Read Online Flyers (9781481414449) by Daniel Hayes - Free Book Online Page B

important and doing a quick U-turn. She was still watching me. And on my way by, I caught her giving the girl next to her what I took to be a there-he-is jab. I groaned inside. This was a complication I didn’t need. If she liked me, and if she was a friend of Katie’s (which she might not be since locker assignments were given out alphabetically), Katie might feel like she had to say no if I ever got around to asking her out. And that was a big if in itself.
    I was well into this new line of worrying when I almost hit her head-on—Katie, that is. I saw her the last half second before we would have actuallycollided. She was looking down adjusting her pile of books, and I don’t even think she saw me swerve past her. From my particular angle at the time, the thing that struck me was her deep blue eyes. With just that split-second encounter before I veered left, those eyes were already imprinted on my brain. I knew in every fiber of my being that they were the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen, quiet and enigmatic, as if they contained important secrets of the universe. I hurt—actually felt a wrenching emptiness inside—from just the thought of those eyes.
    I stopped and stood for a second to let my head clear. And in that moment I knew without a doubt that Katie Lyons had become my number nine.
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    I saw Emmett when I was coming out of the gym at the end of fourth period. Instinctively I slammed on my brakes, forcing Bo and a few other guys behind me into a chain-reaction collision. My mind was still kind of reeling from the whole Katie Lyons thing, and I definitely wasn’t up for dealing with a human suction cup like Emmett St. Andrews.
    Emmett had appeared a month or so earlier, fresh from Salvation House in Albany, and for the last few weeks the whole school had been under a kind of drug siege. Not with real drugs, which had never been a big problem in Wakefield, but with drug awareness. Emmett, ex-druggie but still-practicing pain in the butt, was relentless. In addition to haranguing us in all our classes and at a Friday evening antidrug rally, he annoyed us more informally throughout the day as a peer pal and some kind of self-proclaimed role model. He’d left for a few weeks and was now back in town preparing for the final phase of his assault—theupcoming field day that was to be the culmination of Wakefield’s “Say No to Drugs” campaign.
    The way I heard it, Wakefield had applied for and received a fifty-some-thousand-dollar grant to make us aware of drugs. The money was used for: 1. Bringing us Emmett, 2. Buying multiple copies of every antidrug poster ever made, and 3. Sticking up a few DRUG-FREE ZONE signs around school property. As far as I could tell, the only result of this expenditure, except for my being personally offended by having a boob like Emmett brought into my sphere, was a purely unintentional one. Owing to some confusion caused by the proliferation of posters showing fried eggs as “your brain on drugs,” one kid in the elementary school supposedly turned his mother in to the police after she cooked his breakfast one morning.
    Ironically, right before I spotted Emmett I’d started thinking the morning might be taking a turn for the better. My first three classes had slid by without adding any new worries to my list, and I’d managed to get in five miles on the track during my study hall. Even though track season was over and done with, I still had my permanent pass to go to gym. Running has a way of clearing my head, and I was even thinking that the next time I saw Katie, I might actually talk to her. Only now there was Emmett as large as life and standing there in all his boobocity. I knew from experience that a conversation with him could do a wicked number on my mental state.
    Emmett was listening (“active listening” is what he called it) to a couple of junior high kids. The