Read Online The Nine Lives of Chloe King by Liz Braswell - Free Book Online

she was home and asleep, so Chloe was spared the almost inevitable confrontation about the bruises and scrapes on her cheeks. She slept dreamlessly until her alarm rang and managed to hide her face from her mom until she got out of the house.

    “What the hell happened to you?” It was blunt, but at least Amy didn’t start off with any is-your-mom-hitting-you bullshit. She was smoking a clove cigarette this morning, trying to look cool by casually dropping it and stepping on it as they approached the school.
    “I walked into a door. Again,” Chloe answered tragically.
    Amy hit her.
    “I was attacked by a bum last night, walking home.” She wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to tell the truth, but after not bothering to mention her night at the club or Xavier, Chloe was beginning to feel uncomfortable with the number of omissions and half lies she was telling her friend.
    “Oh my God. Are you okay? Wait, what am I saying. This is the Chloe King who survived a fall from Coit Tower.” Amy raised one eyebrow and shook her head.
    “I beat the living shit out of him,” Chloe couldn’t help bragging.
    “Yeah? Which episode of Buffy was that? Or more importantly, what was he on?”
    “Hey! I attribute it to my awesome strength, lightning-fast reflexes, and that self-defense course I aced.”
    “Uh-huh,” Amy said, nodding and pretending to agree. “So. What was he on?”
    Why didn’t Ame believe her? Was it so unbelievable that she’d managed to defend herself successfully from an attacker? Chloe thought back on the fight. The man had been large, six-foot two or so, but skinny. He had obviously been living on the streets for a while. She tried to play the scene through Amy’s eyes. It seemed believable, almost like a scenario from the self-defense class—up until, with no training, she’s done that high kick onto his chest. And instead of running away, she had finished the fight.
    Chloe sighed. “Probably smack or something.”
    The predictable appearance of crunchy cheese-baked scrod on Wednesday was a surprisingly reassuring thing. Though it made Chloe want to retch, lunch seemed to indicate that everything was normal. Sure, Amy and Paul tended to disappear from the scene every available moment—Chloe was convinced that someday one of the face-sucking couples she passed in the hall before class would turn out to be them. She’d taken to walking between classes faster, head down.
    Amy did manage to find five minutes on the walk between school and work on Wednesday to talk, bringing a latte for her friend, the first of many what Chloe called “gilfts”: guilt gifts. They chatted about this and that, but it was always the same problem.
    Chloe wanted to talk about things—like the fall. Like her fight with the bum. Like Xavier, for Christ’s sake. But she and Amy had been so apart recently that it took a few minutes of rapid reacquainting before Chloe felt comfortable enough to really talk, and by then one of them—usually Amy—always had to leave.
    At Pateena’s, Marisol had turned on the old black-and-white television—one of four throughout the store that played trippy visuals to trance on the speakers. Some dumb sitcom was playing while she set up the tapes. Chloe absently watched it while taking her break, scanning the obituaries again, looking for Xavier. The TV show was something about a normal guy and his hippie wife and the comic mayhem that ensued as a result of their differences.
    Chloe suddenly envisioned a different version of her mother: a slightly ditzier, San Francisco hippie version who dragged her daughter to horrible things like drumming circles and Goddess nights. Maybe she owned a bookstore. She would be kooky but easy to talk to and would have relevant things to say about boys when Chloe opened up to her over a mug of homemade chai. Nothing negative. Nothing like “don’t date them,” for instance.
    From what little she remembered and had been told, her dad was more that type of