Read Online Ballad by Maggie Stiefvater - Free Book Online Page A

had snuck over from her dorm to meet me back here? Or would they see the truth—that it meant nothing. I’d thought we had something, until this summer, until Luke. But I’d been stupid.
    It was killing me, the wanting. The wanting for this—her in my arms, her tears on my T-shirt—to mean the same thing for her that it meant for me. If it had, if she’d really been my girlfriend, I would’ve asked her why she was crying. Why she was sitting under the columns of my dorm instead of hers. If she’d seen Nuala. If it was her fault that Nuala was here in the first place.
    But I couldn’t ask her anything.
    “Talk,” Dee said, her voice muffled against my T-shirt.
    I thought I’d misunderstood her. I opened my eyes, watched the gray clouds roll in sheets to the ground. “What?”
    “Just say something, James. I just want to hear you talk. Be funny. Just talk.”
    I didn’t feel like being funny. “I’m always funny.”
    “Then be what you are always.”
    I asked, “Why were you crying?”
    But she didn’t answer, because I hadn’t said it out loud.
    The truth was that I was too grateful for her presence here at all to push my luck by asking questions that might frighten her away. So I babbled to her about my classes and the foibles of Paul and Doritos as alarm clocks, and I was completely flippant and funny and even as she began to laugh, I was dying with wanting.

Nuala
    If just for a moment to belong
    To be caught in the wondrous net of family
    Would it be untrue or wrong
    To say ‘I live here; this is home,’ so earnestly?
    — from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter
    Watching James come out to rescue Dee behind the dorm put me in a bad mood. I got tired of watching her boohoo-ness really fast, and decided to go to the movie theater instead. If I was going to be witness to that amount of melodrama, I wanted it to be delivered by a highly paid and beautiful head on a big screen. On the walk over to the theater, I thought of the multitude of things I didn’t like about Dee. While I waited in line for a ticket—not that I really needed a ticket—I wondered if she practiced her sad faces in a mirror. Or if she was just a natural at invoking sympathy in male types. Not something I really had talent for myself.
    The kid at the ticket counter looked bored. “Which movie?”
    “Surprise me,” I told him, and waved money at him.
    It took him a moment to figure out what I meant. “Seriously?”
    “Serious as death.”
    He raised his eyebrows, punched something into the computer, and then gave me an evil grin that made me think fondly on the human race in general. He handed me a ticket, face down. “Go right. Second theater. Have fun.”
    I rewarded him with a smile and headed down the dim carpeted hall. It smelled of popcorn butter, carpet cleaner, and that other odor that always seemed to invade theaters—anticipation, or something. In such familiar surroundings, my brain returned to its previous preoccupation: things that I hated about Dee.
    One, her eyes were too big. She looked like an alien.
    I counted the doors to the second theater and resisted the temptation to look up at the sign above the door to see what movie Ticket-Boy had chosen for me.
    Two, her voice was pretty at first, but it got annoying fast. If I wanted to hear singing, I’d get a CD.
    Inside the theater, it was quiet and fairly empty—only two or three other couples. Maybe that wicked grin from Ticket-Boy was because he had sent me to a dud.
    Three, she used James to make herself feel better. It was the sort of attribute I only liked for me to have.
    I chose a seat in the dead center of the theater and put my feet up on the chair in front of me. It was the perfect seat. If anyone came in and sat in front of me, I’d kill them.
    Four, she fit in James’ arms too perfectly. Like she’d been there before. Like she was claiming him.
    The trailers boomed to life in front of me. Normally I would’ve basked in them, enjoyed