Free The Bermudez Triangle by Maureen Johnson Page B

I miss you? No. You have no idea
.
    Neen
    It was eleven o’clock in the morning. Nina’s body was still on California time and she’d slept three hours later than normal. This left her with very little time to get ready, since she had to go to school for the first council meeting of the year. She had just enough time to take a quick shower (ah … privacy at last—that was a perk), throw on a sundress, and grab her keys.
    It was a little creepy going into the quiet school. The air washot and still. The secretaries were casually dressed in shorts and playing music in their offices, and some of the teachers were in their classrooms, pulling things out of cabinets. No one seemed to notice that Nina was walking around the halls, which were freshly polished and as glossy as decade-old linoleum could be. The lockers had been repainted in the same range of brown, putty, and salmon. The bathroom doors were propped open, and Nina could see that all of last year’s damage was gone. All was white and sterilized.
    “Bermudez!”
    Okay. Someone noticed her.
    Nina spun around and saw Georgia, the council secretary, heading for her. Georgia Barksdale was a large girl, both tall and broad, with chestnut-colored hair. Her family lived in and operated a bed-and-breakfast, so she’d grown up eating huge country breakfasts every morning at a grand Victorian table and collecting dried wood from the yard for the farmhouse’s seven fireplaces. There was just something solid and warm about Georgia. She had been on the council from her freshman year. She seemed to know everyone in the school and was a walking, talking database.
    “Sucks to be back, huh?” Georgia said, wrapping Nina in a huge hug. “You look great. How was California?”
    “It was amazing,” Nina said.
    “Come on. Wakeman’s waiting for us in the office.”
    “Tie?”
    “Of course.”
    Nina had never known what to make of Devon Wakeman, her VP. For a start, he had worn a tie every single day since mid—sophomore year. At first people just thought that this was sarcastic fashion. But Devon pushed it further, past joke, statement, and quirk, taking it all the way to trademark. He was wearing one today—a nice maroon one with a gold stripe—even though it was hot.
    “So,” he said.
    “So” was Devon’s traditional greeting.
    “Hi,” Nina replied. She tried not to notice that he’d gotten a little better looking over the summer. He was the renaissance man of AHH: the reigning king of the photography lab, track and field star, coffeehouse guitarist, peer counselor, and vice-president of the AHH’s National Honor Society. He was also physically distinctive, with his thick, wavy blond hair and long eyelashes. (Those eyelashes were
enviably
long, real eyebrow-sweepers. There wasn’t a mascara in the world that could produce the Wakeman effect.) He had always managed to sweep elections, and he’d dated an entire cross-section of the AHH female population, from cheerleaders to the library volunteers. (None of his relationships lasted for more than a few weeks, so he also had the tragic romantic thing going on.)
    Perhaps, to offset the Wonderful Factor of all of the above, he also wore a permanent scowl—he constantly looked like he’d just been told that his car had been towed. For some reason (even though she was not one of the Wakeman exes), Nina felt like she and Devon had never gotten along. They’d never had anargument. It was nothing specific. He was one of the few people who really put Nina on her guard. She’d always tried to avoid him. Now she was going to see him constantly.
    “Chocolate cheesecake muffins,” Georgia said, pushing a box of baked goods at Nina. “Jeff’s late. Shock. Amazement. I guess we should wait.”
    “I guess,” Nina said. She had wanted to start the first meeting of the year on time (which set a good precedent, according to her instructor over the summer). Still, Jeff Burg was the treasurer, and it didn’t seem right to