Read Online Last Summer by Rebecca A. Rogers - Free Book Online

about showing my
junk, but now I feel awkward in a shower. Probably has something to
do with the fact that I’ve talked myself out of her pants. For now,
at least.
    I finish showering and dry off, wrapping a
towel around my waist, and open the bathroom door, releasing the
humid air. I hand Chloe my clothes, which she mixes in with her own
dirty laundry so her mom won’t notice.
    “What about your other clothes?” she asks,
nodding toward my backpack.
    I shrug. “Don’t worry about them.”
    “Okay. I’ll be back,” she says. She snatches
a towel out of her closet and wraps it around her head. “Can’t
exactly walk downstairs with dry hair; that’d be tough to
explain.”
    After she disappears, I check out her room.
The walls change colors between blue and purple, and the shift
between the two fades like sidewalk chalk during a rainstorm. It’s
a strange paint job, to say the least. She also has purple shelves
attached to each wall; some hold books, some hold local souvenirs,
some hold picture frames filled with memories. Those are what I
scan through, seeing what her past holds. What I find saddens me,
because the girl in these photographs is not the Chloe I know; the
girl from the past is the real deal, smiling and laughing, and
Chloe’s just a shadow. The girl from the past seems happy and
vivacious, and the present-day Chloe is held back by fear and
unhappiness, and maybe even desperation. Chloe’s reaching for
something, but she doesn’t know what it is just yet.
    Maybe it’s me. Maybe that’s why she wanted
to help—I’m what she’s been searching for all along. The thought
stops my heart for a mere second. If that’s true, if fate is so
fucked up as to bring us together under horrible circumstances,
then she and I won’t have much time together. She’ll be gone in
less than two months, and I’ll be Godknowswhere.
    “I’m back,” she says, startling me. “Remind
me to check on the clothes in twenty minutes or so. I don’t want my
mom to accidentally pick up yours and interrogate me.” She rolls
her eyes and unwraps the towel around her head.
    I just stare at her. Who are you? I
want to ask. Who are you and what have you done with the real
Chloe? I want to meet her, the real you.
    Instead, like the pussy that I am, I say,
“Okay,” and leave it at that.
    “So, while you were in the shower, I came up
with a few ideas,” she goes on, picking up a piece of paper and
sitting on the edge of her bed. “And since you won’t hand over your
stash, we’re going to have to come up with a new plan of
action.”
    “Oh, yeah? Like what?”
    “Like, sports or outdoor activities,
something that will keep your mind focused on anything but drugs.”
There she goes again with that nose scrunching. “You don’t look so
thrilled.”
    “Um, sure. Sports. Yeah. Totally
stoked.”
    Shaking her head, she says, “At some point
you do realize you’ll have to discard whatever needles and/or
paraphernalia you have on you, right? This process isn’t going to
work unless you go all the way.”
    “We’ll deal with that later,” I say,
gritting my teeth. I don’t want to think about what withdrawal will
be like, for both our sakes. Right now I need to focus on how I’ll
be coping when the withdrawal hits me, which won’t be pretty.
    “All right. So,” she begins, glancing over
her little to-do list, “what do you think about this weekend? For
starting this routine, I mean.” She glances up at me, big blue eyes
under thick eyelashes.
    “Tomorrow,” I respond. “There’s no sense in
waiting. I need to get in shape, and we probably won’t have much
time, anyway.”
    Puzzled, her brows crush together. “Why
won’t we have time?”
    Go for the kill, heartbreaker. Do what
you do best. “Because you’ll leave in a couple of months, go
back to wherever it is you came from, and we won’t ever see each
other again. So, that’s that. The sooner we can get this over with,
the sooner I can return home