Please, Please, Please Read Online Free

“Sure.”
    “Don’t,” Morgan said.
    “What?” Zoe asked. “You changed your mind already?” She smiled at me and then at Morgan and then back at me. She has the friendliest smile—you can see her molars; it makes you have to smile back.
    Kids were passing us going in to school. “You coming?” Olivia Pogostin asked us.
    I nodded and looked up at my book bag on the wall, next to Morgan’s. “Zoe?” I asked. “Could you grab mine and Morgan’s bags? We’re too short.” Morgan and I used to share a chair at each other’s kitchen tables, and her mother would say look at the Tinies! A little pair of Tinies! It was a sort of thing with us, being little. I wanted to show her we’re still friends.
    Morgan didn’t smile back. She glanced at Zoe, then grabbed her own bag. I guess she’s grown a lot since last year. “I can get my own,” she said.
    Zoe pulled my bag down and, handing it to me, said, “I’ll try to talk to Jonas today.”
    “No,” Morgan said. “I hate him. He walks like a chicken. Ew.” She walked fast into school, yelling, “Hey, Olivia—wait up!” Zoe and I shrugged at each other and followed her in. My legs felt like two hundred pounds each.

five
    P ermission slips for apple picking were handed out in homeroom. “Yes!” Lou Hochstetter said when he got his. “Apple picking!”
    “Ah,” said Ms. Cress. “Something excites Lou besides World War Two artillery?”
    “I like other stuff,” Lou protested. “I like, um . . .”
    “Yes?” asked Ms. Cress. She’s always about to laugh, which I think is unusual for a math/science teacher. But she’s also really young, like twenty-something, and she wears short skirts with boots—except when she’s coaching the girls’ soccer team, when she wears sneakers, short-shorts, and T-shirts. All the boys come to soccer games at least partly because they’re all in love with her. It would be typical of Lou to say, “I like you!”
    But he didn’t. Even Lou isn’t that bold. He said, “Um . . .”
    “Hay-stacking!” Gideon Weld coughed into his hands.
    “I like the Internet,” Lou said, sinking into his chair. He’s the tallest boy in our grade and sort of a doof, but also funny. His mother is running for mayor. “And I like apple picking.”
    Ms. Cress raised her eyebrows, twice, and said, “Mmm-hmm.” We all knew what she was thinking about. “Work with me, people,” she said. She wrote the information on the board for us to fill in the blanks of our permission slips.
    I love trips, and I’ve been looking forward to this one for six years. It’s tradition at Boggs Middle that the seventh grade starts out the year going apple picking. It’s supposed to promote unity. Last year on the trip, two couples got caught making out behind a haystack. The whole school found out, of course, including Ms. Cress and every other teacher. “Hay-stacking” immediately became our new dirty word. The two couples were practically movie stars for a week. We mostly say making out or scooping, now, but “hay-stacking” still means a romantic, forbidden kind of kissing. Nobody says it out loud—you sort of have to clear your throat with it: “Hay-stacking.”
    “Oh, no,” I heard myself groan when Ms. Cress wrote Monday, September 21, on the board.
    “Something wrong, CJ?” Ms. Cress asked.
    I shook my head, but then asked, “What time will we get back?”
    “Six thirty,” Ms. Cress said and wrote at the same time. “Now that’s a week from today, ’K? So we need these permission slips back pronto!”
    I rested my face in my hands all through the announcements. Even after the bell rang, while Ms. Cress was yelling, “And, hey, really try to get these permission slips back to me fast—we’ve got a contest going in the teachers’ lunchroom, and I want to win the cookie!” I didn’t look up. She thinks she’s hip, such a kid. Teachers should just realize they are adults.
    I finally folded my permission slip, stuck