At the Edge of the Universe by Shaun David Hutchinson

Author:Shaun David Hutchinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse

224,618 AU

CALVIN HADN’T SHOWN UP TO school on tuesday, and he wasn’t answering my texts. I thought about driving to his house after school to check on him, but I wasn’t sure he’d appreciate me just showing up.

Dad was walking out the door when I got home, and we narrowly avoided colliding.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Your mom’s working late and I probably won’t be home for dinner.”

“Whatever.”

Dad stopped in the doorway to the garage. “I know you’re mad at me, Ozzie, but what happened is between me and your mother.”

“You let me blame her,” I said. “But this whole thing is your fault.”

“Look, I’m not defending what I did—”

“Because you can’t. You cheated; end of story.”

“But,” Dad said, “our marriage would have ended whether or not I cheated on your mom.”

“Sure. Keep telling yourself that.”

Dad gritted his teeth, but his anger flickered and faded. His shoulders fell. He walked out the door and shut it behind him.

I could accept that my parents weren’t going to reconcile. They’d fallen out of love and their divorce was as good as final. I’d even seen the official papers sitting on the counter, waiting for them to sell the house so they could sign them and dissolve our family. But my father had been the one man in my life I’d looked up to, and he’d let me go on thinking it was all my mom’s fault, when he was the one who’d cheated. I didn’t know if I could ever forgive him.

I ate a sandwich and then walked to the mailboxes at the end of the street. It was still early for college acceptance letters to begin arriving, so I was surprised when I shuffled through the stack of bills and other junk and found an envelope from Amherst. The crest stood out, bold and burgundy on the upper left-hand corner, emblazoned with the school’s motto: Terras Irradient. Standing there in front of the bank of mailboxes and the notice board covered with pleas for dog owners to pick up their pets’ poop, and invitations to the next homeowners’ meeting, my heart sped up. It beat so rapidly my ribs rattled like the storm shutters covering the windows during a hurricane. And then it stopped. Just like that. It’d been beating so hard I could feel my pulse throbbing in my neck, and then nothing.

Is this what death feels like?

No, I wasn’t dead. I was still standing. If I’d died, my legs would’ve buckled and I would have fallen and remained on the ground until some minivan-driving neighbor found my cooling corpse in the middle of the road.

I was still breathing. And then my heart began beating again. It sputtered to life and I lurched to the side, my vision dimming and then everything becoming too bright. I needed to sit. I stumbled to the grass behind the mailboxes and plopped down right beside the begonia bushes everyone in the neighborhood hated but refused to spend the money to dig up and replace. The

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.