Free The Stranger Inside by Melanie Marks Page A

as she peeked out at us through the living room window.
    Seems nice , I scoffed. How can you tell something like that by the way a person waves?
    Still, I thought I might invite Parker to dinner. He and I had become sort of friends. Not that I’d ever seen him outside of his car. I hadn’t, ever. But sometimes we would sit for a while and talk when he gave me a ride home from Sawyer’s. He had a strange, dry sense of humor. He made me laugh.
    Also, he played the saxophone, and I played the flute. We were always talking about getting together and playing a duet. So, his coming to dinner seemed alright. I figured it would be nice to have a friend that could actually come in the house.
    When I got to Sawyer’s he was on the phone. I heard him say, “I need to go—No, don’t come over.” Then he said it again, “Don’t come over.”
    I knew he was talking to one of the guys from his band. I didn’t even bother to ask. Sawyer had issues with girlfriends coming to his band practices. Apparently, The Clutch all steal each other’s girlfriends. Or something. Whatever. I didn’t need the drama.
    Still though, it seemed more than that, like Sawyer was keeping some sort of “secret” about the band. He would act weird whenever I brought them up—get all stiff and cautious. Weird, weird, weird. I tried to not let it bug me though. Tried. We all have secrets, right?
    Like, well, I didn’t tell him about Dad—what happened to him. I couldn’t. It just sat in my stomach like a rock. So, I let Sawyer have his secret, knowing secrets are painful, but maybe … necessary? Sometimes? A little bit?
    We played a little ping-pong down in his basement and I got the socks beat off me, then we went up to his room to play Wii. His house was like an arcade—one with free snacks. It was cool. And void of parents, which was a good thing, except Sawyer was alone so much.
    “The Clutch is pretty much my family,” he’d once told me.
    I was glad Sawyer had his band. When he was eleven, his mom had abandoned him. She just took off while his dad, who was a captain on a nuclear submarine, was out on patrol. She never came back. Sawyer didn’t talk about it much, but I knew it hurt him. How could it not?
    “Oh, hey, don’t eat that,” Sawyer said, tossing the slice of pizza I’d grabbed into the garbage. “That was from last week. Are you hungry? I can make you spaghetti.”
    “No, that’s okay. I’ll just stick with the chips.” I glanced around his room. “Your cleaning lady’s about due, isn’t she?”
    “What, the place offends you?” he grinned, glancing around. “I guess it is kind of a mess, huh? Actually ol’ Betty was supposed to come by this morning, but something came up. Car trouble or her daughter had a baby. Something.”
    I grinned. Obviously he wasn’t too interested in the personal life of the lady who scrubbed his toilets. But actually, the place was pretty clean considering he was a teenage boy. I think it said a lot that his dad trusted him enough to leave him alone and unsupervised while he was away.
    “I don’t get into trouble,” Sawyer had told me when I first learned of his independent situation. “Seriously. For the most part I just hang out with the band. Sure we have parties, but controlled parties, you know? I don’t want my place getting trashed. Besides, we don’t get into that much trouble when we drink. We just do it until we pass out.”
    He’d laughed at me when I looked horrified and promised not to drink around me. I personally didn’t drink and I didn’t want to hang out with a bunch of drunks. How depressing. Okay, I had a bias, big time. My grandfather was an alcoholic. He put my dad through hell. Drinking equaled problems. Period.
    Sawyer ran his fingers through my hair. He’d put on the stereo earlier, now a slow song came on. “I love this song,” he murmured, drawing his face near mine.
    “Yeah. I like it too. Kind of romantic, huh?”
    He kissed me then, tender and