Josie Griffin Is Not a Vampire Read Online Free Page A

lifted his hand. “I’ll go,” he said. As I watched him talk, I realized he was seriously cute with piercing gray-blue eyes and dark skin under the layers of short red-tinted braids snaking from his head like tendrils from a plant. He was lean but I could tell he was muscular under his baggy jeans and tee. “It was a full moon, so you know, that made my week tougher,” he said, and I thought,
Oh brother
. The moon made his week hard? Sounded like Aunt JoJo when she went through her New Age Wicca stage ten years ago. She was always talking about how the mother moon’s ebb and flow dominated her cycle. Happily she no longer bought into that malarkey. I would have never pegged this guy for a New Age moon worshiper, though. Looked more like a skate rat to me.
    “Can you share what happened, Avis?” Charles asked.
    Avis squirmed in his seat, poking his head forward again and again like a bird. “Yeah, so I was skating with some of my homies around the Circle and the cops started giving us a hard time, for no good reason. We weren’t doing anything wrong. No jumping or trying to ramp the steps or ride the rails. The cops were just bored, probably. Didn’t have any real criminals to go arrest, so they were harassing us. I could feel my anger coming, you know, like it was bubbling up under the surface. Like my skin was going to split open and unleash the beast. And it was crazy intense because the moon was shining down on me like a spotlight, man, and part ofme wanted to attack one of those doughnut-munching pigs.”
    Dang, unleash the beast within? I got mad and all, but I never felt like I was going to pop out of my skin and rip a cop’s face off.
    “How did you deal with that? Did you use any of the strategies we’ve discussed?” Charles asked.
    Avis sat back in his chair, eyes darting side to side. “I took some deep breaths and I walked myself through our questions. I asked myself why I felt angry. I asked myself why I wanted to lash out at the cops. And I reminded myself that letting things get ugly is not in my best interest.”
    “Did that stop you from acting out?” Charles asked.
    “Yeah, but I was still pissed,” Avis said. “So I took off on my board. I just went all out and pumped as hard as I could down Meridian, racing cars and blowing through stop lights.”
    Charles frowned. “Was that a good choice?”
    Avis’s laugh was strained, like one of those rubber chickens you squeeze. “Well, it was better than the alternative.”
    “Yes,” Charles said. “You’ve got a point.”
    “See, this is what I don’t get,” the redheaded girl said. She sat next to Avis with her knees drawn up toward her chest. She was a tiny thing with skinny little arms and legs but she seemed to buzz with energy, like she could levitate off the chair any minute. Maybe it was all the crazy waves of bright red hair that cascadeddown her back or how her green eyes flashed while she tried to get the words out, which seemed stuck behind her lips for a moment. “We’re not the emeny!” she said passionately.
    Emeny?
I looked around but no one else seemed bothered by this.
    “That stuff is deep inside our, our, our, you know.” She paused and thumped her chest with her fist. “Seep in our douls, I mean, deep in our souls! So why is it a crime?”
    Charles sighed, as if they’d been over this a million times before. “It’s not a crime to feel anger, Tarren. It’s only a crime if you act on it in a way that hurts others.”
    Tarren flapped her arms around her head and talked fast, like she was about to fly away. “Yeah, but we’re made to feel guilty because of who we are and how we experience the world. As if there is only one way to be.”
    She had a point, I thought. It was like my how my parents thought I couldn’t simultaneously streak my hair purple and pierce my nose and still be a decent human being. Those things
could
coexist.
    “Would anyone else like to address Tarren’s comment?” Charles