Where Things Come Back by Whaley John Corey

Author:Whaley, John Corey [Whaley, John Corey]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Coming of Age, Juvenile Fiction, General Fiction
ISBN: 9781442413344
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2011-05-15T07:00:00+00:00

“I can’t believe this!” Vilonia Kline said, frustratingly, to my father as we drove back home.

“What?” my mother asked.

“You didn’t dig deep enough. We should go back.” Vilonia crossed her arms.

“Ms. Kline, if it’s all right with you, could you please not talk for the rest of the ride?” my father said bluntly, dirt smeared across his forehead.

“We must’ve dug, like, ten feet,” Lucas said quietly, sweat still dripping from his nose.

My mother glared at my father the way a wife does, and then she turned back toward me. She reached one hand back, set it on top of mine, moved it quickly up and down twice, and then turned back around. Mena Prescott was asleep with her head against the window. Lucas Cader was picking dried dirt from the knees of his blue jeans. Vilonia Kline stared out the wind-shield with her lips tightly shut. She sat between my mother and father like some child on the way to a barbecue. She reminded me of sadness.

Seeing my brother’s zombie, or whatever it was, made me think about Russell Quitman and how I probably would never see him again. He was still in Florida, still in a hospital bed, and I was still making out with his ex-girlfriend in the backseat of my mom’s car. Ada said to me once, just after we had begun to know each other, that Russell Quitman, though he was a huge asshole, was actually one of the most sensitive people she’d ever known. “He would cry over the strangest things,” she said, “like a dead dog on the side of the road or a smell that reminded him of his grandmother.”

“Did he cry when you two broke up?” I asked her.

“He wept like a baby.”

“Naturally,” I joked.

“Wouldn’t you?” she said.

“We’ll see,” I said plainly.

“Ha! What does that mean?”

“We’ll just see.”

Ada Taylor said that my friendship with Lucas Cader was probably the only thing getting me through all the madness of that summer. Here is more of what I knew about Lucas Cader: His father was a drunk who used to pay him and his older brother to fight in the front yard. His mother was that sort of woman who rarely speaks and usually says something unintentionally very sad when she does. She let her husband hit her two small children, so I never really took the time to know her. Neither did Lucas. Lucas’s father left them in the middle of the night when he was nine years old. Lucas’s brother, well on his way to becoming the alcoholic that his father had been, burned to death in a car crash three years after that. Lucas Cader had dated every girl in our grade and most of the ones in our school by the time we were sophomores. He still spent most of his time with me and slept on my floor a good four nights of the week. I loved Lucas Cader, in a very nonsexual way, and this all suited me just fine.

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.