Read Online The View from Mount Joy by Lorna Landvik - Free Book Online

what brings you here?” I said, the suaveness I tried to project undermined by a little squeak in my voice.
    “I was in the neighborhood,” she said lightly, and as she came toward me, I braced myself. For what, I didn’t know.
    She sat next to me and I smelled Love’s Baby Soft, the baby-powderish perfume all the girls were wearing. She flipped the songbook to its cover and read,
Best of Broadway.
    “It…it’s not that I like—”
    “Play this one,” said Kristi, and because it didn’t occur to me to do anything different, I did.
    The song was “Try to Remember” from
The Fantasticks,
and I had only played a couple of measures when she said, “Sing too.”
    And so I sang, because whatever Kristi wanted, you were happy to give it.
    “That was so pretty,” she said softly, and as she pressed her shoulder against mine, the baby-powder smell got stronger. “Play it again.”
    I did, singing all the verses. It’s a nice ballad, and I knew I had a nice enough voice—nothing flashy, but nice—and after my voice faded away, riding the last note, and after the vibrations of the piano strings slowed to a stop, Kristi Casey leaned even closer and kissed me.
    The surprise factor surprised me—well,
stunned
me—so much so that I was immobilized, and it wasn’t until she drew back her head and smiled that I realized she had stopped and that I wanted more.
    “Thanks for the concert,” she said, stopping too abruptly the slow delicious slide her hand made down my thigh by patting my knee. “But I gotta get going. My squirrely brother’s waiting for me out in the car.”
    I was discombobulated from that kiss, from that hand on my thigh, and didn’t quite understand what she was saying. “Kirk…Kirk’s out in the car?” I had worked with the bag boy for more than a month before figuring out his sister was Kristi.
    She was already shrugging into her pea coat. “Yeah, like I said, I was in the neighborhood. I had to pick him up at work.”
    “It’s cold out there.” It seemed I was vying for the lame conversationalist award.
    “Well,
duh.
That’s why I’m leaving. My mother would be
p-i-s-s
pissed if I brought him home frozen.” She wiggled her fingers at me. “
Mañana,
Jose.”
             
    I wasn’t a greedy bastard—the fact that Kristi’s mouth had been on mine for one moment in time was enough for me, and besides, I was practical. What were the odds of that happening again? Pretty damn good, and
beyond,
it turned out.
    One day after lunch, I was getting my books for my afternoon classes when I saw a folded square of paper on my locker floor.
    Meet me in the audiovisual office at 2:00,
it read, and was signed,
K.
    I stood staring at the pile of books on the shelf above my jacket, my mind playing badminton with two thoughts:
K’s gotta be Kristi. K can’t be Kristi.
    “You trippin’, man?” asked Todd Randolph, nudging me as he opened his combination lock.
    “Huh?”
K’s gotta be Kristi. K can’t be Kristi.
    “You look like a zombie standing there.”
    “Nah,” I said, grabbing my history and English books and shutting my locker. “Zombies look like this.” I opened my mouth, letting my tongue push out my lower lip, and rolled my eyes back.
    “No,” said the guy who considered himself the funniest kid in our class. “Zombies look like that.” He pointed at Terry Seagren, a kid whose navigation down the hallways was a little harder than most, considering the leg braces he wore.
    “Asshole,” I said, shaking my head.
    Todd Randolph gave me one of the many smirks he passed out all day. “Takes one to know one.”
             
    The bell rang at two o’clock, and seconds later, I knocked on the door of the audiovisual office. To say I was relieved when Kristi opened the door is to understate my emotions—I was thrilled, excited, and mystified. Apparently I looked the way I felt, and she laughed, pulling me into the small room as she closed the door and turned the