Reading Online Novel

Ice Shock(21)



Great.

I move away and stand by the punch bowl. Looking at the door, waiting for Emmy. Wishing I hadn’t bothered.

With one ear, I listen to the conversation behind me.

Garcia this, Garcia that.

Then one voice pipes up, “Josh Garcia—not the Josh Garcia with the, like, hilariously traumatized blog about UFOs and stuff …”

There’s a big laugh from the entire group.

I think about going over there and punching a couple of them, but at that moment, Emmy bursts through the door and is jumped on by Mikey and the rest of her band. Her latest hair-dye job is black with red; she’s wearing bright red lipstick and black fingernail polish, with a matching “American Idiot” T-shirt. With this girl, it’s all about Billie Joe Armstrong. Then she notices me.

“Hey, Josh,” she says, grinning widely. “You made it! Cool.”

From behind me, the voices continue.

“The Joshua Files, it was called.”

“How do you know? Were you one of his readers?”

“Not me, idiot—Gracie, my big sister. She lives to be a geek—I told her this loner from school was obsessed with UFOs and said they’d abducted his dad … and she started reading it. She used to leave comments on his blog … they were blog buddies!”

Squeals of laughter. Emmy raises her eyebrows to say “What the heck?” but I put a finger to my lips, then point behind us. She gets the message right away.

“Let me try to remember her blog name … I know, it was TopShopPrincess.”

“TopShopPrincess?”

“Something to do with the Arctic Monkeys …”

“They’re old …”

“Nah, man, they’re awesome, idiot; shut up and listen. Then one day Gracie left a comment—something so terrible that poor Joshey got all upset and deleted the blog.”

The guy’s got a real audience now. Behind me, I sense them turning around to stare at me.

“Hey, Josh, what did she write?”

But I can’t say anything, I’m just too stunned. Emmy picks up that I’m angry, furious … She puts an arm around my shoulder. “You okay?”

I can’t tell if I’m okay.

TopShopPrincess was this guy’s sister. Fact.

Not Ollie.

I can hardly take it in.

Emmy begins to sound really concerned. “Ignore them. If you actually tried to collect the stupidest people in our school, you couldn’t do better than that bunch.”

I manage to find my voice. “It’s not that …”

“What’s wrong?”

I’m thinking about the exact order of events. I met Ollie right after that comment of TopShopPrincess’s—the one that made me delete the blog.

And then … my knees almost give way when I remember.

I met Ollie after the burglary. The one that happened when I was so conveniently out of the house with Tyler.

The burglar took my laptop computer, read my blog up to that date, found out about TopShopPrincess.

Ollie wasn’t TopShopPrincess at all.

That was just the perfect way to sneak someone in under my guard. A spy—a mole. Whoever “Ollie” is—if that’s even her name—she knows what she’s doing.

I stumble toward the kitchen. I need to get those taunting voices out of my head. Emmy follows me. She closes the door. For a second she leans against it, blowing her bangs out of dramatically made-up eyes that stare at me, sizing the situation up. And then she walks over and hugs me tight.

“Josh, don’t let it get to you …”

I’m so desperate to confide in her, but I feel gagged, choked into silence.

Emmy asks softly, “Is this about when you ran away to Mexico? Everyone knows, you know. There was a big fuss about it, wasn’t there?”

“A bit.” I glance at Emmy. She stares sympathetically into my eyes. We look at each other for a moment. It gets a little awkward.

To break the tension I say, “Thanks, Emmy. It’s nice of you, you know. To listen.”

Emmy laughs. She punches me softly in the chest. “Get lost.”

And just like that, the tension vanishes.

“Let’s get back to the party,” Emmy suggests. “Put some music on nice and loud, dance. Forget the losers.”

But how can I enjoy a party? My head is all over the place. At home there’s a half-deciphered fragment of Mayan codex and a bizarre message coming through on mysterious postcards from Mexico. Not to mention what I’ve just learned about a girl I thought was becoming a really close friend.

Ollie wasn’t TopShopPrincess. She’s been lying to me from the beginning.

Whatever suspicions I had about Tyler, what I’ve discovered about Ollie pretty much blows all that away. She’s been lying, pretending to be someone she’s not. And I fell for it—every word.