Free My Almost Epic Summer by Adele Griffin Page A

like air.’ ” I look up. “The girl is talking about missing her mom. There’s more poetry in that sentence than in something like ‘My mom’s not here, she’s gone I fear.’ ”
    “ Your opinion.” Starla makes a face. “It’s not even in a regular poem shape.”
    “It’s not supposed to be.”
    “You can’t just read some mushy sentence out of a book and call it a poem.”
    “But that’s my point. Poetry doesn’t have to—”
    “Because I can make any word rhyme. Go ahead. Pick a word.”
    I replace Obasan in my bag. “Braggart.”
    “Ha, nice try.” Starla glares at me like she’s the sheriff and I’m the sneaky outlaw. “That’s not a word.”
    “It is, too. I promise.”
    “All it rhymes with is fart. ”
    “That’s only approximate rhyme, and if you’re going for that, a better choice might have been swagger. Or laggard. ”
    Starla’s glare tightens by a notch. “You’re pretty conceited. You think I can’t tell the difference between real and made-up words? You think I’m stupid, right? You and D, you both do. But I’ve got stuff going on up here all the time.” She taps her temple. “Sometimes I get dizzy from all the things in my mind. No joke.” Her voice gets louder. “All you nerds are alike. You act like you’re the only people who think. And mostly what you’re thinking about is how you’re better than everyone else. But you’re jealous of me, too. I know. I see how you watch me.”
    “I don’t think I’m better than you, and I definitely don’t watch you,” I say. It surprises me that Starla could possibly care what I think.
    “Come watch what I do next, Nerd .” Starla turns and starts walking. “I’ll show you something,” she calls. “Something worth watching.”
    And then I have to follow her, because her anger is so purposeful.
    “I can’t stay away too long. I need to keep an eye on Lainie,” I say to Starla’s back.
    She waves me off. “There’s sixty moms on patrol today. Chill.”
    So I trail her all the way to the parking lot, where Starla stops in front of a small, shiny blue car. If Starla had magical powers, the look she gives this car should have caused it to explode.
    “D took me out in this.” She kicks at a dinged hubcap.
    “We went out a lot of times. You think you’re so smart, tell me why someone would go out with you and then break up for no reason as soon as school ends?”
    “Maybe it wasn’t about you.”
    “Oh, shut up. I can get an answer like that out of any magazine.” Starla moves close into my space. “We did stuff in this car, you know? And every time I see it parked out here, I feel it all come back to me. Sometimes I feel it too much.” She presses her heart. “That’s why poetry is cool. I can explain my life a thousand times better in poem form.”
    Under the hot sun, the faint line that traces above the shape of Starla’s upper lip seems exceptionally pale, X-ray lit, against her tan skin. Or maybe I just noticed this, the way I’m always noticing new colors and angles of Starla. The smile she gives me is a duplicate of the smile I saw after she robbed Shady Shack, and my muscles tense in anticipation of whatever next trick she’s got up her sleeve. Then she fishes something out of her pocket.
    It’s a key, swinging on a loop of soft twine.
    I look around, trying to figure out what she wants to unlock. Nobody else is in the parking lot. The couple of kids lolling on Shady Shack’s porch to beat the heat have their backs to us.
    But Starla doesn’t unlock anything. She slashes the key across the car door’s paint. It leaves a dark scratch.
    “Wait! Stop!” I make a grab for her wrist and she snatches it away.
    “You don’t feel how I do when you see this car,” she says. I hear the rasp of metal on metal as the key’s edge digs deep and fierce. The scar she leaves in her wake is like the claw mark of an animal. She walks around it, slow, taking her time.
    I step back. I step back again. I