Free Hanging by a Thread by Sophie Littlefield Page A

reading my thoughts, Lara leaned over and touched the hem of my shorts, smoothing out the ragged fringe. “You always look soooo amazing,” she said in the dreamy voice of someone who’d been drinking a lot. “You have, like,
real
style. Not like, you know, everyone else’s style. But real. You’re
real
. On the inside. Where it really counts.”
    For emphasis Lara tapped on her chest and sighed, staring into my eyes like she was about to hug me. She was wearing a tight, cropped red and white striped tank top with a white star appliqué on the chest, and as her fingertips brushed the star I remembered that there would be fireworks over this very beach three nights from now to cap off the big festival.
    Luke and Hopper, who’d been making a beer run to the coolers, dropped to the sand next to us.
    “Oh, Jesus, are you guys gonna make out?” Hopper demanded drunkenly. “Oh, shit, that’s so hot.”
    Lara giggled and put her hand on my shoulder. “Hopper! I’m totally straight. But if I wasn’t …”
    I’d seen this before, girls flirting with each other, mostly for the guys’ amusement. None of these girls were bi, that I knew of, not in this crowd. Lincoln had a theory that everyone experimented by the time they got out of college—he even had a list of straight guys he hoped to catch during their experimental phase—but somehow I doubted that Winston High was quite as progressive asthe Blake School. As for me, the thought of kissing a girl wasn’t appealing.
    But tonight was different. Everything was so beautiful—the inky sky full of stars, the glimmer of moonlight out on the water, the laughter of my friends. Somewhere nearby, I had a new best friend, someone who cared about me and who I would have all kinds of fun with in my last two years of high school. I was feeling funny and clever and happy, even if I wasn’t drinking—what would it hurt to play along, to have a little fun tonight?
    I put my arm around Lara and leaned against her shoulder. She smelled nice, like spicy perfume and rum, and she giggled and hugged me back. As my hand slid down her back and rested on the fabric of her top, the energy inside me hitched and bucked and reversed, the pleasant moment being sucked backward toward a swirling vortex, a voice shrilling over a thick blanket of pain.
    Take your hand away
, I willed myself. Ordinarily I would never have my defenses down when I touched someone—it had become second nature to me to steel myself. I tried to resist the visions, or at least control them. But tonight everything seemed possible, and I hesitated, enjoying being part of the crowd, part of this group of pretty girls who seemed to take all their good fortune for granted. I liked feeling popular. I liked feeling wanted.
    But as my hand rested on her back, I sensed … something. And still I didn’t pull away. Lara’s memories, her emotions and thoughts, flowed through my fingertips andflickered to life in my mind, and I had barely absorbed her brittle cheer before I felt it break into a thousand shards against the sadness that lay just below the surface.
    Once it began, it was too late to break away, to interrupt the transfer. I let myself go, the energy flowing through her shirt into my hand, along my nerves and veins to my mind and heart, and the cool sand fell away beneath me, the starry sky disappeared above me, and I was inside Lara’s mind. It was an anxious place.
    In the vision, Lara—her hair longer, and not as blond—was walking along the liquor aisle of a grocery store. I knew it had to be Dell Market even before I recognized the well-stocked refrigerators full of sodas and beers, the bakery cases at the end of the aisle. Where else would a couple of high school girls go to steal liquor?
    Sure enough, in the vision, Lara was accompanied by another girl. I saw her from the back, her long hair cascading over her shoulders as she bent down like she was considering the bottles of carbonated juice stocked on