Read Online Echols, Jennifer by Going Too Far (v1.1) [rtf] - Free Book Online Page A

remembered how thrilled I was to see my handprint and name on the wall for the first time, back when I was young and dorky(er). I thought I was famous. Along with everybody else in the third and fourth grades. Now I regretted that a little piece of me would be cemented to this place forever.
    I braced myself on the wall with one hand, put my leg behind me, and pulled on my ankle to stretch my quadriceps. My head throbbed and my blood tingled from too much caffeine.
    The trees in the park held tight to the tiniest bright green leaves. The sky was so blue it looked fake, and the yellow daffodils looked plastic, like in a cemetery. This told me I was really sleepy and/or I really needed to get out of town.
    And jogging toward me came the ghost of Johnafter.
    I think I actually did a double take. His shirt was off, showing the sort of six-pack abs I saw all the time on TV but rarely in person. His white skin glowed against the bright greens and yellows of the park. Probably from living in the dark on night shift. His blond hair looked white, too, and from this distance, his dark eyes were holes in his face.
    He didn't look like a forty-year-old cop to me anymore. I didn't see how I had ever made this mistake, either. And he didn't look like the boy from the yearbook. He looked like what he was, a nineteen-year-old with a fantastic body. Get this—I resisted the urge to hide behind the tile wall, I felt shy in front of him. Like I admired him from afar, but I knew I didn't have a chance with him. Suddenly I wished my hair was not blue.
    He jogged to a stop in front of me and panted a few times to get his breath back. Finally he said, "Hey," as if I was some girl from school instead of his prisoner.
    "Hey," I said.
    He looked at the wall. "Are you on here?"
    I put my leg down and kicked my handprint on the wall to show him. I picked up my other ankle behind me.
    He bent down to look at my handprint. "Mmph," he said. "Near Eric."
    This irked me for some reason. "Are you on here?" I asked quickly. As I said it, I realized I'd been scanning the wall for his name the entire time I'd been stretching.
    He walked to the opposite end of the wall and reached way up to put his hand over a handprint. It was almost as far from mine as possible.
    I craned my neck to see. "Why is yours the only one on the wall that's black?"
    "I went through a Goth phase when I was nine." He looked pointedly at me. "T grew out of it."
    Did he mean my blue hair was immature? Ass. I said, "And you grew into your cop phase."
    He turned without a word, walked into the parking lot a few paces away, and opened the door of a pickup truck. Great, I'd pissed him off. Riding around with him tonight would be fun fun fun.
    To cover his naked muscles, he pulled on an Audioslave T-shirt I remembered him wearing in Spanish class last year. Only it fit him more tightly now. He lit a cigarette, slammed the truck door, and sauntered back to me.
    I gestured to the cigarette. "What do you think you're doing? Flaunting your youth and good health in front of the cripples?"
    His brown eyes widened at me, and he glanced toward an old lady moving at glacier pace on her walker. "It's the one thing I do wrong." He took a drag and sighed through his nose like he did when he was frustrated, but this time he exhaled smoke. "It keeps me awake. I'm tired. I'm always tired. The human body is not designed to work from ten p.m. to six a.m."
    "Have you tried coffee? Mountain Dew? Red Bull?"
    "That would keep me up too long. I want to sleep when I get home. I already tried and failed for eight hours. After my days off, my first day back is always the hardest. I came here to run and tire myself out." The picture of health took another drag from his cigarette. "Did you just get up?"
    "No, I just got off work."
    "Work!" He ran one hand back through his hair with a puzzled expression, as if he couldn't quite believe it was gone. "Where?"
    "Eggstra! Eggstra!"
    "For how long?"
    "Since your shift was