Charm and Consequence Read Online Free

would pick a character who is less … weak and confused, I guess. You chose the Wife of Bath last time, right? Who was horrible, but she wasn’t a weak character, at least.”
    “You mean unlike someone strong and noble like Hamlet?” I shoot back, knowing that I should just pick up my books and leave, but I seem frozen to the spot. I must be running some kind of masochist marathon, to see how much pain or irritation I can withstand. Still, there’s something kind of exciting about talking to Michael. No one else has ever made me feel this weird mix of exhilaration and aggravation every time we exchange a few words. What’s wrong with me?
    “No, like Lady Macbeth, maybe?” he suggests. “She seems more your style.”
    “Because I would nag my husband until he kills somebody just to shut me up? You’re too kind.”
    “What? What are you talking about?” He catches himself and looks at me more coolly now. “As you point out, how could I say you're like any character when I hardly know you? You seem like a strong person, though, and Lady Macbeth is a strong character and that's all I meant–"
    Before he can finish, a male voice rings out “Endicott!” way too loud for a library. Michael glowers as we both turn to see who it is.
    It’s Jeremy Wrentham, whom I've noticed in the halls many times before. No one can help noticing him. He’s movie-star good-looking, all gold hair and green eyes; tall; athletic-looking without being bulked up; with cheekbones that curve and arch at the same time somehow … Let’s just say that if Cassie had the power of God to create man, she would have created Jeremy Wrentham.
    “Wrentham,” Michael acknowledges.
    Jeremy tosses his backpack onto the table and turns to me with a grin that could sell ten thousand tubes of toothpaste. “And who is this?” he asks.
    “This is Georgiana Barrett. Georgia, this is Jeremy Wrentham.” Judging from his grimace, the weight of this social nicety is pressing down hard on Michael.
    When Jeremy extends his hand to me and I take it, I feel a little jolt run up my arm like the time I touched the electric fence at my uncle’s farm to see what would happen.
    While I usually loathe preppie, entitled males—witness one Michael Endicott—there’s something wildly appealing about Jeremy Wrentham. Like Michael’s, Jeremy’s family is important in this town. They don’t have a street named after them like the Endicotts, but Jeremy’s dad is a corporate lawyer and his mom is on a lot of the town beautification committees that my mom wants to be invited to join. But Jeremy is more human than Michael.
    While Jeremy's clothes are as expensive and classic as everyone else’s around here (maybe more so) he wears them in a way that announces that he doesn’t really care about that. Jeremy’s a study in slightly disheveled elegance every day, with the cuffs of his shirts slightly frayed or a tiny moth hole in the shoulder of his sweater, whereas Michael always looks like he’s just stepped off an ironing board, having just been pressed and starched himself. Jeremy seems so at ease in the world; when he’s sitting half sprawled on a bench in the cafeteria it’s like he’s lounging in the den at home. When he’s talking to someone, it’s so effortless, whether it’s a goggle-eyed freshman girl like Cassie or Vito the maintenance guy or the school principal. He always seems like he belongs wherever he is and with whomever he happens to be with.
    He’s smiling at me and his hand lingers in mine.
    “Endicott and I are both Pemberley School dropouts,” he says with the kind of smile that would make him a very successful serial killer. Anyone would follow him into the back of even the shadiest looking panel van, or down a dark alley. Anywhere, really, if he smiled at them like he's smiling at me now.
    I fear I may be blushing.
    “We didn’t leave for the same reasons,” Michael says as he picks up the books from the table.
    “No, no!”