Until It Hurts to Stop Read Online Free

definition of adventure .
    I laugh and show that one to Nick.
“She’s just finding that out?” he says.
    Then Sylvie texts: you shouldn ’ t do it because if you have a bad reaction and go to the hospital , they ’ ll ask what you ate , and you ’ ll say : a brown thing . and they ’ ll say , but what was it ? and you ’ ll have to say , i don ’ t know . and they ’ ll say , why did you eat something when you didn ’ t even know what it was ?
    I answer: you have a point . also , i don ’ t really want to eat a mysterious brown thing . even for adventure .
    In this way, I’m determined to keep my own little world alive, as if the rest of the cafeteria doesn’t matter. Walling off Raleigh, pretending not to hear her even when she’s braying ten feet from me, is something I perfected in junior high. It’s strange how my stone-faced tunnel-vision abilities have come right back, though I haven’t used them much since the end of eighth grade.
    This is how I used to feel every day.
Raleigh had so many followers in junior high; I never knew where the attacks would come from. But our high school draws students from two junior highs and two middle schools, so the old pool of Maggie-haters has been diluted. And in high school it’s not considered okay to beat up on the losers so openly. It reeks of trying too hard, of having no life of your own.
Even so—if anyone can figure out a way to carry it off, if anyone can stir an entire school against a single person, it’ll be Raleigh. Which means that I can never completely relax.
    On Thursday, Raleigh catches me off guard in the hall between history and English. Somewhere behind me, she squeals, “I don’t belieeeve it!” I react instantly, fleeing from her voice, that piercing eeeee . Reaching the girls’ room, I glance under the stalls for feet. I lock myself in and press my forehead against the cold metal of the door—all this before stopping to think, before asking myself what I’m doing.
    I’ve watched Raleigh flip her shiny, black hair, glide down the school halls with her head up. I’ve heard her voice plenty of times since she’s been back. So I don’t know why hearing it now zaps me this way, fries my nerves.
    It’s something about that note in her voice: the note of danger, the exact frequency of trouble. “She’s heeere,” Raleigh would call when I appeared at school every morning, signaling the start of the day’s attacks. “Oh, Maggieee,” she would sing out, and it was always the opening to an insult, a threat, or an order. “Oh, Maggieee, cover yourself, so your ugly face won’t make me throw up!”
    I have to stop these flashbacks.
I belong here just as much as she does. I can’t crawl through the halls on my belly until we graduate. I only hope she didn’t see me running, that she didn’t catch the scent of my fear the way a shark smells blood in the ocean.
Slippery-palmed, dry-tongued, I force myself to open the door.
     

five
     
    I’m in no mood to dissect a frog with Adriana Lippold this afternoon, but that is what I’m destined to do. Formaldehyde prickles the inside of my nose as we snip and slice silently, identifying the organs and drawing them on our lab diagrams. I’ve never thought of Adriana as particularly smart—maybe because of her obsession with makeup and clothes, or the way she always trotted around at Raleigh’s heels—but I realize now there’s no reason to assume she’s stupid. In fact, maybe the surgical precision she once used to dismantle my ego should’ve prepared me for her skill at cutting up dead animals.
    “Wow, look how big the liver is,” she says.
“Yeah.” I’ve been thinking the same thing. At first, I thought the liver was the stomach, but the stomach is much smaller than I’d expected.
We exchange a few more remarks about frog anatomy. At one point I study her face, wondering what’s going on behind the frosting of blush and mascara and lip gloss. I wish I knew why she used to