Free Ready or Not by Meg Cabot Page B

for a minute, I thought I had entered the wrong house. I almost turned around and went back out again. That’s how bizarre I found what I was seeing.
    Lucy was sitting at the dining room table with a bunch of books spread out in front of her.
    On a Friday night. A Friday night. Lucy is never home on Friday night. Up until recently, she’s always either been at a game or out with Jack, who travels down almost every weekend to see her. Lately, of course, she’s been working the Friday night shift at Bare Essentials, over in the mall.
    But not this Friday night. This Friday night, she was going over SAT vocabulary words with—and this was the part that had me convinced I had the wrong house, the wrong sister, the wrong everything—Harold Minsky.
    There are a lot of places I might have expected to see Harold Minsky. Potomac Video, for one, in the very anime section I’d just spent an hour organizing. Or possibly the sci-fi shelves. I would definitely have expected to see him in the computer lab at school, where he practically lives, in his capacity as teacher’s assistant to Mr. Andrews, the computer lab supervisor.
    I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to see Harold in the manga aisle at our local Barnes and Noble, or standing in front of Beltway Billiards, where he and his friends spend hours attaining high scores on Arcade Legends.
    But I can’t say I expected, in a million years, ever to find Harold Minsky in my house…much less sitting across the dining room table from my sister Lucy.
    â€œWaggish,” Lucy was saying thoughtfully as I walked in. “You mean, like a dog?”
    Harold said, in a bored voice, “No.” Then, when there was no reply from my sister, he prompted, “It’s an adjective.”
    â€œWaggish.” Lucy looked up at the ceiling, as if expecting the vocab fairy to tumble down from the chandelier and help her out. Instead, she noticed me standing in the doorway with my mouth sagging open.
    â€œOh, hi, Sam,” she said brightly. “Do you know Harold? Harold, this is my sister Samantha. Samantha, this is Harold. You know. From school.”
    I did know. Harold was my computer lab TA. I said, “Uh, hi, Harold.”
    Harold nodded at me, then turned his bespectacled head (how could it not be, when his parents had named him Harold?) back toward Lucy. What could they have been thinking, by the way? Didn’t they know that naming a kid Harold was a self-fulfilling prophecy, guaranteed to turn him into all that the name stood for: glasses, a crop of weedish brown hair that was badly in need of cutting, an unsteady gait stemming from a frame that had shot up six inches over the previous summer, making him one of the tallest guys in school not actually on the basketball team, and an orange Hawaiian shirt, the tail of which flopped out from the waistband of his too-short Levi’s?
    â€œCome on,” he said in a no-nonsense tone that I’m sure no male member of the species had ever used on my sister before in her life. “You know this one. We just went over it.”
    â€œWaggish,” Lucy said obediently. Then, to me, added, “Oh, I got that thing for you, Sam. That thing we talked about the other night? It’s on your bed.”
    At first I didn’t know what she was talking about. Then, when she winked slowly, it hit me—and I blushed. Deeply.
    Fortunately, Harold was too caught up in getting my sister to come up with a definition for waggish (SAT word meaning “mischievous in sport; roguish in merriment or good humor; frolicsome”) to notice me.
    â€œLucy,” he said severely, “if you aren’t even going to try, I see no point in wasting my time and your parents’ money—”
    â€œNo, no, wait,” Lucy said. “I know this one. Really, I do. Waggish. Doesn’t it mean ‘happy’? Like, the football victory left him feeling waggish?”
    I had to