The Sound of Your Voice, Only Really Far Away Read Online Free

were happy to see her, and Marylin was almost happy to see them—members of her pack, the ones who were going to keep her safe from the wolves. But when Mazie cupped her hand overher mouth and whispered something into Ashley’s ear, her eyes trained on Marylin the whole time, Marylin didn’t feel safe at all. In fact, she was pretty sure the wolves were a lot closer than she’d thought.

from up and down, and still somehow
    Lorna wanted to try out for the spring musical, but Kate wasn’t sure she was the sort of person who tried out for things anymore. She had skipped basketball tryouts in November, because she didn’t think basketball went with her black boots or her guitar. She was sort of sorry about it now, especially since her dad worked with Marcie Grossman’s mom, and Marcie Grossman played power forward. Her dad was always dropping little tidbits of the girls’ basketball team news at dinner, giving Kate pointed looks while he did, like he was saying, This news should be about you.
    Maybe. Kate couldn’t decide. On the onehand, she missed being around other girls who liked to play basketball, and she missed how she felt after a good game. On the other hand, could you really play basketball and write poetry at the same time? Could you really be the kind of person who was a jock and a guitar player? When tryouts came around, Kate had had a hard time putting the two halves of her life together, and so she decided to pass on basketball this year.
    “If we try out for the spring musical, we’ll be expanding our horizons,” Lorna told Kate in Creative Writing Club while they waited for everyone to get there. “At least that’s what my mom says. She’s completely freaked out by my life right now because I don’t have two million friends.”
    “You don’t need two million friends,” Kate said, pulling her poetry notebook out of her backpack. “She knows that, right?”
    “But I only have one friend,” Lorna said. “Well, let me revise that: I only have one friend in real life, which would be you, by the way. I have hundreds of World of Warcraft friends,but to my mom, they don’t count because they’re computer friends.”
    Lorna was obsessed with World of Warcraft and spent most of her Friday and Saturday nights playing it online with ten gajillion other people, although she wasn’t friends with all of them, just the ones in her guild. Kate had tried to get interested, but she just wasn’t a fantasy person. She liked to be involved with stuff that actually happened with real people or people who could be real if they didn’t live in the pages of a book.
    “I just don’t get why it bugs your mom so much that you only have one close friend,” Kate said. “Isn’t that better than having ten so-so friends?”
    “My mom’s deal right now is that all the stuff I like to do is solo—cooking, reading and writing, World of Warcraft,” Lorna explained. “Even though World of Warcraft isn’t solo. But according to my mom it is, because it’s me sitting alone in a room in front of a computer.”
    Kate waved her arm to indicate the whole ofthe classroom. “But this isn’t solo. Isn’t she glad you’re in a club?”
    Lorna shook her head sadly. “It’s not enough. But if I’m in the musical, that’s at least fifty people. And I have to pick one more activity besides Creative Writing Club or I can’t do World of Warcraft anymore, so I figure the musical is my best bet, especially if you’ll do it with me.”
    “I don’t know,” Kate said, doodling a guitar on her notebook. “Can I think about it?”
    “The auditions are Friday after school,” Lorna told her. “And the sign-up for auditioning ends tomorrow, so you have exactly one day to think about it.”
    “Okay,” Kate said, and then her entire body went electric, which meant that Matthew Holler had entered the room.
    To Kate’s disappointment, Matthew sat down at a desk on the other side of the room. It seemed to Kate that