(You) Set Me on Fire Read Online Free

into my room and looked around with an air of practical optimism I would eventually come to admire.
    “Okay,” she said finally, and then, carefully choosing and spacing out her words, “I guess I just figured I’d come up and see if maybe I could hook you into coming down. I mean, you know, it’s orientation week.” The sparsely decorated surfaces of my room slid past her gaze: my bare-looking bed with its oatmeal-coloured sheets, my computer with its fuzzy-TV screensaver, my stack of black journals piled up on the desk.
    Not your typical teen dream mansion.
    “Maybe I’m … maybe I’m just not much of an orientation-week person,” I shrugged, stating the obvious.
    Taking a step backward, Carly tilted her head and looked sad and suddenly still.
    “Oh um, right. I guess, you know, I thought maybe I’d just come up and see. I mean, maybe you could just come down for one slice?”
    Clearly, this monster called orientation was a stickier beast tha things I needed to be doing-10n the phenoms of high school: physical education class, overnight camp spirit week, Halloween—all things I’d managed to detour in past years through a complex system of avoidance and denial.
    I think the problem with orientation week, narrowing it down, is that even if it is a fake holiday, a college creation, people believe it’s real. It’s like Santa Claus: everyone knows he’s not an actual ambassador of Christmas, and yet we all get a thrill out of pretending we don’t. The people who make the biggest show of believing are the people with the most spirit. People who refuse to hang stockings by the chimney, on the other hand, are really sad or assholes.
    My refusal to take part in frosh was obviously making Carly … sad?
    Why it didn’t make her think I was just an asshole is anyone’s guess. I suppose that after several years of having people read my silence as some sign of asshole-ness, I was kind of touched by that.
    “You know what,” I said, after what must have been a long silence, “I’m done. Putting things away I mean.”
    “Seriously? Yay!” Carly chirped. “There’s pizza and if you hurry you can get a slice in before we go up to Alpha Delta Phi. There’s a concert thing too but a bunch of us are going to skip out and go to Alpha.”
    I half expected Carly to reach for my hand like some sort of camp counsellor, but instead she did a jumpturn and walked out the door to the elevator.
    As we waited for it I casually leaned on the fire extinguisher case, pretending not to be reading the instructions, while Carly whistled the opening lines to what sounded like an old game-show theme song.
    “What’s Alpha?” I finally asked.
    “The fraternity?” Carly hopped through the rickety elevator doors (which had evidently been painted and then scratched up on a yearly basis). “For the party?”
    Clearly, I was about to fail my very first college cool test.
    “Is it like an all-ages thing? Or. Just. Because I don’t have, uh, ID. I mean, I HAVE ID but I don’t have …”
    “Fake ID.”
    “Yeah.”
    “What do you use to go to bars at home?”
    FAIL.
    “Um, I don’t really. I’m.”
    Well, let’s see. You don’t need fake ID to go to the movies so … it’s never really been a problem.
    Finally I stuttered, “I skipped a year in junior high … so. I’m even … younger. Just, uh.”
    I watched as the gears in Carly’s brain clicked forward. “Right. You know what? Don’t worry about it. I got this.”
    On the main floor, the quivering mass of women I’d pushed through earlier had concentrated into a solid block of the newly arrived. As I walked through the corridor lined with framed pictures of Dylan Hall in earlier (black and white) days of tennis and posh picnics (apparently), the hum of their voices was not unlike a hive of angry bees—except there was laughing. So a hive of laughing bees, if that’s possible.
    a book in the library.?0In the main common area, outfitted with a fancy flatscreen TV