Read Online Forever in Blue by Ann Brashares - Free Book Online Page A

you like that. She began to tune Alison out in favor of her habit. There was one good-looking guy who she guessed was also a college student. He had black curly hair and very dark eyes. He was Middle Eastern, she thought. Maybe Turkish, but she heard him speaking English.
    Another one was sort of good-looking. He looked old enough to be a graduate student. He had reddish hair and so much sunscreen on his face it cast a blue tint. That was maybe not so sexy.
    “You’re Bridget, right?” Alison asked, startling her from her habit.
    “Yes.”
    “You’re in mortuary.”
    “Okay.”
    “What does mortuary mean?” Bridget asked a tall girl named Karina Itabashi on their way to the field lab.
    “It means dead people.”
    “Oh.”
    After lunch Bridget settled in for her first lecture and discovered an interesting thing: The best-looking guy was neither the possible Turk nor the sunscreen-slathered redhead. The best-looking guy was the one standing in front of her, lecturing about artifacts.
    “Okay, folks.” The best-looking guy had been holding an object behind his back, and now he presented it to them. “Is this object in my hand a technofact, a sociofact, or an ideofact?” The best-looking guy was looking directly at her, wanting her to answer his question.
    “It’s a tomato,” she said.
    To his credit he laughed rather than throwing the tomato at her. “You have a point, uh…?”
    “Bridget.”
    “Bridget. Any other ideas?” Various hands went up.
    She’d thought he was a graduate student when she’d first seen him eating a sandwich under an olive tree earlier that day. He didn’t look like he could be thirty. But he’d introduced himself as Professor Peter Haven, so unless he lied, he was one. He taught at Indiana University. She tried to picture Indiana on the map.
    At sunset that night after dinner in the big tent, a bunch of people gathered on an embankment on the hilltop to watch the sun go down. Several six-packs of beer were on the ground. Bridget sat next to Karina, who had a beer in her hand.
    “Do you want one?” she asked Bridget, gesturing to the supply.
    Bridget hesitated, and Karina seemed to read her expression. “There’s no drinking age here, as far as I know.”
    Bridget leaned over and took one. She’d been to enough parties over the last year that she’d formed a solid acquaintanceship with beer, if not an actual friendship.
    On Karina’s other side, Bridget recognized one of the directors, and she was struck here, as she had been at dinner, by the mixing of the team. The group wasn’t hierarchical, the way school was. Age-wise, it wasn’t nearly as homogeneous. If anything, people assembled more according to the area of the site where they worked than according to age or professional status. She realized how accustomed she was to looking out for authority figures, but here she wasn’t finding any.
    “Where are you digging?” she asked a woman who sat down next to her. She recognized her as Maxine from her cabin.
    “I’m not. I’m a conservator. I’m working on pottery in the lab. What about you?”
    “Mortuary. For starters, at least.”
    “Ooh. How’s your stomach?”
    “Good, I think.”
    She saw Peter Haven at the other end of the group. He was also drinking and laughing over something. He had a nice way about him.
    The sun was down. The moon was up. Maxine lifted her beer bottle and Bridget tapped it with hers. “To mortuary,” Maxine said.
    “To pottery,” Bridget added, never having drunk beer with a conservator before. It was good to be an adult. Even the beer tasted better here.
    If Leo had looked at her as planned, Lena wouldn’t have had to think about him several times that night, or tried to figure out his last name so she could Google him.
    She certainly wouldn’t have felt the need to go to the empty studio on a Saturday morning when all self-respecting art students were still in bed. She went there to sneak a look at his painting, secretly