Fetching Read Online Free Page A

for one. She’s almost invisible. Not personality-wise, I mean. She’s actually really out spoken, so it’s not like you can ignore her. It’s just that Phoebe is so pale she’s almost see-through. Her eyes are the color of water in the shallow end of the pool, and her skin also has a watery quality, like skim milk. Her hair is long and white-blond, which kind of adds to her ghost-ish looks. She’s also got some serious braces on her teeth, which gives her a smile about as pretty as a box of nails. But she’s mostly serious and doesn’t smile very often. It’s almost like she got cheated out of the gene for humor—but if that’s the case, she makes up for it with a double serving of brains. In fact, everyone seems to think that if it weren’t for Phoebe, Mandy would have failed both the third and fifth grades. Or, as Mandy tells it, “I probably eventually would have been the only sixth grader with an assigned parking spot.”
    Not that Mandy’s dumb. Not at all. Actually, most of the time she “gets” things that leave the rest of us clueless—jokes, people, that kind of thing. She’s just not great with things you learn in a classroom. And people don’t always “get” her. Mandy’s what you might call emo. In some schools this would be cool, but Mandy, she takes it just a little past that point. She dyes her hair black and sometimes gray, and wears black Sharpie on her lips. Also, she has a pierced eyebrow, and it sometimes gets a little infected, so half the school calls her “Bubonic,” and the other half is just afraid that she really is.
    Joey’s the only guy in our group. He’s a full year younger than the rest of us (and acts it!) because he skipped fourth grade on account of being some weird type of math genius. He’s kind of round and looks a little like the kid in the Far Side cartoons, which makes him a favorite target of ninety-nine point nine percent of all middle school boys. We’ve gotten used to Joey—he’s obnoxious, but sometimes he can be pretty funny. Also he has the unique ability to keep score when we play board games without writing down any numbers at all, which is an added plus.
    Delia is probably the most socially acceptable of us all. She’s got these really pretty light brown eyes that remind me of root beer candies, and wavy black hair, and she’s small and thin and wears good clothes. But her social problem is acne. Really bad acne. The skin on her arms and neck and hands is smooth and the color of, say, a Frappuccino, but her face is rough and blistery and different shades of red. Her mother won’t let her wear makeup because she’s afraid it’ll make Delia’s acne worse, so she just tries to hide it with her dark tumble of hair. I love Delia—she’s my best friend out of all of them and the first friend I made when I moved here—but even I have to admit it’s pretty bad. The worst thing about it is that it’s made her shy—maybe not with us, but with the outside world. I hear that she used to be really outgoing and stuff in elementary school, but when she got zits, she crawled into her shell.
    And then there’s me. My outward defects are that I’m almost six feet tall and kind of scarecrowy in parts. If you took the word AWKWARD—with all those pointy A’s and W’s, and that unwieldy K—and made it into a person, that person would look a lot like me. My clothes fit me strange. I also have really frizzy dark brown hair. Actually, it’s beyond frizz—it’s more like fuzz. So sometimes I wear knit hats, even in August, when it’s ninety degrees out, like today. My inward defects are that, thanks to a bunch of bad genes, I’m probably destined to a life of social problems and insanity. Also, thanks to Brynne Shawnson, people say I smell like dog. There may be some truth to that, since I