Read Online The Last Time We Say Goodbye by Cynthia Hand - Free Book Online

night.
    Wrong Ashley.
    I let out the breath I was holding. “That’s me,” I say to answerher previous question. I hand over her biology notebook and straighten up.
    â€œIs this . . . mine?” she asks, and I see she’s got the envelope from Ty, frowning now because there’s her name written right on it.
    I snatch it out of her hand. “No. It’s mine.” And with no more explanation, I’m on my feet, heading off at a half jog because I’m late, too. For English. For Ty.
    For everything. I’m too late.

7.
    STEVEN IS IN MY ENGLISH CLASS. Of course he is—Steven and Eleanor and Beaker are in all my honors classes. There was a time when that was a good thing, a great thing, even. But not today. I’m five minutes late, but the desk I usually sit at, the one on the far right between Steven and Beaker and in front of El, is still empty. Waiting for me. Steven looks up and smiles, and I feel my face heating again, thinking about the rose.
    Crap.
    Mrs. Blackburn stops talking and stares at me from her perch at the edge of her desk, puzzled by my highly unusual tardiness.
    â€œSorry,” I mumble, and then I slink to the back of the classroom and find a seat on the left. I can’t deal with my friends right now.
    Especially Steven.
    Mrs. Blackburn continues the lecture she was giving. She’s starting us on an exercise in etymology, she says—the study of theorigin of words. She shows us a website where you can type in any word and it will spit out the word’s roots: its definition, where and how that word originated, and how the usage of the word changed over time. In conjunction with our Heart of Darkness reading she demonstrates how the website works using the word heart (which goes back to the Old Norse hjarta ) and the word darkness (Old English deorcnysse ) and takes us back through the history of each word.
    â€œSo, class,” Mrs. Blackburn says when she’s done with the general history lesson about the birth of the English language. “What are some other words that you associate with Heart of Darkness , so far?”
    I raise my hand, which surprises her because I’m not typically so quick to volunteer in this setting (not my cup of tea, remember), then suggest the word horror , which the website tells us comes from early fourteenth-century French.
    Oh la horreur.
    Mrs. Blackburn looks pleased that I have apparently already finished the book and know the significance of the word.
    Thank you, Damian.
    Then she sends us off on the class laptops to look up our own set of words. “Research a word that’s been on your mind,” she instructs.
    I stare at the blank screen for a long time before I actually type in a word that’s on my mind.
    GHOST ( noun ):
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Origin: before 900; Middle English goost (noun), Old English gāst; cognate with German Geist spirit
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  1. The soul of a dead person, a disembodied spirit imagined, usually as a vague, shadowy or evanescent form, as wandering among or haunting living persons.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  2. A mere shadow or semblance; a trace.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  3. A remote possibility.
    As in: there’s not even a ghost of a chance that what I saw—what I’ve been seeing, I guess is a more accurate description, as it’s happened two times now—is real. It seems real, in the moment. It feels real. But it is not real.
    Ghosts do not exist. I am a rational person. I know this.
    Which leads me to:
    HALLUCINATION ( noun ):
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Origin: 1640–50; < Latin hallÅ«cinātiōn- (stem of (h) allÅ«cinātiō) a wandering of the mind.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  1. False or distorted perception of objects or events with a compelling sense of their reality, usually resulting from a mental disorder (????) or drug (no, pretty squeaky clean, drugs-wise; I don’t