Читать книгу Just Try to Stop Me - Gregg Olsen - Страница 15

CHAPTER SIX

Snuggled in her robe after a long, hot shower, Amber Turner wrapped a fluffy white towel around her head and flung herself on her bed to answer Elan’s call. Calls were rare. Texting was the preferred mode of communication between the two of them.

“Hey you,” she said.

“What are you doing?” Elan asked.

“If you really want to know,” she said, shifting her weight on the bed and unfurling the towel, releasing her long red hair. “I just got out of the shower.”

“I can picture that,” he said.

“I’m sure you can,” she said back, putting him on speaker as she worked a wide-toothed comb down the length of sectioned hair.

“Want to hang out today?” he asked.

Amber continued with her hair, first with her fingertips as she parted safe passage sections for the comb. She loved her hair. It made her stand out in a crowd. She’d only colored it once, a dreadful burgundy that she regretted when it made her hair look the color of a strawberry popsicle.

“So not a good color for you,” her friend Kelly had said in what was surely the understatement of the year. She thanked God it was only a temporary color and that after three weeks of washing her hair nightly it had returned to the beautiful and natural ginger tones that made the green of her eyes all the more lovely.

“I guess so,” she said to Elan. “I have cheer at two, and that’ll last two hours.”

“I could come and hang out at the track while you practice.”

She smiled. “Sounds good to me,” she said.

“Bye, Amber.”

“Later, Elan.”

Kelly had texted while she was talking to Elan.

Kelly: You want to do something after cheer?

Amber: Elan and I are going to do something.

Kelly: OMG! Elan and you. What’s going on?

Amber: Nothing. Not really. I guess I like him. He’s cute.

Kelly: Yeah. Quiet. But cute.

Amber: Not so quiet but definitely cute.

Kelly: See you at school.

Amber: K.

Amber slid to the edge of her bed and looked around, her hair ready for the dryer. Her room needed a makeover. Her mom still treated her like a little kid, with white wicker furniture and white eyelet edged curtains. She’d asked a million times if she could do something to change things, up. Even paint. But her mom always deflected her requests by passing them off to her stepfather, Karl. He couldn’t care less about Amber. Everything was about Bryn, the new baby. Bryn this. Bryn that. Whatever they said, Amber had an answer. Never aloud, though. Always just inside her head, where remarks went unchallenged and, most important, unpunished.

“We need to save up for private school for Bryn.”

I didn’t get to go to private school.

“Thank God Bryn got some melanin in her skin. She won’t burn like her big sister.”

I don’t feel like a big sister. I wear sunblock, and it isn’t like being a ginger is a skin disorder.

“We might need to move you downstairs so Bryn can be closer to us.”

I’m not moving.

“Bryn is the cutest baby ever.”

She is cute. Maybe not the cutest ever.

Amber finished getting dressed, grabbed her pom-poms and made a beeline for the door. Her mom, Sue, called over to her from the kitchen where Princess Bryn was being served something that smelled pretty good. Sue had been making homemade baby food, which she had never done for her eldest daughter.

“Hey! You need to eat, Amber!”

Amber looked over at her mom. Bryn had a big smile on her face, and Amber couldn’t help but return a smile of her own. She hated that she did. As much as things had changed since Bryn’s arrival, she couldn’t blame it all on the baby. Her mom was in her early forties and, as far as Amber could see, had no business getting pregnant again. Seventeen years apart didn’t make for great sibling relationships. In fact, it made for exactly what had transpired.

A house divided.

“I’m on cheer, Mom,” she said, on the move again. “We don’t eat. We all have eating disorders. Bye!”

Sue made a face, a kind of exasperated expression that was the counterpart of an eye roll, without rolling the eyes, that is.

“Not funny!” she said.

The door shut, and Amber got into her car.