Read Online The Secret Society of the Pink Crystal Ball by Risa Green - Free Book Online Page A

attention.
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œI don’t know if they’ll let me take my box on an airplane. And I won’t be able to think if I’m not inside it.”
    A slow grin spreads over his face, and he punches me lightly on the arm. “Come on. We should get back to work,” he says. “The museum closes in twenty minutes.”

Eleven
    Jesse Cooper is just an impossible person. That’s all there is to it.”
    Lindsay and I are waiting in line in the cafeteria, and I’ve been venting to her for the last six minutes about how rude Jesse was to me at the museum last night, with his one word answers and his “you’re so in the box” comment. Lindsay gives me a devilish grin, her dimple slowly revealing itself, like a girl at the beach who’s reluctant to remove her cover-up.
    â€œI think you like him,” she teases.
    â€œOh, okay. Let’s just say that I like him about as much as you like the Unabollmer.”
    The Unabollmer is actually a kid in our grade named Chris Bollmer who’s obsessed with Lindsay. He’s some kind of computer-y science genius, and a lot of people say that he’s completely antisocial, but I don’t necessarily agree. I think he’s just a really smart guy who doesn’t know how to relate to people who care about things like sports, or who will become the next American Idol, or whether Dana Peterson got a nose job over the summer, and is therefore totally misunderstood by high school society. I mean, if he were truly antisocial, he wouldn’t spend so much time trying to come up with any excuse to talk to Lindsay, and he certainly wouldn’t have emailed her a virtual bouquet of flowers on Valentine’s Day, along with a poem that said, “Roses are red, violets are blue, you hate Megan Crowley and I do too.”
    Which I thought was kind of funny and weirdly sweet. But Lindsay, not so much. In fact, the only time that Lindsay ever shows even a shadow of her former mean self is when it’s got something to do with Chris Bollmer.
    Lindsay frowns. “Oh, please, don’t even say that. I think the only thing worse than having nobody at school talk to me is having nobody at school talk to me except for him.”
    â€œWhat about me and Samantha? We talk to you.”
    â€œOkay, fine. The only thing worse than having nobody at school talk to me except for you and Samantha is having nobody at school talk to me except for you and Samantha and the Unabollmer. Is that better?”
    â€œMuch. Thank you.”
    The nickname comes from an incident in third grade, when Chris happened to notice that one of the manhole covers on his street had been left unscrewed. He went down into it and began fooling around with the electrical system and pulling out wires. But he must have pulled on the wrong wire, because the manhole exploded while Chris was still inside, and he ended up almost killing himself. He spent two months in the hospital being treated for burns, and he had to get a tattoo to fill in a big chunk of his left eyebrow where the hair got singed off.
    Anyway, when Chris came back to school in the beginning of fourth grade, he was, like, a persona non grata . Everybody would whisper whenever he walked into a room, and although the official story was that he had gone into the manhole looking for wires for a robot that he was building, a rumor started going around that he had actually been building a bomb, which he was planning to use to blow up some kids in his neighborhood who used to tease him.
    He pretty much kept to himself after that (further fueling his antisocial image), and after a while, most people just forgot about the whole thing. But then a couple of years ago some kid at school learned about Ted Kaczynski—that crazy Unabomber guy who in the ’90s sent bombs to people in the mail, until the FBI caught him and sent him to prison for the rest of his life—and that kid