Read Online The Julian Game by Adele Griffin - Free Book Online

more.”
    I stared. In the shadow of the night, Ella seemed unreal, a soothsaying cyborg with pale hair and a washboard body held taut against the nip in the air.
    “Ha,” I stammered. “Thanks for the tip.”
    “Don’t be mad, fancy ant.” She waved at the car, then casually looped her pinkie finger through mine and swung. “All I meant is find your life and take control. Am I right?” Stepping off the porch, she didn’t look back as she tugged me, pinkie-hooked, into a striding lope across the lawn. “’Cause it’s sure as hell not gonna come find you.”

fourteen
    One eighth-grade graduation party at D’Arcy Brewer’s house with parents present, no alcohol, and random couples feeling each other up behind the Brewers’ shed. Two parties last year, with absent parents, keg beer and everyone in the kitchen playing endless rounds of drinking games: Circle of Death, Quarters, Give One-Take One.
    The sum total of my partying experience.
    As soon as Doug turned into the drive, I saw that this party would be different.
    For one thing, the property was huge. I was getting used to prepster wealth—even Natalya’s house claimed a kidney-bean pool and a weedy clay tennis court. And we’d all been to Faulkner’s faux Tudor fortress back in October when she’d hosted that class party to celebrate her shoo-in presidency.
    Rolling fields, a bend in the drive and there was the house. And the barn. And the pool house.
    “Just one family lives here?” I squeaked.
    “I know. Holy Great Gatsby, Batman, right?” murmured Hannah from the passenger seat. But nobody seemed surprised.
    Cars and jeeps parked haphazardly over the vast lawn. Tucked under willows and wedged into hedges, as if all drivers had spied the same spaceship in the sky and then abandoned their vehicles for a better look. Doug did the same, veering his brand-new birthday Volvo off into a field.
    “This is good. Not trapped,” said Ella, “in case we gotta bolt.”
    “If the cops come, I’m not waiting for you two,” Doug answered.
    “Chivalry lives,” Ella answered, unbothered, while I made a decision to keep an eye on Doug all night.
    Light boomed from the downstairs, but the kitchen was nearly empty when we walked in from the enormous pillared veranda. Doug and Hannah seemed familiar with the territory. They were a spidery, stylish couple, twin heights to match an identical gender that lay in that futuristic zone between male and female. His thin hips and her jutting ones, his pink T-shirt and her black leather jacket making a complementary mix-and-match.
    Also they were nice to me, which made them vital in this evening of strangers.
    I followed them as they followed Ella through the kitchen and dining room and then into the hotspot central area, molded and paneled and gilded—and feebly lit, despite the multiple wall sconces. Looking around, I got an instant, high-dive shock. Maybe the light was deceptive, but on a glance it seemed like everyone at this party was ridiculously beautiful. A gathering of the gods.
    A freestanding bar took up the back of the room. Where drinks, with ice and mixers and stirrers, were being served. Not for the last time, I wished Natalya were here, just to get an eyeful.
    Every single person except for me seemed interconnected. As if all the jokes and conversations lapped around the room on the same wavelets and I was, without a shred of doubt, the only person off the matrix. To make matters worse, Ella had disappeared on the far side of the room, and Doug and Hannah had attached to another couple.
    “You driving?” A guy who looked and sounded like Harry Potter’s devious cousin veered up out of the jam of bodies. British accent—could this be the infamous Henry Rubbish? He was on the quirky end of cute, with an outgoing smile, malt-brown eyes and hair like a dropped pile of straw, and he was offering me one of two red-wine-filled juice glasses.
    “No.” I squinted. “And no, thanks.”
    “Only the hard