Twenty-Seven Minutes by Ashley Tate

Author:Ashley Tate
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Sourcebooks

GRANT

Grant stared hard out of his bedroom window to avoid thinking. About Sunday. About June Delroy asking him questions he didn’t want to answer. About Becca starting to open her big mouth. He’d kept Becca hidden but close for a reason, and if she was straying from him, and about to ruin the punishing balance he’d worked so hard to maintain, he wasn’t sure what he’d have to do. Grant’s insides continued to corrode as the shred of control he’d held onto the last ten years came undone.

He rubbed the back of his neck to shake the feeling that someone had been in his room again. He’d been finding cigarette butts on the driveway recently, and neither he nor his mother smoked.

Outside, the fields and trees and sky were colorless, a ghostly white. The old barn was still off to the side of their property, like a speck of dirt in the corner of his eye. The slanting roof, the wooden boards that were no longer red but weather-beaten, neglected.

His mother had sworn repeatedly to tear it down but had never followed through. Because it had meant too much to Phoebe, he assumed.

Grant’s shoulders tensed until they ached, as he tried to force back the memories that the sight of the barn had unleashed. Memories of when they were children and would spend entire weekends out there reading comics and devising plans to run away—to the city, to the moon, to anywhere far from here. Phoebe would draw maps on the wooden walls in chalk; excited, hopeful. As long as they were together, without their mother and the poison in their house, they’d be okay.

But aren’t you afraid, he’d asked her once, to leave home?

Of course I am, Phoebe had answered. But I’d rather be afraid somewhere out there, trying. And besides, I’ll be with you.

And then another rush like a wave, bearing down hard, of when they were older—a rare night that Phoebe had gone out with him.

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