Read Online Modern Monsters (Entangled Teen) by Kelley York - Free Book Online Page A

doesn’t ask about her at all. Sometimes he just looks at her empty seat like…like she’s dead or something. People talk about her in past tense and I hate it.”
    I scuff my heel against the bench. “Will she come b-back to school now?”
    She shrugs. “At some point, she’s gonna have to. I mean, for finals if nothing else, or she isn’t going to walk with the rest of the seniors. But every time she thinks about it, it just…freaks her out, you know?”
    Can’t blame her, but I also don’t know what to say.
    Autumn sits with me until long after the last bell has rung. When she gets up, it’s all at once; still one moment and then sweeping up her backpack and sliding off the table to begin walking away without a word to me. No “thank you,” but no “piss off,” either. Maybe this is an improvement.

    I don’t know why, but I don’t tell Brett about my conversation with Autumn. It seems like something personal meant just for the two of us, and I don’t feel the need to spread Callie’s—or Autumn’s—business with anyone. For that matter, I didn’t tell him about the incident with Aaron and his friends in the bathroom, either. This is my problem, and Brett has enough on his mind with finals and college applications to have to worry about me…again, like he always has.
    But news apparently travels fast even when I keep tight-lipped, because at lunch he stares at me, avoiding looking at Aaron when he passes by, and asks, “When were you going to tell me?”
    “About what?”
    “You know what.” He glances askance at Aaron’s table. “I heard what happened and I was going to wait for you to say something, but…”
    I refuse to lift my head. “N-nothing to tell. I just, you know, he w-wanted to talk to me.”
    “With a group of his friends?”
    A frown pulls at my features. “H-how did you even find out?”
    Brett gives me a long look. Ah. Right. Someone probably saw them drag me into the bathroom, or maybe Aaron himself said something. “Tell your mom, man. She can talk to Aaron’s mom so he stops being a dick.”
    “Mom doesn’t care.”
    “She’s your mother . Of course she cares.”
    I pick at the crust on my sandwich. No response for that. On a basic level, yes, I know my mother loves me because she’s my mother. We used to be close. She would read me bedtime stories and tell me how much she loved me, and that I was her reason for getting out of bed in the morning. She went on my field trips with my classes. Packed my lunches with extra treats. Got up early on Sundays to make me blueberry French toast before church.
    To this day, I’m still trying to figure out what it is I did to make her distant. If there was some defining moment that changed our relationship. Now, as always, I draw a complete blank. It’s not like she woke up one day and started ignoring my existence; it didn’t happen all at once. It was a gradual process, until I finally realized that things had drastically changed.
    Brett nudges my foot under the table. “What aren’t you telling me?”
    Lots of things. I’m not telling him how I’m hardly sleeping at night and how, despite that Mr. and Mrs. Mason are great, I miss being at home in my own room. I’m not telling him how exhausted I feel after sitting down to conversations with Mr. Mason, or how the hardest part about all this isn’t how everyone else has treated me, but just that Mom doesn’t believe I’m innocent.
    What I tell him instead is an attempt to focus on the positive so all the things I don’t want to say can remain tucked safely in the recesses of my mind. “The DNA came back.”
    Brett’s spine straightens. “Really? So you’re cleared, right? What did they find?”
    “N-nothing of mine,” I say, forcing a weak smile, and purposely leaving out the fact that a lack of physical evidence doesn’t necessarily mean I’m cleared.
    He taps his plastic fork against his lunch tray. “Well, duh. Someone else’s, then?”
    “I d-don’t