Misty (Wildflowers 1)

"I'm not rich," I said.

"You a lot richer than me," she retorted. "And you," she directed at Jade, "You're probably richer than Doctor Marlowe."

"I resent being blamed for having money," Jade cried. "Didn't you ever hear that money can't buy you happiness and love?" I asked Star.

She twisted up the corner of her mouth.

"No, but give me the chance to be

disappointed," she said.

Doctor Marlowe laughed loudly this time. We all turned to her, Cathy looking more surprised than any of us.

"It's all right, girls," Doctor Marlowe said. "I'm glad you're not alike and that you don't all think the same way. You'll have more to offer each other that way," she pointed out.

Jade looked skeptical, but not as skeptical as Star. "Just have the patience to give each other a chance," Doctor Marlowe pleaded

Everyone relaxed again, their eyes back on me.

"I was barely hanging on in school, but the worse I did, the more they blamed each other and the more static there was at home," I said. "I started to get sloppy in other ways, too, my clothes, my hair, how I ate. I hated what I looked like. I hated everything about myself.

"The thin threads that had kept me tied to my old girlfriends snapped completely then. They wanted less and less to do with me so I started hanging with a different crowd Finally, I got involved with a boy named Lloyd Kimble, who was about as different from Charles Allen as any boy could be.

"Lloyd's parents really were split up. He lived with his mother but she was out of the house so much, he was really on his own. He had nothing to do with his father. In fact, he hated him. He told me he had actually had a fistfight with him when his father tried to punish him the last time they were together. He wasn't bad looking even though his nose had been broken in a fight. He said the other boy hit him with a baseball bat. He had dark, brooding eyes and a narrow face with a nearly square jaw. He just looked tough and ready and hard. He seemed always angry and really hated all the kids I used to be friends with. He had been to family court, suspended from school, and put on probation. I kept thinking if my mother even knew I was talking to him, she would have a nervous breakdown. Maybe that was why I did it.

"Doctor Marlowe and I are still exploring that, aren't we?"

"Among other things," Dr. Marlowe said, nodding softly. "There's no single cause for the difficulties you all suffer."

"Maybe that's why you did what?" Star asked, her face full of impatience.

I looked at Doctor Marlowe and then I looked at her. "Ran away with him," I said.

Star smiled.

"Ran away? You're here, aren't you?"

"That's why," I said.

8

"I didn't set out to be friends with Lloyd. Until the day he came over to me in the cafeteria, I don't think I had so much as looked at him twice.

"I was sitting alone, feeling sorry for myself and hating everything and everyone around me. I guess I had that bitter, unhappy look on my face. When Lloyd dropped his tray on the table and slid into the seat beside me, I was so deep in my well of dark thoughts, I didn't even hear him or see him. He deliberately knocked his shoulder against mine to get my attention, which caused me to spill the soup out of my spoon. I was ready to jab it into the face of whoever had done it.

"'Sorry,' he said, 'but you was leaning over too far and takin' up two places.'

"'I was not,' I protested. He shrugged.

"'Then, maybe I was,' he said and laughed.

"I knew who he was, of course. Everyone knew who Lloyd Kimble was, the way you knew what a scorpion or a rattlesnake was. You didn't have to have any actual contact to know you should keep your distance.

"'What happened?' he asked with a half-smile. 'Your friends dump you?'

He nodded in their direction.

"'No,' I said sharply. I wasn't in the mood to be made fun of. 'No one dumped me.'