all morning, leaving carnage and death strewn in my path.
     
    When Yoda whistled for our lunch break, I walked over to a white oak that would give us some decent shade. I stripped off my shirt and hung it over a branch, then poured ice water over my head and let it cut through the sweat and dirt caked around my neck.
    Yoda was eating the white-bread-mayo-lettuce-bologna sandwich cut into four pieces he’d had every day since first grade. I pulled out the half loaf of bread and peanut butter and jelly jars from my grocery bag and slapped together three sandwiches which I inhaled, stopping only to guzzle iced tea. The Honduran guys found their own patch of shade to eat in.
    I dumped out some Oreos and tossed the package to Yoda.
    “So, like I was saying,” he said as he pulled out a cookie, “everybody thinks you got busted again.”
    “You weren’t saying anything, and we’re not talking about it.”
    He twisted the Oreo open. “Are we talking about school?”
    “Hell, no.”
    “How about my new Sith Lords in Congress theory?”
    “Not.” I looked in my bag again. I’d forgotten the Doritos.
    “Can we talk about Hannah?”
    I put the jars back in the bag and drained the last of the iced tea. “Friends don’t date friends’ sisters. It’s a rule. Back to work.”
    “Rules are made to be broken. We’ve been IMing every night, you know.” Yoda scraped the icing off his Oreo. “She thinks I’m ‘sweet.’” He stuck the two cookie halves together and devoured them. “Look, this Bethany thing will blow over. Relax, you should.”
    “Shut up, Yoda.”
    I left my shirt hanging on the tree and went back to work.
     
    The five-foot circumference of the hole I was supposed to dig was marked with pink spray paint. I just had to make a hole as deep as the circle was wide.
    I used my boot to push the shovel blade into the dirt, bent my knees, put my back into it and lifted. Ten minutes into the work, I was