Read Online Under the Bridge by Rebecca Godfrey, Ellen R. Sasahara, Felicity Don - Free Book Online

not know there were words like
humiliation
or
shame,
so he thought it was maybe anger, this emotion that he felt when he did things he would later regret. Once he grabbed this dye that Chris Fox had, and he dyed his hair blonde and all the girls were “really choked.” Syreeta didn’t look too pleased. His hair was sort of this sunflower color, but a parched and dull sunflower. He didn’t understand why he’d dyed his hair—just so suddenly, and on a whim. He wasn’t exactly vain, but he kept his white jeans bleached and clean, and he folded them neatly every night and put them in his duffel bag, which he kept on the floor next to Chris Fox’s dresser.
    â€œYou think I’ll still be a ladies’ man?” he said when he was at peer counseling, and he took off his baseball cap and showed Mrs. Smith his newly dyed curls.
    â€œOh no,” she said, shaking her head. He smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said, because she looked suddenly sad. Outside Mrs. Smith’s office, old Grubnut Kelly Ellard was pacing around, and he didn’t know it, but Mrs. Smith wanted to speak to her about swearing at a teacher. He left the office sure he was going to go ahead and do that peer counseling role model thing with Syreeta. Mrs. Smith wanted them to talk about how they worked out their problems nonviolently.
    He saw Syreeta in the distance of the hallway, leaning against his locker, dressed in a red T-shirt that matched the red laces on her white shoes. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and when she saw him coming, she smiled even though she rarely smiled lately because of her braces. “Warren G,” she said, and she kissed him right there, in front of everybody.
    Maybe it was that day, though he blanked out the date because it was not an occasion he wanted to memorize. The occasion of his expulsion, that is. After school, he and Syreeta went down to the beach and then to her house for dinner, and he talked to Syreeta’s step-dad for a while, just about man stuff, and then he went home to Christie Point, cheerful as always, past D.J. and his sister Ashley. He saw this great blue heron that lived on the bird reserve. The heron always reminded him of himself, the way he was in Estevan. The heron was all alone and strange in the bird sanctuary with the flocks of geese and swans. And so when he returned home, he was going to ask Grace what she knew about herons. She sat by the TV, a grim, determined expression on her face. She said, “Warren….”
    He didn’t really listen to the words because the words sort of blurred, but she said something about how Reginald was getting out of prison in December and he was going to move in here, and so there wouldn’t be enough room for Warren anymore. He sure didn’t want to be in the way again, overhearing the bitter words of adults, so he said, “Yeah, sure.” What was he going to say? He said
yeah, sure,
when she asked him to leave her home. “Don’t worry, Grace,” he said. “Don’t worry about me.”

More Friends Than Enemies
    O N THIS SAME DAY, Josephine also received some distressing news.
    â€œHey, I just got a phone call,” a freckled boy named Justin told her. When he called, she thought he must be wanting to invite her to a party or tell her she was beautiful. Instead, he said, “Some girl just called me and told me you had AIDS!”
    â€œWhat the fuck!” Josephine screamed.
    Only an hour later, she was seeking comfort in the arms of a boy named Tyson Bourgeois. Tyson’s friend Johnny, a BMX rider with a scarred lip, said, “Hey, Josephine. I just got a phone call.”
    â€œAbout me?”
    â€œYeah, some girl was talking shit about you. She asked me if I’d seen you lately and she said you weren’t so pretty anymore.”
    â€œAre you serious?” Josephine said. Tyson and Johnny were cracking up, so amused by the pettiness