The Inseparables Read Online Free Page B

told her. “Your well-being is the most important thing.” Which was why she was here, in the back of what everyone on campus called the paddy wagon, a stout electrified vehicle used to ferry delinquent students up to the administration building.
    “First off, I’m normal,” she said as they drove. “Perfectly normal. And I never sent the picture. Not to him, not to anyone. He stole it from my phone. You were there. I told the dean this.”
    Abernathy turned. “I’m not in charge.”
    “But do you believe me?” she asked.
    He shrugged, as if to say, It doesn’t matter what I think.
    “Why doesn’t anyone believe me?” she cried. All of this was exactly what she’d wanted to say earlier, in the dean’s office, but hadn’t. As they went up the hill, she thought she detected a hint of a smirk on his face. This was how it had been these last few days. The onslaught of public shame. Someone’s extended finger reaching out to mockingly tease the delicate skin of her earlobe. What did it matter whether this man, or any man, believed her? She had seen this elsewhere, at her old school in Crestview, certainly. The existence of a naked picture automatically worked to discount whatever academic or personal currency or dignity a person might have earned by, say, being alive. Every innocent gesture assumed a sexual intimation. Laughter followed her. She was branded now.
    From the back pocket of her uniform-issue slacks, she felt her phone buzzing, and then, a moment later, heard it buzzing against the hard plastic seat.
    Abernathy shook his head. “Look, I’m just trying to help you out. At least silence the thing.”
    The phone was nothing special. It was one of the three or four models of phones everyone else had. A present for her fifteenth birthday, it was titanium and white with a mirror-buffed screen. She was rarely without it. To her parents, it represented a digital lasso, a way to keep tabs on her. The embedded GPS showed as a blip on their computer screen a few hundred miles away. To her it reflected the absolute totality of her previously minuscule social life. She felt an appropriate love for it, or as much love as possible for something that could not love her back. The list of such things was short: her phone, her stuffed animals, Morrissey, the collected works of the Brontë sisters.
    The phone was how Charlie had first come into her life. A tiny New Jersey kid with mild color blindness and Keanu Reeves’s hair, he was preternaturally gifted with computers. On her second day of school he had somehow acquired her number from the school database and sent her a message halfway through a gruelingly bleak lecture on species extinction: Polar bears, blah blah blah: we haven’t met. I’m the other beautiful person in the room.
    The phone was how they always got in touch, how he, at midnight on a Thursday, for instance, would tell her that he was stoned across campus watching Batman on mute, or Superman on mute, or Iron Man on mute, and that he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Come over, swim over, run over. Let’s hang, get high, let’s fuck around. Sometimes she would read these aloud to her roommates, but more often than not she simply stewed over them in silence. Turn on the fucking volume, she’d written back once. Or watch a better fucking movie. He was undeterred. Send me a picture of yourself, he had said. She took a picture of herself smiling. You know that’s not what I meant. C’mon. This was the first week of school, and it did not stop until a week ago. A hundred and eighty mornings of predictable bullshit. His commitment to the cause, she was ashamed to admit, flattered her, but not enough to give him what he wanted. Months went on like this. In public, he made kissy faces at her, blew in her ear while they stood in line for food. In chapel, he passed her notes with plagiarized love poems by Petrarch. Still, he would not stop asking.
    The universe of fifteen-year-old boys could be divided