Party

Read Online Party by Tom Leveen - Free Book Online Page A

Book: Party by Tom Leveen Read Free Book Online
Authors: Tom Leveen
Ads: Link
again!
    “No, I don’t.”
    Max looked all hurt and I almost laughed right in his face.
    “You don’t know!” he shouted.
    I stopped walking. Max stopped, too.
    “Yes, I do too!” I yelled back at him. “Bro, you have
never
talked to her! You spent the last three years talking
about
her but never
to
her! How the hell you think tonight’s gonna be any different? And she don’t talk, anyway. To anyone. Why would she even show? Dude, we
graduated
, man! Move on!”
    “That’s why tonight’s gonna be diff’rent!” Max shouted back.
    “Because you have nothing to lose?”
    “Yeah!”
    “Desperation,” I said. “What a motivator.”
    Max pulled out his Lucky 13! card and shook it in my face. “This’s a sign,” he said. “My luck’s gonna change.”
    “It’s not luck, that’s my point! It’s about you growin’ the
cojones
that you have failed to grow over the course of our high school career. You bought twelve cups of coffee and got the thirteenth free. That’s not luck, it’s a choice. You chose to buy those coffees. Well, you chose not to talk to Beckett Montgomery for the last three years. If you talk to her tonight, it’s not because you got lucky—ha! Get it? Got lucky?”
    “Bro” was all Max said.
    “Look, what do you even see in her?” I asked him. “Is it the hat? ’Cause she’s not even
black
, I don’t know if you’ve noticed that. She’s the opposite of black. She’s
pasty
. How do you get that pale living in SoCal?”
    “Dude,” Max said.
    “Serious, what is it about her? ’Cause that hat, man. For real. Like she’s all Rastafarian. What’s up with that?”
    “Man …,” Max said.
    “It ain’t luck,” I said.
    I could see he was chewing on it. I looked aimlessly around State so I wasn’t staring at him while he thought. The violin guy was laughing now as he played. I wondered if it was because of us. We weren’t being quiet.
    “I guess I see what you’re sayin’,” Max said, all slow, like he was still thinking real hard. “But what
I’m
sayin’ is that I didn’t get my Lucky Thirteen last night, or tomorrow. I got it tonight. That
means
somethin’.”
    I was starting to get pissed. Tonight was our last night of high school, for real. Graduation was cool and whatever, but pretty much anyone who was anyone would be at this party, and it was prolly gonna be the last time we ever saw them. Graduation was the ceremony; this was like the going-away party. I wanted to chug some brew and maybe see if I could snag a chick, and not talk about Beckett fing Montgomery all night.
    “What’re you gonna do? Give her a piggyback ride to your house? You got no car, man. How douche is that?”
    “My
house?”
Max said, and his voice squeaked. “I never said anything about—dude, I’m not tryin’ to sleep with her. That’s not what this’s about.”
    “You don’t want to sleep with her?”
    “No, I—I mean, yeah, of course I … I just mean, not tonight, that’s not the point, that’s not what this’s about.”
    “What’s it about then?
Luuuve?”
    “Maybe!”
    “Yeah, or, uh—lust?”
    “Of course there’s lust!” Max exploded. “Yes, I want to do her! She’s totally hot! But not tonight! I wanna get to know her, I wanna know everything about her, I wanna know who she is. I wanna hold her hand and take her to dinner and talk all night long … you know? And … yeah, I like her hat. So what?”
    “You’re sad, man.”
    Max looked really bummed, and I felt bad. I knew what he meant, of course I did. But for all the talking he’d done about Beckett Montgomery, he’d never said
that
. So this wasn’t your usual hard-on for a babe in bio class. This was like magnetism or something. Which made this situation a lot more dangerous. Like yesterday—I’d heard about this girl Morrigan who’d broken up with her boyfriend because he was like some religious whack-job. I didn’t really know either of them, so it wasn’t a big deal to me. But I’d

Similar Books

Mountain of Fire

Radhika Puri

Still Life in Shadows

Alice J. Wisler

Entangled

Barbara Ellen Brink

The White Knight

Gilbert Morris

Bloodlines

Jan Burke