This Is What I Want to Tell You Read Online Free

what that is supposed to look like. That maybe that is why I ride the middle all the time—never offending anyone, never getting a hard time, but never much standing out either. For a long time we blamed you for anything that seemed bad in our family—my sister and I did. But now I’m starting to think that blame gives you too much credit. Anyway, you’re not here to deny or defend so what’s the point.
    * * *
    I walked my bike into the school lot and locked it to the still-empty rack. I crossed through the basketball court, filling up now with early morning players. I nodded a few greetings and a lot of the faces nodded back. It was the first day of school and there wasn’t anyone I was looking for and there wasn’t anyone I was afraid of. It had always been that way. I kind of slid through the rules, and that was fine with me.
    I found I was all good as long as I stayed on the cross-country team. I could do all of the socially unacceptable academic things I wanted—honor roll and debating and Model U.N. and Literary Mag, slipping under the social radar as long as I was a runner. I could walk that line.
    Plus, you’re good-looking, Noelle said last spring.
    Was I? I believed her. The way it was with Noelle and me, we said what the other couldn’t see or admit—we never bullshitted. We couldn’t. We shared the same instincts.
    After Noelle said that, I started to notice the way some of the girls looked at me, like I could have gone up to any one of them and started talking and maybe even invited her to a movie or whatever and it would be okay. She’d probably say yes and it would all be pretty easy.
    But nothing about that appealed to me. All I’m saying is, I didn’t feel like hanging out with some girl who had nothing to say, who was boring as hell, just because I could.
    The locker room was empty. Anyone who was in school this early was on the basketball court. After I took a shower I left my running clothes in my locker and went out to the courtyard. It was filling up now, a lot of yelling and shrieking and high-fiving and hand-shaking and awkward standing around. I made a beeline for the Class of ’76 oak tree and sat under it and took out my book. I was still reading Walden , which Lace had given me over the summer. The thing is, it bored the hell out of me and half the time I wanted Henry David Thoreau to shut up and relax a little bit. But there were two things that kept me reading.
    1. It was my dad’s book. That’s a long story, but having a book that had been in his hands, that said Dario Avelli in scratchy faded-black ink on the inside cover, a name he’d written when he was maybe just a little bit older than me, inside a book he’d carried around with him and given to maybe the first girl he’d loved, all of that made me unable to stop reading it.
    2. The truth is, even with all the rambling that sometimes drove me to nodding off, I was kind of into the ideas HDT was talking about. The idea of isolating yourself from everything so you could understand it better. That part I could get.
    Hey, you.
    I looked up. Keeley was standing over me. It was hard to see her—the sun came down the back of her, gold where her hair was and green where her sweater was, and the front of her was dark, shadowed.
    Hey. I closed the book.
    You totally left me, Noelle said, standing behind her.
    Hey. I stood up. I’m sorry, I wanted to run before …
    Whatever, Noelle said. Listen, I need to find Jessica. K, are you coming? Do you wanna just see me in Chem?
    Noelle was already walking away.
    Okay, Keeley said. I didn’t know if she was talking to me or Noelle.
    Hi, I said again. I felt ridiculous.
    Noelle is being so weird with me. It’s like she knows. How could she know?
    Keeley was talking about it out loud now. That made it real. I’d kissed Keeley Shipley.
    She doesn’t know, I said. I wanted to talk about anything else.
    Hey, listen, I said. The activity fair is now, before first period. I want to sign up