Torched Read Online Free Page A

like?”
    Coyote pressed his lips together before answering. “A consumer. He’s a stockbroker. We don’t have a lot in common. He doesn’t have that much in common with my mom, either.”
    “Do your parents mind that you aren’t going to school and you’re not living at home?”
    “Are you kidding?” Coyote gave me a twist of a smile. “It kills my dad. Absolutely kills him.”
    He held open the door to Village Coffee. It was only a block from a Starbucks, but the two places couldn’t have been less alike. Village Coffee was small and cluttered, but I liked going there because there was always a new piece of art on the walls, a new magnetic poem on the cash register or old esoteric magazines scattered on the tables. It was one of a kind.
    “Tall skinny latte,” I told the barista, who had sideburns to rival Elvis’s. “Two shots.”
    Coyote reached past me with a ten-dollar bill. “I’m paying for it.”
    “Oh, no. That’s okay. I can buy my own coffee.” I waved my own five-dollar bill at the guy.
    Coyote handed over his mug and the money to the barista. “Lemon ginger tea, please.” He turned to me. “You can buy next time.”
    Next time. I had to fight back a grin. Maybe this was a date.
    We sat down at a table in the corner. Feeling emboldened by “next time,” I decided to tease him a little. “Isn’t this Village Coffee ?” I said as he used a spoon to press the tea bag against the side of his mug. “Why did you get tea?”
    “It’s so hard to know if the coffee’s fair-trade, you know, or how many pesticides they sprayed it with,” he said.
    I clutched my latte protectively. “What about your tea? How do you know what they spray on it or who picks it and how much they get paid?”
    “Touché!” said Coyote, lifting his mug to click with my paper cup. “I probably sound like I’m full of crap. But I am trying to make a difference in what I choose to support, even if sometimes it doesn’t feel like it adds up to much. I want to leave the world in better condition than how I found it. That’s what I like about your parents. They get it.”
    “Where do you . . .” I hesitated, not wanting to mention the word MEDics in public, even if no one was sitting next to us. “Where do you guys know my parents from?”
    “Hawk met them at the food co-op. They’re pretty cool for—” He stopped.
    I finished his sentence. “For old people. They are old. They’re not my biological parents, anyway. They adopted me when I was a baby.”
    Coyote’s green eyes widened. “Do you know who your real parents are?”
    “Just that they were in high school. I guess they knew they couldn’t hack both school and a baby. So Laurel and Matt adopted me.”
    “They don’t mind if you call them by their first names? My dad would kill me.”
    “They think it sounds too subservient if I call them Mom and Dad.”
    Coyote looked impressed. I didn’t tell him that I sometimes wished for parents who were a little more normal. It was okay when my parents were around their own friends or even Marijean. But every time we were out doing something and ran into someone from school, I couldn’t help but feel self-conscious. Matt with his long gray hair and beard and Laurel with her belief that bras were “unnatural.”
    I took a sip of my coffee. “They never hid it from me that I was adopted,” I said. “I guess they figured it wouldn’t take me too long to figure out that they were too old to be my real parents. Sometimes I wish I had someone I looked like or that I took after. You know, like I had the same color hair as my grandmother, or an aunt who played the piano like me.”
    Coyote’s long fingers played with his tea bag. “There’s a downside to relatives, though. Take my grandfather. He’s old school—hunting, fishing, having everything stuffed and mounted. I remember being at his house one time when I was a little kid. I tried to pet this animal by the fireplace, and then I got all freaked