Read Online More Than This by Patrick Ness - Free Book Online Page A

could totally do it, bro. Show her where the wild things are.”
    “From someone who can’t even find a map to the wild things,” Monica said.
    “Hey!” H said to her, his voice low and aggrieved. “What did I say about telling them our business?”
    Monica huffed and turned her back.
    “What do you think, Sethy?” Gudmund said, trying to steer the moment away from an argument. “Think I should take that bet? Go for Chiara Leithauser?”
    “What,” Seth said, “and then secretly find out she’s got a heart of gold and actually fall in love with her and then she dumps you when she finds out about the bet but you prove yourself to her by standing outside her house in the rain playing her your special song and on prom night you share a dance that reminds not just the school but the entire wounded world what love really means?”
    He stopped because they were all looking at him.
    “Damn, Seth,” Monica said admiringly. “‘The entire wounded world.’ I’m putting that in my next paper for Edson.”
    Seth crossed his arms. “I’m just saying a bet over Gudmund having sex with Chiara Leithauser sounds like some piece of shit teenage movie none of us would watch in a million years.”
    “Truer words, never spoken,” Gudmund said, standing up from the grass. “She doesn’t deserve me, anyway.”
    “You’re right,” Monica said. “Dating the best-looking, richest, and most popular guy in school must be punishment enough.”
    H made a scoffing sound. “Blake Woodrow isn’t
that
good-looking.”
    They all stared at him again. “I am so sick of you guys doing that!” he said. “Not everything I say is stupid. Blake Woodrow has a girl’s haircut and the forehead of a caveman.”
    There was another pause before Monica nodded. “Yeah, okay, I’ll give you that.”
    “And Gudmund could totally get her if he wanted,” H said, getting up to join the rest of them.
    “Thanks, man,” Gudmund said. “From you that’s almost a compliment.”
    “But you’re not even going to try?” H said hopefully.
    Monica hit him again. “That’s enough. I may hate her, but she’s not a prostitute. Quit talking about her like she’s someone you can just take off a shelf.” She looked at Gudmund. “Even you.”
    “I wasn’t serious, you feminist,” Gudmund said, smiling. “I only said it was possible. If I wanted to.”
    Monica stuck her tongue out at him before setting off across the field and onto the track, H on her heels, both of them trying to look as if they’d been running for the past half hour.
    Gudmund glanced at Seth, who was watching him seriously. “You don’t think I could?”
    “Monica would be so jealous she’d probably choke to death,” Seth said as they started running back across the field, too.
    Gudmund shook his head. “Nah, Monica and I are like brother and sister.”
    “You flirt that much with your sister? She wants you so bad, it’s like she’s got a permanent toothache.”
    “Jeez, are you sure she’s the jealous one, Sethy?” Gudmund punched Seth playfully on the shoulder. “Homo,” he said.
    But he said it with a grin.
    They ran toward the now-shouting Coach Goodall and –

Seth snaps his head up.
    The world is still the same. The sun still in the same place. The park still wild beneath him. It doesn’t even feel like he dozed off.
    He groans. Are they going to come every time he closes his eyes? All the things that are most painful in their different ways, whether because they’re too bad or because they’re too good?
    Hell, he reminds himself. This is hell. Why
wouldn’t
it suck?
    He gathers his stuff and pushes the cart back toward the High Street, beginning to feel tired again.
    “This is stupid,” he says, sweating profusely under the insulated clothes, the backpack on his shoulders, and the weight of the cans in the cart. He stops by the doors of the supermarket, swaps the spaghetti-stained T-shirt for a fresh one, then unloads half the cans onto the