Handcuffs Read Online Free

really skanked up her grandma’s gift.” The nerve of Kandace Freemont, coming over here wearing a robe and nothing else. Pulling the robe open in front of him. Her grandma probably thinks she’s using it when she gets out of the shower. A red and white Santa robe is exactly the sort of gift my grandma would send, if she hadn’t sent me a bath set with talcum powder instead. Who the hell uses talcum powder, anyway? It’s like crushed-up chalk, and it doesn’t even smell good.
    “Some girls are like that,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he approved or not. I didn’t kiss him goodbye.
    Heading home, I can’t help glancing at the house to the left of his, where a hot senior girl named Erin Glasgow lives. I remind myself that I don’t have any reason to feel threatened anymore. Doesn’t matter if he sits out on his deck so he can see Erin lounging by the pool. I don’t have to care about him anymore. He’s my ex-boyfriend, and that’s not a boyfriend at all.
    Erin is actually pretty cool. She was in my chemistry class last year. I skipped the intro to chemistry course, which is why I was with upperclassmen, and woefully unprepared. Erin helped me out a couple of times with stuff that my sophomore brain couldn’t quite grasp. It was lucky, I guess, that before finals they moved me out of chemistry and put me in comparative religion. Kyle Henessy was one of the seniors in my chemistry class.
    “It may not seem fair to you,” Mr. Dawson, our assistant principal, said as I sat in his office. “Kyle did something wrong, and you didn’t. We take sexual harassment very seriously here. But he’s a senior and you’re just a sophomore. You have plenty of time to take chemistry, and he needs it to graduate.”
    When I went back to the chem lab to gather my books, Kyle had his head on his desk and Erin Glasgow was trying to comfort him. And so my sister’s irresistibleness screwed up my sophomore schedule as well as Kyle’s entire life. Too bad Paige isn’t kindhearted like Erin Glasgow, who I can’t bring myself to hate, even though I find myself despising most girls if the ex even glances at them.

 
    6
     
    “P arker, come on in, honey,” my mom calls.
    Yeah, right. She knows I hate coming into a movie that’s halfway over. At least, she should know. I feel a rush of irrational anger. Paige is sitting between our parents and Preston is on the floor. They are all sharing a big bowl of microwave popcorn. So happy and content. What do they need me there for, anyway? I thought they would be upset that I walked out and missed the big Christmas dinner event. Did they even miss me?
    “She has to check her e-mail,” my sister says from the living room. “Seriously, do you think it’s normal for a sixteen-year-old girl to be on the computer as much as she is?”
    “She isn’t like you,” Dad says. For a moment I wonder if he means something good or something bad. Then I look in at Paige, sitting in front of the TV. Paige had a social life, Paige had tons of friends. How could they compare me to her and see anything good?
    I grab some chips and a bottled water and head up to my room to fire up my PC. The Dell desktop that was top-ofthe-line like two years ago.
    My in-box is empty. I imagine the AOL voice saying, “You have no new messages.” The voice of social inferiority. I go to Hotmail and click to open a new account. Apparently, to open a Hotmail account you have to have a regular e-mail account. I use my other screen name, P216P, to create a dummy account. Like I said, my parents act like I’m a computer genius techno-nerd, but mainly I just push buttons and see what happens. Of course, I’ve done it enough that I usually push the right ones.
    I have to find some way to make him remember and pay attention and realize the things that keep me up at night, the things that tie me in knots and make me want to hyperventilate at the same time. And so I type my masterpiece. Everything that I know he wants me to