Weightless by Sarah Bannan

Author:Sarah Bannan [Bannan, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2014-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

We built a bonfire after we’d finished making the float – this was tradition, too, and Mr and Mrs Hall helped us find stuff that would burn well. And they took logs from the barn – they’d had to get rid of some oaks when Walmart bought a part of their land – and lined them around the fire so we could sit and watch.

The fire started out small – a little in the center – and within five, ten minutes, after Mr Hall had loaded up more kerosene and more branches and newspaper, it was huge and high and blue and red and black from smoke. We had to sit back and away so we wouldn’t be blinded and so it wouldn’t burn our faces. We sat all around it, in pairs and in threes and fours. Shane and Carolyn were directly across from us, and through the fire, through the blue and the red, you could see them making out – his hand sliding up her shirt, her hands in her lap.

Mrs Hall gave us stuff to make smores and sparklers to light. The fire got too big and our marshmallows caught fire and went black – too black to eat – only Dylan would take them, and he loaded up a sheet of graham crackers with twenty fried marshmallows.

We liked the sparklers best – once they were lit, we’d walk away from the fire, away from our seats and into the darkest parts of the field. We’d swirl them around and try to make words with them – our names, if we could – and the guys would do curse words, like they would with their calculators, and then we’d make shapes, hearts, stars, flowers, then just lines and circles – like an Etch A Sketch. Mr and Mrs Hall told us to be careful, and we kind of laughed at this, thinking nothing could go wrong, and we watched Blake Wyatt put around twenty unlit sparklers into the front of his pants, mouthing to us that we could use them later. While we played with fire, Shane and Carolyn stayed on the log, making out. Once Brooke was gone, we guessed they didn’t care who saw them. We would look back, and we could see their faces, through the orange glow and the smoke, and we wondered what it was like to be her, to be wanted so badly, to be accepted so easily.

We stayed away from the fire, long after our sparklers had gone out, just standing, talking, flirting. When Dylan went into the house to get more food, Blake Wyatt said we should go follow him and call 1-900 numbers – Mr Hall did it all the time, he said, so nobody would know. We thought this was funny, and he tried to get a bunch of us to go in with him, but we didn’t – so he didn’t – and we stood around for as long as we could stand it.

We looked

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.