Where I'd Like to Be Read Online Free Page B

caffeine; that much was clear.
    “I don’t feel like it, Ricky Ray,” I said. “You have to be in the right mood for the books to work.”
    I was in a horrible mood. How could I be friends with Murphy if she was going to be friends with Logan Parrish? The very thought made me feel irritable up one side and down the other. She was sitting on the front steps that very minute, waiting for him so they could make some stupid plans that would probably cause Logan to wiggle his eyebrows some more. I hated to even think about it.
    Ricky Ray leaned his head against my arm. “Maddie, Maddie, oh, won’t you go get the books?” he pleaded in a sing-songy voice. “It makes me so very, very, very happy to look at the books.”
    I couldn’t deny Ricky Ray anything. “Okay,” I said. “But not all afternoon. I’ve got things to do. Important things.”
    Ricky Ray just smiled. Nothing made him happier than to look at my scrapbooks of cutout pictures, and since he was the only person I ever showed them to, it was like we had a little club together. I knew I could trust Ricky Ray to treat the books with the proper respect. Even though he was only six, he was carefulwith things. One of the first times I’d ever noticed him, he was trying to repair an ant hill he’d stepped on by accident. He would never mess up anything if he could help it.
    I guess you could say I’d sort of adopted Ricky Ray. Or maybe he’d adopted me. After I’d been at the Home a couple weeks, I started walking around the big circle every afternoon, looking at all the buildings and wondering how long it would take me to save up to buy my own house. I pretended each step I took earned me ten dollars. One afternoon, I heard a little voice behind me say, “Thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five . . . ”
    I turned around and saw a blonde-haired kid with bangs flopping in his eyes, his expression as serious as a preacher’s. “What are you doing?” I asked, not mad, just curious.
    “Helping you count,” he said. “Sometimes you count out loud when you’re walking; that’s how I know that’s what you’re doing. What are you counting, anyway?”
    “Footsteps, dollar bills, a down payment on a brick house with a white fence around the front yard.”
    “You don’t have to buy a house. You can come live with me and my mama when she comes to get me. She won’t mind a bit.”
    Ricky Ray started walking again. “Thirty-six,” he said. “Thirty-seven, thirty-eight . . . ”
    We got up to four hundred and forty-two that day. At the end of it, Ricky Ray said, “We could get bunk beds, when you come to live with me and my mama. You can even have the top one.”
    There was something about him—the way he flicked his bangs out of his face with a shake of his head and looked at me with his straight-ahead smile, like he just knew one day we’d be living the high life at his mama’s house—that made me want to pull him into a big bear hug then and there. Instead I said, “You can have the top bunk, that’s okay.”
    His face lit up. “Cool!” He started running toward the Children’s Dorm. “See you tomorrow!” he called. “Maybe we’ll get up to five hundred!”
    And that’s how me and Ricky Ray ended up adopting each other.
    “Here,” I said, throwing two black-speckled scrapbooks onto Ricky Ray’s lap after I got them from my room. “I hope you’re happy now.”
    The Book of Houses and the Book of People were the only two scrapbooks I kept anymore. I used to have a bunch more, including the Book of Animals and the Book of Nature , but when I moved to the East Tennessee Children’s Home I became so busy with other activities that I didn’t have time to keep up with all of my books. Looking for pictures to cut out can eat up your whole day if you’re not careful.
    Ricky Ray pulled the books close to his chest and wiggled in his seat. “Come on, let’s do a story.”
    I couldn’t help myself. I snuggled next to Ricky Ray on the