Sister Mischief Read Online Free Page A

from Guatemala when he was five and is so charming and easy to love that you almost don’t notice his right arm is gone. He was just born without it, some kind of congenital thing. Anyway, until last year — that is, until she really started chilling full-time with us — Tess spent a lot of her time with her Old Best Friend, the wicked stepsister, Mary Ashley Baumgarten. I think Tess found other believers easier to relate to for a while.
     
    “
They’re
the posers?” Tess asks incredulously. “We’re the suburban white girls trying to be rappers.”
     
    “Speak for yourself,” Rowie says pointedly.
     
    “Well, yeah,” Tess says. “Sorry.”
     
    “The possibility of our being posers, or people thinking we are, doesn’t make MashBaum a better person than she is,” I say. “That girl’s a straight-up gay-hater.”
     
    “Which is why we should stop talking about her. Spot me,” Marcy orders me as she reaches into her purse for a Parliament. She and MashBaum are old nemeses, and it still causes some friction. The car swerves.
     
    Tess screams. “Are you effing crazy? Keep your mother-loving eyes on the road! You’re going to get us pulled over!” Tess always tries not to swear. After a while, you start to find it endearing.
     
    “Dude, can you chill out?” Marcy says. “We’re fine.”
     
    “Marcy, that’s gross,” Tess whines as Marcy lights up, coughing for effect. “You’re bringing me back to Ada chain-smoking while she drove me to grade school. I have to sing.”
     
    “If you don’t look at the road sooner or later,
I’m
calling the cops,” Rowie says.
     
    “Dude, I’ve got the five-oh karmically taken care of this week. Lightning ain’t gonna strike twice,” I say with confidence.
     
    “Did you get busted for something?” Rowie asks.
     
    “Like, something to do with the fact that my mother is swearing she saw you in Charlie Knutsen’s car last night?” Tess asks.
     
    “
Shut up.
Is that true? Is
that
why you never texted me?” Marcy says.
     
    “Jesus, this is all getting so teen rom-com. So maybe I got busted by Darlene and then by the cops during my first tour of a boy’s backseat. Do I have to, like, get my period and cry next?” I say.
     
    “I heard the cops broke up the parking lot party later, too,” Marcy says. “Holyhill sucks so hard.”
     
    “Can I just come out and ask the obvious question here?” Tess asks more insistently. “What were you and your Superman panties doing in the back of a car with a male
Homo sapien
?”
     
    “Key word there being
homo,
” Marcy adds, snickering. I blush, exactly one second before I start hating myself for blushing.
     
    “Charlie Knutsen? Surprising.” Rowie regards me with curiosity, then bursts into laughter.
     
    “Did you —?” Tess asks, knowing that sentence finishes itself. I feel myself go from pink to maroon.
     
    “You so did! Look at her! You went to the bone zone with Chuckles!” Marcy crows.
     
    “Oh, my God, I barely did,” I say. “It was so gross.”
     
    “You dirty little hooligan, you’re going straight on us,” Marcy hoots, dissolving into yuks.
     
    Rowie reaches up and ruffles my hair. “So why’d you decide to make Chuckles’s day, anyway?”
     
    “I don’t know, man. I just wanted to be sure, or something.” I pause. “I mean, my pops’s been through enough raising me on his own already. The least I could do was check for sure before I told him once and for all that he completely failed at raising me normal.”
     
    “Queer little word,
normal,
” Rowie says, smiling at me.
     
    Tess starts to make a sound, then stops. I turn around.
     
    “What?”
     
    “You know what I’m going to say.”
     
    “Tess.”
     
    “I’m just saying that
maybe
it’s
possible
that you’re sixteen and you just weren’t ready.”
     
    “Okay, let’s take a ride on the real-talk express. Is this a Christian thing?”
     
    “Of course, but not in the way you