Read Online Lost in the Sun by Lisa Graff - Free Book Online Page A

her chocolate milk like an expert. Took a long swig. “I wanted to tell you something.”
    I sighed. I didn’t want to talk to her about her stupid scar anymore. I didn’t want to argue with her about drawing her weird pictures. “Don’t you have any friends?” I asked her.
    All right. It came out meaner than I meant it.
    Fallon froze, halfway to her apple. Hand just frozen in midair, like she’d been zapped or something. But then, just when I thought she was going to burst into tears like a real girl, she unfroze herself and grabbed the apple, like nothing had happened at all. Like the freezing had just been a fritz in my vision. “Don’t
you
?” she asked.
    Well.
    That was a fair point.
    I sighed again. “What did you want to tell me?” I asked.
    She took a bite from her apple. Today, I noticed, she was wearing a yellow-and-pink-checked dress with a rounded collar, like a four-year-old might wear for Easter. Where did she
get
these clothes? “I was going to tell you the real story of how I got my scar.”
    Oh, brother.
    I still had half a sandwich to finish, plus a whole bag of chips, and I had nowhere to be but a bathroom stall, so finally I gave in. “Fine,” I said. “Tell me.
How
did you get that mysterious scar of yours?”
    Her eyes lit up, on either side of the scar. It really was a thing to look at.
    â€œLightning bolt,” she told me. “I was standing under a tree during a lightning storm—you know how they tell you never to do that?—andI got struck.” She made a slicing motion with her non-apple-holding hand. “
Boom!
I was out cold for an entire hour. When I woke up, I had this scar.”
    I focused on my sandwich. A glop of tuna was threatening to fall onto my cardboard tray. I caught it with my tongue. “Were you all by yourself when it happened?” I asked as I chewed. Fallon nodded. “Then how do you know how long you were out for?”
    â€œGood point,” she said. She took another bite of apple and chewed slowly. Swallowed. “I’ll work on that.”
    â€œDon’t you ever talk about anything else?” I wondered. I’d been thinking about it, and actually I was pretty sure that Fallon Little wasn’t friendless. She wasn’t one of the loner kids like Ian Holt, who spent every recess huddled in a corner behind the handball court playing Connect Four by himself. Or even like Mindy Fitzgibbons, who made best friends with the librarian and hung out with her every day for all of elementary school. In fact—not that I’d spent a lot of time paying attention to Fallon, but just on remembering—it seemed like she always had someone to sit with at lunch, always had someone to partner with on projects. But I was pretty sure it was always someone different.
    I was starting to figure out why.
    â€œLike what?” Fallon asked. “What else is there to talk about?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “
Anything.
Baseball. The Dodgers. How about that?”
    She took another bite of her apple.
    â€œHave you seen
Field of Dreams
?” Fallon asked me.
    Well. I didn’t see
that
coming.
    â€œ
Field of Dreams
?” I said.
    â€œYeah. It’s a movie. About baseball. This farmer guy hears this weird voice and decides to make a baseball field, and then all these old baseball players who are, like, dead or whatever, come play baseball.”
    â€œI know what it’s about,” I told her.
    â€œBut you’ve never seen it?”
    â€œI saw part of it.” I didn’t want to tell Fallon that my mom had been trying to get me to watch it forever, because she said it was the best baseball movie of all time, but when she first tried to make me watch it when I was six, I got freaked out by all the creepy whispering—“
If you build it
 . . .”—and I screamed until she turned the TV off.
    â€œYou should