Free Rebel by Francine Pascal

contact you later.
    Keep an eye on Gaia, though. Make sure she doesn't get involved."
    "Right." Ella clicked the phone shut and shoved it back into her pocket. Poor, poor Gaia indeed. So there was a good chance she would lose her boyfriend
and
her best friend. All within the space of a few days. It was turning out to be a merry Christmas after all.
    Top Ten Reasons I Should Avoid Gaia Moore Like the Plague and
    Never Speak to Her Again

E D
    1. She nearly got me killed by a bunch of skinheads.
    2. She nearly got me killed by a serial killer.
    3. She pisses me off.
    4. She's in love with Sam Moon.
    5. She's involved with something really bad and mysterious that she can't talk about.
    6. This bad and mysterious thing will probably get her killed.
    7. This bad and mysterious thing will probably get me killed, too, if I keep hanging out with her.
    8. She has no redeeming social skills.
    9. Every time I think about her, I get a headache.
    10. I'm in a wheelchair, and she isn't.
    Top 10 Reasons I Should Keep Hanging Out with Her
    1. She does a kick-ass imitation of that little kid from
The Sixth Sense.
    That's about it. Oh, yeah. I'm also in love with her. Does that count?

bearded clones
    He'd learned a long time ago that it was wise to be paranoid when hanging out with Gaia.
    ED WASN'T SURE EXACTLY WHAT DROVE him to accept Gaia's invitation and meet her and Mary in Washington Square Park that night. He sure as hell wasn't psyched to play more truth or dare. No, he figured there were probably two reasons--a desperate need to be in Gaia's presence and utter boredom.
The New Gaia
    Pretty much the usual.
    Plus he had been spending
way
too much time with his family the past few days. Christmas was already forty-eight hours behind him, and his parents were still planning holiday events--as if dragging him to New Jersey yesterday to visit his grandparents wasn't torture enough. For some reason, his mom and dad really seemed to believe that there were actually twelve days of Christmas--and each of those days required some kind of painfully awkward family gathering.
    At least he'd escaped for a while. And it was a little warmer, which probably explained why the park was so crowded at this late hour. Well, that and the fact that all the I'm-too-hip-for-words NYU students were coming back early from Christmas break so they could be in the city for New Year's Eve. Ed snickered to himself as he entered from the southeast. He almost felt sorry for these people --the kids on the benches in their leather jackets and baggy jeans,
    huddled around each other in tight circles for warmth. All of them wanted to pretend that they were native New Yorkers. But no amount of body piercing could alter the fact that most of them grew up in lame states like Iowa or Kansas or Montana.
    He rolled slowly along the brightly lit pathway, scanning for signs of Gaia. There was a lot of action at the chess tables, but he couldn't see--
    "Yo! Ed! Over here!"
    There
she was--standing by the fountain with Mary, waving furiously. God, the more those two hung out together, the more they started to dress like twins. Gaia had bought the same black wool hat as Mary-- and Mary had bought Gaia's overcoat. Their outfits were practically identical. It was kind of scary.
    But what was even scarier was that Gaia was smiling.
    This had been happening a lot lately. It was a fairly strange development, as far as Ed was concerned. Before she'd met Mary, her facial expressions were pretty much limited to various forms of anger. Ed had gotten used to it. He'd come to
expect
it. The fearsome, unsmiling Gaia was the one he had fallen for. But Mary seemed to have some kind of bizarre normalizing effect on her, in a way that he never had. The new Gaia didn't seem to take life as seriously. The new Gaia acted like any other run-of-the-mill seventeen-year-old....
    He shook his head. Maybe Gaia was just smiling
    because she was psyched to see him. Or she was full of Christmas cheer. He