Read Online The Bargaining by Carly Anne West - Free Book Online

job. She bought a house sight unseen from a Realtor who could barely make time to meet us long enough to turn over the keys.
    And Dad let his wife drag me off to a possibly condemned structure to camp out for the summer.
    â€œIt didn’t feel like a clue when the agent insisted on meeting you in town instead of at the house?” I ask, no longer capable of disguising my incredulity. “You weren’t, I don’t know, maybe ten percent afraid that she knew the whole thing might flood the minute we flushed a toilet? Wait, does this place even have indoor plumbing?”
    â€œAnd that’s where we stop. I mean it, Penny. It’s home for the next two months. Start calling it that.”
    The finality she can so easily assert, the sheer stubbornness that is her “bonding” with me, is the first evidence I’ve seen of the April that Rob warned me about. The woman of chocolate cake legend.
    My heart warms at the thought of Rob, a feeling I never would have been able to predict three months ago. Being the new kid in school three quarters of the way through my junior year should have done me in, but driving to campus five days a week with Rob had me wondering every morning if maybe I would be able to survive it. Stranger things hadhappened. I now had a quasibrother, one who made me forget enough of the bad stuff that I actually felt like I could pour the little white pills down the sink. Then once Dad (using words that sounded more like April’s) convinced me to pick up photography again, suddenly I had something to fill the space carved out of me.
    The camera I have, but I miss Rob already.
    I sneak a peek at my phone and see that I only have one bar. Life without parole—in solitary.
    â€œYou can talk to me that way, but Linda doesn’t take kindly to scoldings,” I say to April.
    She looks at me like I’ve given her something new and exotic to worry about, which brings me a hint of joy.
    Outside by the jeep, the trees sway in the breeze, and I look up at the sky in search of something, the moon maybe.
    I remember Rae doing that, except she wasn’t looking for the moon. It was one of the first times we hung out together, and she was looking up at the sun as it nudged the clouds out of the way.
    â€œYou’re not supposed to do that,” I’d said. “I think you can go blind or something.”
    â€œThat doesn’t seem fair. It’s the closest we’ll ever get to a star, and we can’t even enjoy it.”
    I reach behind my ear and trace the cluster of stars weeach had inked there so we could be closer to them than the sun would ever allow us to get. I wonder how many times Rae thought back on that day when we each sat in a ripped vinyl chair and lied about being eighteen. Mine came out better than hers. She resented me for that.
    â€œThe sun seems shy,” I’d said another time.
    â€œThat sun . . . what a pussy,” she’d said. Rae could ­dismantle a serious thought in five words, a quality that should have been maddening but brought me relief more often than anything. It felt nice to have the weight of those types of thoughts lifted occasionally.
    And then I remember the heaviness that would settle in later, the holes she left after taking away so much of what I wanted to feel for myself. The confusion at how so much empty space could weigh me down.
    I open the cab of April’s jeep and grab my camera case from where it toppled to the floor. As I climb out and close the door, I search the area, suddenly aware that my surroundings have shifted, though I don’t fully understand until I hold still for a moment. That’s what’s changed—everything has gone still.
    The breeze has stopped blowing, the groans and creeks of the deep forest have quieted. Even the leaves on the branches have stopped trembling. I exhale and see my breath form in front of my face.
    April appears in the doorway of the