Free Avalon High by Meg Cabot Page B

It wasn’t that, after a single dinner and a couple of lemonades, I considered us soulmates, or anything.
    But…he’d told me so many other things. Like about not wanting to go to the Academy.
    And the rose. What about that rose?
    “So,” Liz went on, “you can see why Will doesn’t like to spend a lot of quality time at home. With his new stepmom and a dad who’d do something like that. Not to mention Marco.”
    “Who’s Marco?” I asked, totally confused now.
    Stacy, the girl who was offering us a ride, finally showed up, sauntering up behind us as if she had all the time in the world. Well, she was a high jumper. They can be that way. It’s not about speed with them, so much as defying gravitational pull.
    “Oh my God,” she said, having overheard my question. She looked at Liz and laughed. “She hasn’t heard of Marco?”
    “I know,” Liz said, rolling her eyes. “Well, she is new.”
    “What?” I looked from one girl to the other. “Who’s Marco?”
    “Marco Campbell,” Liz said. “Will’s new stepbrother. The dead guy’s son.”
    “Town psycho,” Stacy said. She pointed her finger at her temple, then twirled her finger around. “Total head case.”
    I knew I was fully gaping at them both, but I couldn’t help it.
    “Marco lives with Will and his dad and stepmom?”
    “Yeah,” Stacy said. “Though I’m sure they’d like to get rid of him.”
    “Why? What’s wrong with him?”
    “Stacy already told you,” Liz said. “He’s a total freak. He got kicked out of Avalon High last year, a month before graduation, for—get this—trying to kill a teacher.”
    I’d been sitting on the curb in the parking lot next to Liz. Now I got up, and turned to face the two girls.
    “This isn’t true,” I said firmly. “This is part of that—what did you call it? Oh yeah. My initiation. You guys are playing Trick the New Girl, or something.”
    “Uh,” Stacy said, squinting at me, since I was standing with my back to the late-afternoon sun. “You wish. It’s true. They tried to hush the whole thing up—and I don’t know if there was ever enough evidence to press criminal charges. But the guy got expelled. It was all over school.”
    “It really is true, Ellie,” Liz said, getting up from the curb as well. “Although Marco went around claiming itwas self-defense, that the teacher—whoever it was—was trying to kill him, and he was just trying to save himself. Like anyone would believe that. He’s supposed to be starting college this year. That is, if he got in anywhere. Which I highly doubt, since his grades sucked. And not because he wasn’t smart, either. It was his attitude.”
    I couldn’t believe Will hadn’t told me any of this. I mean, the thing with his dad wanting him to go to the Naval Academy, sure. That he’d mentioned. But that his dad had purposefully sent his best friend into a war zone, then snapped up his wife for himself after the guy had been killed? And that he had a stepbrother who’d been kicked out of school for trying to kill a teacher?
    Well, maybe that’s not the kind of thing you tell a virtual stranger when you run into her in the woods. Even if she did let you have some of her pad thai.
    Probably Will didn’t want to talk about it. I mean, it was the kind of thing maybe you’d want people to forget.
    Still. It definitely explained that look I’d seen cross his face a few times.
    My parents are going to be home . That’s what Will had said about his party. That his parents were going to be home. Not his dad and new stepmom. His parents.
    “What happened to his mom?” I asked Liz, as we began following Stacy toward her Miata. “Will’s real mom, I mean?”
    Liz shrugged. “She died or something, I think. A long time ago, I guess. I mean, I never heard him talk about her, anyway.”
    So Will’s mom was dead. He hadn’t mentioned that, either, I noticed.
    Maybe that’s why he liked sitting around by himself in the woods, listening to