Freaked by J. T. Dutton

Author:J. T. Dutton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

HELL IN A BUCKET

OTHER EMPTY THOUGHTS rattled my brain and I occupied myself for the last few minutes of our train journey as best I could by trying to pull them all together and buckle them down. Todd composed a symphony, tapping the end of his pencil on his takeout box. I stared and stared at a poster of a bear selling fabric softener. The poster was above Walt’s head, on the wall of the car and next to the cigarette ad. The bear was wearing a cute little bow around his neck, and he smiled and waved one of his cute paws. Though the bears on all Jerry’s posters and bumper stickers were equally smiley, they never oversold their friendliness. They never seemed as if they were secretly plotting to smother me in my sleep or set fire to my house the way the fabric softener bear seemed to. Having to be so damned cute all the time could have strained anyone’s mood. My happiness was stretched thin, too, and I felt like I might snap if I didn’t get some kind of break from the darkness of the tunnel.

Finally we reached Grand Central Terminal and rolled under the first bank of fluorescent lights. I felt so tense I hardly knew myself. I imagined the look-alikes of my stepfather Knees, guys in suits and ties, carrying briefcases and patting their thinning hair, huddled on the platform every weekday waiting for the train to stop. A person had to be careful not to lose his soul in Grand Central and turn into a commuter zombie, hovering around like an extra for a Hollywood horror movie. The majority of the terminal is underground, with passages winding out into nearly every basement in the city. My mother, afraid of the gloom, took cabs, staying aboveground as much as possible, but there were still car tunnels and the Bronx and restaurants with bathrooms in the sublevel waiting to suck a person in.

“Wake up, Walt,” I said, kicking at Walt’s left foot.

Walt’s choice to follow us to Freedom still baffled me, and I had spent some of the last minutes of the ride trying to figure him out. It was typical for him to put up a fight on some issues and to give right in and do as he was told on others. But on decisions that determined his future, he nearly always held firm. He was disciplined, for example, when it came to math class, though we made efforts to distract him, get him to blow off homework, or let us use his answers to cheat on tests. I had had two sections of math with Walt when I was a freshman, and I knew he was a genius when it came to numbers. Even if cutting school for Freedom got him kicked out, he’d go on and invent something like the solar microchip or paint-by-googolplex kits or some damn thing. Still, I wondered, as I kicked him awake, why he wasn’t in a worse state of remorse over his affairs.

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