Shine Your Light on Me Read Online Free Page A

free and you could tell; her shoes were ratty; she had a hand-me-down purse of such a violent yellow that it assaulted the eyes; her hair was dirty blonde and greasy and thinning; her nose seemed to always be running; her eyes always looked moist.
    Yet she was a pretty good person, despite all that, he thought. Stupid in some ways, maybe just in the way she hoped and dreamed that she would do something worthwhile with her life. Bobby had tried to talk about it with her once, asking her how she was supposed to build castles when all her parents and life had supplied her with for material was dry sand. But she was stubborn, and that might help her. And far as he’d seen she wasn’t afraid of working, which was more than he could say for himself.
    He walked around the girl’s locker room and wondered what Cindy was up to at that very moment. Probably reading, soaking up some kind of knowledge she figured she could use to improve her circumstances. Bobby shrugged and pulled a bomb from his pack. He taped it under a bench in the center of the room. He wasn’t sure if anybody had first hour P.E. but it didn’t hurt to put one there just in case.
    The enormity of what he was doing hadn’t really had time to sink in. How many kids would die? How many teachers? There were only three hundred students, junior high through to seniors like himself. There were thirty teachers, a few groundsmen, about a half dozen women that worked in the kitchen, preparing lunch. He estimated that the bombs would kill at least half, and injure the other half.
    Roughly three hundred and forty people.
    A lot of funerals. A lot of flowers.
    Walking back to the door, he paused, unsure why he was hesitating. But then it came to him that Cindy didn’t listen to him like she should, and he feared that her too hopeful ass might come into school tomorrow anyway, and really she was the only person he’d met who had really given him a fair shake. He passed kids every day who never asked how he was doing, if he was all right, mostly because they didn’t like him, but some just because of who his father was and they suspected he might be some kind of rat. But he wasn’t and he could never prove that to anybody if they didn’t offer him the chance to mess up.
    The cafeteria was quiet but far off he could hear the drone of the floor polisher. It sounded like it was on the other side of the school, but in all that stillness, among all that concrete and glass, it was hard to tell how far away exactly the man was working. His melancholy bothered him, and he felt as if he were somehow jinxing himself.
    A couple minutes later he was standing outside the office. His dad’s secretary and the teacher’s lounge and his father’s private room were on the other side of the glass crisscrossed with steel wire. It reminded him of a warden’s chambers. He went inside, through the swinging half door that led into the rear quarters, the teachers’ breakroom, the counselor’s office, his dad’s room. The sign on the closed door read Principal Russell.
    Bobby frowned.
    He started sweating.
    He’d saved this room last because it made him feel so many things he didn’t like to question, let alone explore. Inside the room he sat in his dad’s chair. It was expensive, leather, high-backed. The desk was organized, nothing out of place, the pictures of their family and the awards his father had earned were straight on the wall.
    A big sham. This was only the man he pretended to be. Nobody really knew what he was like at home once he took off his suit and let his real skin breathe.
     
    • • •
     
    Aria pulled back into LeDoux’s bar at ten after eight. The snow was giving way to rain but the white wet powder was everywhere, and it slushed beneath her shoes as she pulled Jessica from the back seat and held her hand and approached the door full of trepidation.
    At first she thought it was because of what she caught Pine doing to her granddaughter, but it was more than