Free Charm & Strange by Stephanie Kuehn Page A

state. Heavy drops of rain pummeled the earth like sniper fire and the air smelled bright and raw like ozone. I stood at the window and watched one of my grandfather’s spit cans roll off a pine bench and straight into the back pond, where it bobbed around before sinking. My grandmother’s herb garden was completely underwater. Half the plants had been washed away or flattened. I smiled.
    Light footsteps approached. I dove back under the covers as Anna popped her head in again. She’d called in sick to her job at the local library so that she could take care of me.
    “Still not feeling well?” she asked.
    I pressed my cheek against the pillow and made sad eyes.
    She sat beside me, soft thighs touching my knees. The fear-anger-confusion that lived inside me subsided, like the lowering tide.
    Anna rubbed my back again.
    I felt happy.

 
    chapter
    seventeen
    matter
    “You can go if you want,” Jordan tells me. “I don’t need a babysitter.”
    My heart skips a beat, not in a lovey-dovey way, please, but in a holy shit, ladies and gentlemen, mark the date and time, Winston Winters is being pushed away before he can withdraw sulkily kind of way. I feel a little sick, actually. How did this happen? I’m not dense. Being pushed away implies I’m making an effort to stick around.
    Something is very wrong.
    I take a steadying breath and pull out my phone. A quick check confirms what I already know, what I can already sense—it’s late.
    Later than it should be.
    The sick feeling intensifies. I’m too keyed up. Anxious, maybe, I guess. Although “anxiety” is one of those words people at our boarding school throw around that’s hard for me to connect with. Kind of goes hand in hand with that whole “worry” thing. I don’t get that, either. Why get worked up over the bad thing that hasn’t happened yet when there’re plenty of bad things that have?
    Take Teddy, for example. He’s a day student, but he and Lex have been tight since the first day of school, so I know him pretty well. The guy worries about everything. It’s draining to see. Never mind that his family is beyond nuclear-ideal—I stay with his folks during vacations or whenever I can get away with not going back to Virginia—he’s loaded, drives a 3 Series BMW, gets perfect grades, and even if he didn’t, what would it matter? Teddy’s a three-generation legacy at Brown, and really, if grades were going to make or break his college success, he’d be better off at public school, where his über-achievement and 4.3 GPA might actually impress somebody. He can’t see that, though. Instead, the guy’s on every SSRI in the book, pops Ambien just to sleep, and practically faints anytime a girl says hi to him. At sixteen. It’s ridiculous. Literally nothing bad has ever happened to him. He just thinks it will. As if thinking will help.
    Thinking never helps. I know that.
    “Teddy,” I asked him once, back when I still thought it was important to try to fit in, “will you feel less bad when a girl rejects you if you worry about it ahead of time?”
    “Screw you,” he sniped. “So you’re saying she’s going to reject me no matter what?”
    “That’s not what I said at all.”
    He sniffed. “Well, if I worry about it, odds are I won’t ask her out in the first place. And I’ll still hate myself. Happy?”
    I clenched my jaw. “Never.”
    Teddy shook a finger at me. “No way, Winters. I get to be miserable, too. You don’t get to be the best at everything.”
    But tonight, anxiety makes sense. Intellectually, I should be nervous. But do I feel it? Is that the reason I’m still sitting next to a girl I don’t know, running at the mouth about my personal life ? Of all things.
    The moon peeks at me from behind a stormy cloud.
    It’s full. Alluring.
    My tongue runs along the tips of my teeth.
    It’s an old, old habit.
    Jordan slouches over on my right. She thinks I’m ignoring her. This can’t be how she wanted to spend the evening.