Free The Girl Who Chased the Moon by Sarah Addison Allen

Martens knockoffs.
    Mr. Horne finally turned back around, and as soon as he did, Julia took the sharpened pencil she was holding and dragged it heavily across her forearm. She didn’t realize what she’d done at first. She simply watched the pebbles of blood form on her skin with a weird sense of satisfaction, of release.
    At first it was random, using whatever she had on hand, but it soon became more deliberate and she started using razor blades she hid under her mattress at home. Every time she cut herself, it was intense and dramatic, like being jerked from the gaping maw of nothingness and back into life. It not only made her feel, it made her feel good . At one point she realized she couldn’t stop, that she couldn’t get through the day without cutting herself, but she didn’t care. She truly didn’t care. It wasn’t long before her forearms were covered in angry spider-webs of scabbed-over cuts, and she wore long-sleeved shirts even on the warmest days.
    She’d been cutting her arms for months before Julia’s father and stepmother found out. It was Beverly who first saw the marks. Julia had just stepped out of the shower one morning and had wrapped a towel around herself, when her stepmother tapped on the door and waltzed in, saying, “Don’t mind me. I’m just getting my tweezers—”
    She stopped short when she saw Julia’s bare arms.
    When Julia’s father got home from work that evening, he came into her bedroom. His face was pinched and worried and he approached her cautiously, as if trying not to crush her with the weight of his presence. He wanted to know what was wrong, and Julia resented the question. How could he not know?
    Her sophomore year ended not long after, and her father and Beverly never let her out of their sight that summer. Instead of feeling like she’d finally gotten what she wanted, she hated that they were trying to stop her from doing the one thing that made her feel better.
    The entire summer was one long power struggle. She actually started looking forward to the school year so she could get away from them. And of course, the new school year meant she would get to see Sawyer. Beautiful Sawyer. But just a few days before the start of school at Mullaby High, Julia’s father told her that he was sending her away to boarding school. It was a special school, he said. For troubled teens. They were supposed to drive to Baltimore to the school the next day. He’d given her only one day’s notice. One day . He’d been planning this behind her back all summer!
    That night, she crawled out of the laundry room window and ran away. If her father didn’t want her around, fine. But she wasn’t going to some stupid school. The problem was, she had no idea where else to go. So she ended up on her favorite perch on the high school bleachers.
    She’d been there a few hours when Sawyer showed up. It was after midnight, but suddenly there he was, walking around the track. The moon was out and he was wearing white shorts and a white polo, so she could see him clearly from her seat.
    She didn’t move, so she didn’t know what made him look up. But he did, and her breath caught, as it did every time he looked at her in school.
    They stared at each other for a long moment. Then he crossed the track and walked up the bleachers toward her.
    Sawyer had never approached her before, but he had always watched her at school. A lot of people watched her, so that in itself wasn’t unusual. But he was always so deliberate about it. She’d often wondered if that was why she had these strange feelings for him, because she thought he really saw her.
    He came to a stop in front of her. “Do you mind if I sit?”
    She shrugged.
    He sat, but didn’t say anything more for a while. “Do you come out here at night a lot?” he finally asked.
    “No.”
    “I didn’t think so. I’ve walked around this track at night all summer, and I’ve never seen you, like I do during the school year.” She wondered