Faking Perfect Read Online Free Page A

staying in on a Saturday night.”
    I shoved his leg with my foot, but even that didn’t break his concentration. He was in the zone. I’d realized Nolan was going to be an artist the day he got mad at me for going outside the lines as we colored a picture of the Teletubbies together. We were four.
    “We’re going to the movies. The late show.” With any luck, my mother would be long gone on her date before I ventured back over to get ready. “How about you? Any plans tonight? Amber?”
    He shook his head as he shaded a section of eyebrow in his drawing. People were his specialty. He drew family, friends, celebrities, total strangers. Under Nolan’s hand, faces came to life on paper. “Her grandmother died yesterday.”
    “Oh,” I said, frowning. Amber was Nolan’s girlfriend. They’d started dating this past summer. I liked her for several reasons—she was nice, she treated Nolan really well, and she didn’t bat an eye when she came over to find me hanging out with him. Most girls would have been wary, but Amber was open-minded and trusting—necessary qualities for a girl who dated a guy whose best friend was me. “That sucks.”
    “Yeah.”
    “You can come out with us tonight, if you want.”
    He laughed. “I think I’ll stay here.”
    I snuggled down into my blanket and contemplated doing the same. I loved being in Nolan’s family room. His house was almost identical to the one I lived in with Mom—split-level, four bedrooms (our house had three), two bathrooms, and a family room on the lower level. But while my family room at home was a graveyard of boxes and dusty exercise equipment, the Bruce family room lived up to its name with its comfortable furniture, wood stove, big-screen TV, and every video game system known to man. It was our favorite place to hang out, except when Landon was down here with his friends, polluting the room with potato chip crumbs and odors that made me glad I didn’t have a brother of my own.
    Teresa, Nolan’s mother, came down the stairs, a stack of folded towels in her arms. “Check the bottom drawer!” she hollered over her shoulder as she entered the room. Those words, I assumed, were directed upstairs toward her husband or younger son. She turned back around and spotted me curled up on the couch with just my face and a few strands of hair showing. “Oh, hi, sweetie,” she greeted me, continuing on to the bathroom. When she returned empty-handed, she started gathering up game controllers and empty soda cans. “You haven’t been over in a while,” she said, peering at me closely. It didn’t matter that the blanket hid ninety-nine percent of my body; she always knew when something was amiss with me.
    “I’ve been busy,” I told her. “Studying hard. You know me.” That’s the problem, I thought. She did know me, all too well. The entire family did. They knew when I arrived at their door, shivering and out of breath, my cheeks flushed with anger, I’d had enough of being in my own house and craved the normalcy and warmth of theirs.
    Teresa narrowed her eyes, which were light brown like Nolan’s. “Is she drinking?”
    “No. The bills again.”
    Teresa sighed and went back to hunting for discarded wrappers and cans. Nolan kept drawing, barely paying attention. He’d heard conversations like this between me and his parents more times than either of us could count. It started when I was six, the first time Mom passed out from drinking too much wine and didn’t hear me when I called out in the middle of the night with one of my nightmares. When I went to her room and found her sprawled on her bed, fully dressed and unresponsive, I panicked and ran—in my bare feet at two in the morning—across the street to the Bruces’ house. That was back when Nolan’s mother and mine were still best friends.
    “Let me know if you need anything, okay?” Teresa told me before going back upstairs. I assured her I would. “And Nolan, sweetie . . . could you please