Read Online Spectacularly Broken by Sage C. Holloway - Free Book Online

to live in a doghouse, moron,” Jarett explained, sounding properly annoyed. “I just like the idea of… You know what, never mind. Just keep painting your…giant water bottle or whatever that is.”
    “It’s a lighthouse!”
    I smirked and focused my attention on the starfish I’d been working on. For some reason, when I thought about a safe place, what came to my mind was jumping in the pool at home and just never surfacing again, hiding out down there indefinitely. So I was creating a wild, sparkling underwater world on my poster board. The sparkling was literal—I was hogging all the glitter supplies Angie had brought and going a little nuts with them.
    “You want to be a merman?” Cai asked. I hadn’t even realized that he had gotten up and was looking over my shoulder.
    “Yeah, that’d be cool.” It wasn’t what I had been going for originally, but it worked for me. “Just jump in the ocean and get away from all the bullshit. No one’s ever gonna find me if I chill with the clown fish.”
    He chuckled. I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of his poster, which was very dark.
    “What’s yours?”
    “I’m not going to explain it, but you can look.” He went over to it, stepping across Lexa in the process, and held it up for my inspection. There was a lot of black, gray, and blue, the colors outlining a cave full of stalactites and stalagmites. I thought it was rather creepy, to be honest. In the middle of it, two shadowed people were huddled closely together, one holding the other.
    “Cool,” I said because it was and because I didn’t know what else to say. It wasn’t my idea of safety, but then, I wasn’t Cai. Maybe he was a fan of cave dwelling.
    “Whoa, Lexa,” Cai exclaimed. “That’s amazing!”
    Lexa’s cheeks reddened a little, but she smiled before she focused on her work again. I scooted over to have a look. She had drawn herself, or a schematic version of herself, inside a log cabin, wrapped in a pile of blankets and sitting in front of a fireplace. Outside the cabin, a snowstorm appeared to rage. It was beautiful and gave me shivers just looking at it. Lexa had some serious talent.
    In the end, all of us seemed quite proud of what we had created, and nobody protested when Angie grabbed tape and hung our posters on the wall after everyone was finished.
    “You’re totally gay,” Nicky commented as he stared at my underwater landscape in awe.
    “Very,” I agreed.
    “Cool.”
    I laughed and shoved him in the direction of lunch.
    In the afternoon, we played with Skittles.
    I’m not a fan of Skittles, except for the yellow ones. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to pick our Skittles, and we didn’t receive them for free either. No, the price for Skittles was more freaking soul-searching.
    “Purple!” Nicky announced loudly and threw the candy into his mouth.
    “Okay.” Angie gave him an encouraging nod. “Tell us something you would change about yourself, if you could.”
    “Oh, that’s easy. I’d be less hyper. It annoys people; I know it does. But I can’t turn it off.” He shrugged, tapping his foot.
    Cai drew a yellow Skittle, which made me jealous. He glanced to the board, where Angie had written the rules for this game. Yellow Skittle meant Tell us something you learned yesterday . He looked at the ceiling in thought for a moment.
    “I learned that Haze really, really hates dishwater.”
    I flipped him off while everyone else giggled. Lexa grabbed the next candy out of the bag and held it up for us to see. It was orange. Something you can’t live without.
    She chewed her lip as she contemplated it. She reached for her pencil and scrawled the answer in her notebook, then pushed it over to Cai, who read it aloud.
    “My sweater.” He looked at her questioningly. “Why?”
    Lexa only shrugged.
    I took the bag from Lexa, but Cai held his hand up. “I have a question.”
    “What is it?” Angie asked patiently.
    He kept looking at Lexa. “Can you talk?” he