Vesper Read Online Free Page A

horribly ashamed that I can't get past all the hobbit singing to get into the story. Instead I went browsing online.
    Maybe it's just me, but hearing about someone my own age, someone I vaguely knew, dying ... it wouldn't leave me alone. Forget my giant DVD case filled with movies about teenagers getting murdered—I'd seen so much CGI and makeup and red-dyed corn syrup that when it came to the idea of another teenager dying it never seemed real. I'd never really considered that one day I could walk outside and get shot, and it would be all over.
    So maybe that's why I Googled "Emily Cooke" and spent hours reading about her. There were local news articles about the mysterious murder, of course, and a whole slew of blog posts from people who'd known her, talking about their shock. Some people posted letters of hers they'd saved—
    surprisingly well-written letters that contained amusing haikus and clever, off-kilter short stories about the person she had written to.
    Eventually I ended up on Emily Cooke's own blog. I clicked through the pictures of her smiling with her friends, then started to read all the comments from people saying how much they'd miss her.
    In the middle of those comments, I saw this:
    Terrizzle Sept 8, 4:54 p.m.

    sad ur dead emily ur much hoter than fat Emily My first thought: "Terrizzle" (real name Terrance Sedgwick) should not be in eleventh grade and writing like that. Capitalization, punctuation, and spelling words out aren't that difficult, especially in what's supposed to be a message to a dearly departed friend ... or a hot girl he wanted to hook up with, whatever.
    My second thought: Wait, fat Emily "? There are—or, well, were—only two Emilys in our class, which meant...
    Oh. Oh no.
    Here's a fun fact about me: Like the partial truth I'd told Dawn the night before, the last thing I ever wanted was for guys like Terrance to look at, think about, or talk about me to other people. The mere idea was completely terrifying. Even so, I guess I had always sort of fantasized that a guy would see me and get past the ponytail and the glasses and the giant sweatshirt to discover how insanely awesome I am, then come and whisk me off into that magical teenager fairyland where everyone else gets to prance around.
    But nope. A guy, some random guy at school, looked at me and thought, What a heifer. What a pig. And then wished, if anyone named Emily had to die, that it had been me. The "fat" one. That way he could continue to think about Emily Cooke's hotness without having to feel weird about how she's now lying on a cold slab in a morgue somewhere.
    I blinked and stared at the screen some more, feeling like there were crowds of pretty teenagers standing in my room and ogling me, judging me. I could almost see long gone Sarah Plainsworth giving me that withering glare of hers. My cheeks burned, and though I didn't really believe the words I was about to say, I whispered to myself, Tin not fat."
    It didn't matter what I said to myself, though, because I knew this to be true: All that mattered was how others perceived you. If others saw me and thought, Big ol´ fatty hambeast, then that's who I was. And now everyone at school would see this and know all about what Terrance Sedgwick thought of previously invisible me.
    The clock ticked away on my computer from 8:07 to 8:11 and still I couldn't stop from sitting there, staring at my computer screen and feeling utterly embarrassed by that one stupid comment.
    And then, at 8:14, my guts twisted and I gasped.

    A massive shudder ran through my body, as though the ground was quaking beneath me, and I fell out of my chair onto the floor. I clutched my stomach, clenched my teeth, and felt my toes curl. Another twist inside my gut and I dry heaved, but my stomach was unwilling to release whatever poisons I was sure were swirling inside of me.
    I tried to call out, but the only sound I could make was a pitiful squeak.
    Not that anyone would hear me if I did yell,