TWELVE

Pearl’s

The library was slow today, thanks to the pristine weather. The sun shone brightly in the sky, and it was warm without being overly so. It was the kind of day that would make Gemma kill to be out on the bay, and even Harper would’ve been happy to join her.

Not that Gemma could go anywhere. As predicted, their father had grounded her when he came home from work last night. He’d yelled in a way that almost made Harper stand up for her sister, but she didn’t. She hid out on the steps and listened to him rant about how he’d always given Gemma freedom and trusted her, but those days were over.

In the end, Gemma had begun to cry. Brian had apologized then, but Gemma just went up to her room. She spent the whole night up there. Harper had tried to talk to her a couple of times, but Gemma just sent her away.

Harper had hoped to talk to her this morning, but Gemma had already left for swim practice by the time she got up. On the upside, Brian had remembered to take his lunch to work with him.

Although that was starting to seem like less of a positive now that Harper was sitting at the front desk of the library without much to do. She absently leafed through Judy Blume’s Forever.

She’d read it before, but that was a couple years ago, so she wanted to refresh herself with the text. It was part of their summer reading program for middle schoolers, and on Mondays Harper met with the ten or so kids in the book club to talk about their weekly reading.

“Did you know that the principal of the high school has had Oprah Winfrey’s biography out for the past six weeks?” Marcy asked, clicking on the computer next to Harper.

“Nope, I didn’t know that,” Harper replied.

Since it was slow, Marcy was going through the computer to search for people who had overdue books, then calling to remind them. Marcy had actually volunteered to do it. Even though she hated interacting with people, she loved calling to tell them that they’d done something wrong.

“That seems weird, doesn’t it?” Marcy peered at Harper from behind a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses. Not that she needed corrective lenses—she just thought they made her look academic, so she wore them sometimes.

“I don’t know. I heard it’s a really good book.”

“It’s like I always say—you can tell a lot about a person by the books they check out.”

“You just like to snoop on people,” Harper corrected her.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing. It’s always good to know what your neighbors are up to. Just ask Poland about that after World War Two.”

“There’s never a good reason to invade somebody’s—”

“Whoa, Harper, isn’t that the kid you know?” Marcy interrupted her and pointed to the computer screen.

“Lots of people I know check out books,” Harper said without looking up from the Judy Blume book. “It’s not all that surprising.”