The Big Crunch by Pete Hautman

Author:Pete Hautman [Hautman, Pete]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-545-33258-3
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2011-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

Omaha. Three hundred fifty miles away. She might as well be moving to Neptune. In two weeks she would be moving to Neptune.

Sani-Made, after all their talk about hiring her dad permanently, had decided not to renew his contract. In fact, they had fired him. On New Year’s Eve, just as he was leaving work.

It wasn’t the first time her dad had been let go suddenly. In the workout business, getting axed was almost normal. The company owners let him come in and do the dirty work, and then turned around and did the same thing to him.

Her dad shrugged it off. “Next!” He’d accepted the Omaha job twenty minutes after getting fired by Sani-Made. In fact, he was driving down the next day, leaving the task of packing up and moving to June and her mother.

“Omaha-Benford Bank has a house for us,” he said. “One of their foreclosures. It’s in a nice neighborhood. You’ll like it.”

Like it? They’d never lived anyplace long enough for her to like it. June knew better than to argue. Her father’s business migrations were a force of nature — the universe conspiring to seek out every scintilla of happiness inside her and rip it out, bloody roots and all, and turn her life to a stinking pile of crap. That was what it was about. He could have gone on to his new job all by himself, let her and her mom stay in Minnesota until the end of the school year, at least — but no, he had to have the family together, as if a few months apart would somehow damage them. Damage? How could they be any more damaged than they were already?

Still, that was what scared her, what kept her in line. If she threw a screaming fit and refused to leave, what would happen? Would her family shatter? Sometimes it felt that way — one wrong move and everything would fly apart.

She spent most of the day in her bedroom making piles of stuff. Stuff to keep, stuff to give away, stuff to throw away, stuff she hadn’t decided about. The throwaway pile was biggest. It included all her schoolwork, clothes from last summer, old magazines, empty and almost empty makeup containers. The downstairs phone rang. June stopped what she was doing and listened. She heard her mom’s voice, a short conversation that she couldn’t quite make out, then her mom coming up the stairs. She concentrated on making a perfect stack of folded T-shirts. Her mom looked in through her bedroom doorway.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Making piles,” said June.

Her mom sat down on the bed. “That was Wesley again,” she said.

“I thought it might be,” June said. She had turned her cell off after talking to Wes that morning.

“I told him you weren’t feeling well, and that you couldn’t talk to him.”

June nodded.

“I’m sorry. He seems like a nice young man.”

“He is.” June spoke in a voice so small she could hardly hear herself.

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