The Boy You Always Wanted by Michelle Quach PDF & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Michelle Quach
- Language: English
- Genre: Teen & Young Adult Fiction on Adoption
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Ollie
THE TROUBLE ALL STARTED WHEN I MADE THE mistake of letting
Francine Zhang see me cry.
It was two weeks ago, during fifth period AP US History, and we were
all sitting in the dark. Mr. Romero was showing The Deer Hunter, which is
the kind of movie you should really warn a guy about before springing it on
him, especially right before lunch. If you haven’t seen it, The Deer Hunter
is about a group of American friends who go off to fight in the Vietnam
War, where they’re taken prisoner and forced by their captors to play
Russian roulette. Some of them survive, but the violence of it—the
pointlessness of it, really—horrified me, especially when I thought about
how people in my family were among those caught in the shitshow offscreen, getting bombed out by the Americans.
What really got me, though, wasn’t the gore or the carnage but the
coming home after it. That sense of never being able to go back to whatever
you were before. Something about that depressed the hell out of me,
making my stomach twist up into my throat and, yes, goddamn it, forcing
me to tear up.
I don’t know what the hell was wrong with me that day. I mean, I’m not
saying I have a problem with crying necessarily, but it’s not something I
really want to be doing in front of everybody. Still, the situation could’ve
been totally fine, given how the lights were all out. I would’ve gotten away
with it, easy—if it weren’t for Francine.
There I was, about to wipe my eyes with the back of my jacket sleeve,
when she somehow dropped her eraser, a rounded piece of rubber made to
look like a California roll, and it came tumbling back toward my sneaker.
She turned around to check where it went, and that’s when she saw me.
For a second, neither of us moved. She blinked, her stare blank and
penetrating at the same time. A sliver of afternoon light escaped from
beneath the drawn shades behind us and cut across her nose. Her eyes were
completely dry.
I leaned over in a hurry to retrieve her goddamn eraser, but really it was
so I could swipe my arm over my face to hide the fact that I’d been low-key
bawling. I handed the sushi roll to her without making eye contact, and she
accepted it wordlessly before swiveling back around, the end credits filling
the projector screen and the weird space that suddenly swelled around us.
I figured that would be it, that we’d go back to barely acknowledging
each other, despite the fact that I’d sat behind her for months and recently
noticed that her hair, stick straight and cut off at the shoulder, smelled kind
of nice, like the tea tree oil shampoo I use on my dog, Dexter.
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