Beneath Her Skin by Gregg Olsen (ebook reader for manga txt) 📗

It was raining, of course, when Taylor and Hayley stood out in front of their house waiting for the school bus. In a few months they’d be sixteen, and if there was any justice in the world, their father would help them buy a car.

Girls like Starla Larsen with older boyfriends managed to halt the cycle of abuse that was the bus ride to Kingston High School. The driver, Ms. Hatcher, liked to keep perfect order on “her” bus. She was a driver. Not a mom. She didn’t want to be a hugger. She made one touchy feely kid sit behind her on the window seat in her blind spot so she never had to engage with him, next to a boy from house number 27, who wore a raccoon tail on a back beltloop as a fashion statement.

Other kids sat in the usual order. In the front were the geeks, the crybabies and the kids who just wanted to get off the bus as soon as the doors swung open. The couples and the druggies sat in the back. The middle section held everyone else.

Beth Lee was seated in the middle—one of the few kids to actually migrate toward the center of the bus since leaving elementary school. Beth had so many incarnations that she easily could have found a spot anywhere. Hayley and Taylor scooted into the seats next to Beth.

As the bus pulled away, the girls rolled their eyes at Segway Guy, the man who lived in house number 91 along the water and who for some strange reason chose the most embarrassing mode of transportation known to man as his preference to get from point A to B.

“Freak,” Beth commented. “Even the rain doesn’t stop him.”

“The rain stops no one,” Hayley said, deadpan. “Not even Segway Guy.”

“Where’s Colton?” Beth asked. “Home exhausted?”

“From what?”

“From doing it with you.” Beth spoke loudly, not so much to overcome the noise of the idling bus and Ms. Hatcher’s tendency to over-press the accelerator pedal as she waited for her turn to merge onto the highway, but to increase the opportunity for someone to overhear. Anyone who saw her could figure that. That day Beth Lee’s impossibly black hair was spiked with so much Elmer’s Glue that someone could hang a coat on it. No doubt once they got to school, someone probably would try.

Hayley motioned for Beth to lower her voice. “For your information, he was out of town all winter break. And in case you were wondering, you’re gross.”

Beth smirked a little and touched the tips of her hair. She made a pained expression that was either meant to signify her sharp hair spires or that she’d been quietly told off by one of the girls whose names she used interchangeably. “Just asking. I figured that you did it by now. Probably told your sister, but not me. People leave me out of everything.”

Taylor spoke up. “She hasn’t told me anything.” She looked at her twin. “You didn’t, did you? I mean, I would have known if you had.”

Hayley scowled a little. “That’s none of your business, but no, I didn’t, and no, I won’t tell you when we do.”

Beth glossed her lips with some overly fragrant strawberry lip balm. “So you’re going to?”

Hayley shook her head, her face now a little more pink than she could ascribe to the cold weather. “I didn’t mean that. I meant, if we do. Unlike some girls around here, I’m actually in no big rush.”

Beth deflected the remark by changing the subject. Beth was like that. Taylor once wondered if Beth’s ancestors invented fireworks because she seemed to totally get off on lighting fuses and standing back to watch the fun.

“I heard some news,” Beth said as the bus lurched down the highway toward Kingston.

“Do we have to pull it out of you?” Taylor asked.

“Right, we know you’re so discreet,” Hayley chimed in, unsuccessfully trying for a little payback.

Beth put her lip balm in her purse and scrolled through her text messages.

“My mom told me that her friend Lu at the Timberline said that Katelyn got into big trouble last fall. Something that made her mom and dad furious. I couldn’t hear it all.”

Hayley narrowed her focus on her best friend. “I thought you said your mom told you.”

“Guilty. Big deal, I was eavesdropping. So what? The information is good.”

“What did your mom say, exactly?” Taylor asked.

“I’m Asian. That doesn’t make me a Sony recorder.”

“Right,” Taylor said. “But what did she say?”

Beth thought for a moment, extracting every word for her friends who always annoyingly insisted on precision. “She said, ‘If I were Katelyn’s mother I’d have done the same thing. What girls won’t do these days for a boy.’”

“What boy was she talking about?” Hayley asked.

Beth sighed. “I don’t know,” she said, clearly bored with the subject of Katelyn’s imaginary love life. “I really don’t care. But I thought you two might.”

Beth Lee anchored her trademark black Doc Martens on the green linoleum floor in front of the lockers in the Red Pod at Kingston High School and flipped through her texts. The school administration didn’t allow the use of electronic devices during class, and teachers had gotten pretty good at catching the kids who tried to strategically place books to block the view from the front of the classroom. One violation got a slap on the wrist (not literally, of course, because that would be abuse and abuse was so very, very out of bounds), but two violations meant confiscation of the device and required an irritated parent to personally retrieve it from the principal’s office.

That day Beth’s fashion sense was subdued. Her top was a small men’s chalk-striped suit vest that left her arms bare, and her jeans were old-school acid-washed. She looked a little like a 1980s reject, but she didn’t care.

While a sea of kids trudged past her, she methodically scrolled through her messages, ignoring her mother’s notes,