If You're Reading This by Trent Reedy

Author:Trent Reedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2014-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

Again, I couldn’t hold back my grin at the thought of how in sync I was with so much of what Dad wanted for me. I always did my best in school. If my mission was to earn an A on an assignment, I probably only had to wait for Coach Carter’s grade to come back for the Civil War presentation. Or else I’d study to ace the next English quiz on Hamlet. This mission shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

What troubled me was the idea that Mom had been mad at Dad for reenlisting. I’d never known that. I’d thought that, except for not having a lot of money, my family had always been happy, sort of ideal. At least that was what I remembered from when Dad was alive. That’s how it had felt on the trip to the Mark Twain Cave, and when Mom and Dad smiled at Mary and me on the kiddie rides at the county fair in Iowa City. I’d never considered that Mom might not have wanted him to be in the Guard.

Dad said he wasn’t a hero, yet he’d gone to a Taliban bomb site with his unit as if it were no big deal. Is that what everyone meant when they said he’d been a hero — that it hardly fazed him to do a whole bunch of scary things? The superheroes in Dad’s old comics that I used to read acted like that, casually fighting powerful villains on a regular schedule, but in Spider-Man and the New Warriors, the heroes always fought with a clear purpose, to save the day. What had my dad been fighting for? He said himself that he wasn’t there to defend freedom, so apart from improving a base in Afghanistan and responding to this bombing, what was he supposed to be doing? What was it all for?

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