Strange Lies by Maggie Thrash

Author:Maggie Thrash
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse

The Harkers’ house, 5:30 p.m.

All he wanted to do was to look at something beautiful. But he was trapped in a locked, windowless room with only a calculus textbook, a laptop with no Internet, and a copy of Moby Dick.

It wouldn’t be so bad if he could escape using his imagination—close his eyes and ascend to some fantasy world like Narnia or the Land of Oz. But Calvin didn’t have the greatest imagination. It was something he’d been forced to accept about himself. He envied artists and their power to summon fantastic, alien landscapes to their mind’s eye. Calvin had a hard time seeing things that he hadn’t actually seen. How did they do it? If only he knew their secret.

Calvin had been grounded before, but not to this extreme. At first it had been a normal grounding: no leaving the house, in bed by ten thirty. But when his dad had realized he was just getting stoned and gazing out the window instead of doing homework, he’d locked him in the basement with only his computer and his textbooks. Calvin had happily watched Enya music videos on YouTube for a while—all waterfalls and falling leaves and otherworldly harmonies—until his dad had cut the Internet connection, leaving him with nothing.

“DAD?” Calvin yelled. “MOM?”

No answer.

They were probably at Beau Ideal, where his dad played golf and his mom Zumba’d within an inch of her life every Saturday. He was pretty sure it was illegal to lock your kid in a room and leave the house, but at least his mom had slipped a sandwich under the crack of the door before they’d gone. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do if he had to go to the bathroom.

“CAMILLAAAA?” he yelled for his sister. But if his parents were at the club, Camilla probably was too. She made no secret that she thought her little brother was weird and difficult and deserved all the maltreatment he got. He’d never counted on her to save him. He jiggled the door handle futilely.

Think, he commanded himself, looking around the room. How are you going to get out of here?  He was supposedly the smartest kid in the tristate area. That bit of data had been shoved down his throat since the age of seven. He’d aced every test he’d ever been given. Surely he could figure out a way to get out of a locked room. But he felt irritable and short-fused. The pot he’d smoked had worn off hours ago, and he hated being sober. He hated the boring prison of his brain, which was only good for differential calculus and solving stochastic systems.

Most of his stash of mind-altering substances was gone. His dad had hired a former police detective to search Calvin’s room and trash everything he found. Calvin had known it was coming, so he’d tried to give some of it away at the science expo; he couldn’t bear to see all those stupendous chemicals going to waste. And

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.