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Authors: Andrew Smith

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BOOK: 100 Sideways Miles
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I believe I will miss it.

My seizures always begin the same way: I smell flowers. Then all the words empty out of my head, and everything is just there: a chaotic jumble of patternless, nameless clusters of atoms.

Beautiful.

My condition is a souvenir from the day a dead horse fell out of the sky and landed on me and my mother.

• • •

I was born on the anniversary of the first-ever atom bomb explosion on Planet Earth.

A gift from the greatest generation—the guys who saved the world!

July 16.

Some of those atoms—when set free in 1945 into the atmosphere above the New Mexico desert—found their way into me: my hands, my head, and my heart.

My atoms have been on this Finn trip for almost eleven billion miles.

Just about every individual atom in the universe, every last bit of the stuff that builds me, is nearly fourteen billion years old. Think of that distance: fourteen billion times all those hundreds of millions of miles.

I hold together pretty well, considering how much my atoms have been through.

These are things I think about sometimes.

• • •

Look: I realize now that I wasn't only trapped inside my father's book; my father also did not want to let go of me. Maybe that's an egotistical thing to say—we are all centers of our personal universes in any event—but it was ironically obvious to me; and my father had told me straight out, anyway.

He said to me, “Finn, I wish you would never grow up and go away.”

So that summer of the Perseids and the perigee moon, of Julia Bishop and the abandoned prison at Aberdeen Lake, of finding myself stranded so far away from home along with my best friend, really turned out to be a sort of scripted shadow play in which the epileptic boy could choose for himself whether or not he would ever get out of the book.

What was I going to do?

• • •

I am an epileptic. I blank out.

I also have heterochromatic eyes, which means they are different colors. Green and blue, if you need to know. People almost never notice it, because most people are afraid to look at other peoples' eyes. I know that because when you have heterochromatic eyes, you
always
look at eyes—always trying to find someone else who is like you, like we come from a different planet or something.

Cade Hernandez noticed it one day when we sat in my backyard hot tub together, the summer before eighth grade. Cade Hernandez wasn't afraid of anything, especially not looking directly at another guy's eyes.

I have never found another heterochromatic set of eyes to
look at, except for ones on the Internet. And they were probably Photoshopped, anyway.

You know what they say about your imagination being limitless? Well, that is absolute horseshit. You can't imagine anything if you don't already have a word for it in your head.

Trust me, I know.

If you really want to imagine something, try imagining what it would be like to empty every word from your head and then look at the universe. You'll see nothing at all that you could ever understand. There will be no separation or distinction between object, color, temperature, or sound; there will be neither borders nor edges, no limits or size, and you will smell things and not have any idea at all what is happening.

I get that way sometimes. My head empties out, and I smell something like nameless flowers.

• • •

I have never been outside the state of California in the nearly seventeen years that my atoms and molecules have been stuck together, walking around and calling themselves Finn.

Oklahoma, where Cade and I were planning to visit over our last summer vacation from Burnt Mill Creek High School, might just as well have been in a different galaxy as far as my atoms were concerned.

There is actually more empty space between our atoms and molecules than anything solid. It's as though we're all clouds of gas, optical illusions—like how spokes on a spinning bicycle wheel blur invisibly into a solid barrier between
hereandthere
,
thisside
and
thatside
.

It's a wonder we don't all just float away—
pfft!
—like smoke.

At first, Dad tried to explain it to me as this: My mother simply floated away when I was seven years old.

In truth, a dead horse fell on us.

I know that is an absurd thing to consider—a dead horse falling out of the sky—but it actually happened.

Picture this: We lived in a small cabin in the Sierras of northern California, at a place called Wheelerville, which is located on the Salmon Creek.

Wheelerville was named for Wheeler Caverns, a cave formation. Near the entrance to the caves, there is a bridge across the Salmon Creek Gorge, popular among base parachutists and other crazy people who like to jump from the edge of the span with enormous wrappings of elastic lashed to their ankles. The bridge is aptly named the Salmon Creek Gorge Bridge.

Although I don't remember it, the story went like this: My mother and I were walking along the creek beneath the bridge when a truck from a knackery, which is what some people call a rendering plant, overturned on the span above us.

Look: A dead horse fell from the bridge. Nobody thought to lash bungee cords to the animal's legs, or maybe equip it with a parachute.

That would have been something to see.

Things like that turn men into writers and other, worse things.

I don't remember it.

After all, it happened more than five billion miles ago.

The knackery truck was on its way to the plant after picking up a twenty-two-year-old Percheron gelding. The horse was dead, set to be rendered, to have its atoms turned into pet food
and stuff like shampoos, lubricants on condoms, rubber tires, and explosives.

Did you know they put dead animals into bombs?

My father told me once,
If that doesn't make you a poet, Finn, nothing will
.

I would rather be a poet than end up inside a bomb or a bottle of shampoo.

• • •

There is something important in running a knackery.

When you think about it, the universe is nothing but this vast knackery of churning black holes and exploding stars, constantly freeing atoms that collect together and become something else, and something else again.

Here is what I think about that horse falling on us: I figure it took a little more than four seconds for the horse to travel from the span of the bridge, over three hundred feet above, to where my mother and I stood on the bank of Salmon Creek. During that fall, the earth moved approximately one hundred miles. If you were to walk a straight line for a hundred miles and drop a total of three hundred feet, you wouldn't even realize you were descending in elevation at all.

That horse fell one hundred sideways miles.

• • •

Look: There are scars along my back where they put pins in me to heal the vertebrae.

They look like colon, vertical slash, colon. Like this:

I am fine now.

In baseball, I have a good arm and a bat, and I can field, but I am not interested in playing it after high school. My natural talent, I think, is in being
fine
—no matter what is actually going on inside me.

I am fine.

Nobody ever thinks otherwise.

FIVE EUROS IN DOLLARS

There is no creek in Burnt Mill Creek. I don't know if there was a creek here at one time, or if the people who named our town were attempting to fool settlers into populating this barren valley at the bottom of San Francisquito Canyon.

False advertising.

There's no mill here either.

Maybe it burned.

Atoms will be freed, after all, and names are misleading and can constantly change. And people hide themselves in costumes.

That's what I believe, at least, and so far it has pretty much been the story of my life.

• • •

Cade Hernandez was like a god.

When we were in tenth grade, he orchestrated a plan to standardize our entire class—make every tenth-grader exactly the same. He called it our Quit Being Individuals mission. With only about two hundred kids in our class, it wasn't a difficult task to manage, and like I said, Cade Hernandez had
the ability to make anyone do whatever he wanted.

After all, Cade explained, it was exactly what the school system had been trying to do to us for our entire lives: make us all the same. So at the end of our sophomore year as the week for the State of California Basic Educational Standards Test (they called it the BEST Test) neared and hundreds of number two pencils were being sharpened in preparation for hours of mindless bubble filling by the kids at Burnt Mill Creek High School, Cade Hernandez came up with a wicked idea; one that he got every tenth-grader in our school to play along with too.

Cade's plan was simple. Even the dumbest kids could follow it.

The plan involved having every one of us give exactly the same pattern of responses on the BEST Test. And we all did it too. When the testing week came around, every single sophomore at Burnt Mill Creek High School bubbled in the following four responses, over and over and over:

C-A-D-E

Naturally, I'd expressed my skepticism over the lack of
B
s, but Cade argued that it didn't matter, since the only people who gave a shit about the BEST Test were bureaucrats and politicians.

“Well, what if they close our school down and fire all the teachers or something?” I'd said.

“Really, Finn?
Really? 

Cade Hernandez could even get
me
to do whatever he wanted.

And we did not find out until the following year just how effective Cade Hernandez's Quit Being Individuals mission would actually turn out to be.

• • •

Like most of the boys who played ball for the Burnt Mill Creek High School Pioneers, Cade “Win-Win” Hernandez chewed tobacco.

I did not, however.

I think the boys on the team never would have picked up the habit if our coaches didn't do it so often; if they never spoke the praises of the tradition of chewing tobacco in the dugout, like it was part of becoming a man, part of the game itself.

Our batting coach, a man named John Ritchey, had such rotten gums from his habit of tobacco chewing that he actually lost one of his lower incisors during a practice session. He didn't care at all. Coach Ritchey spit the entire tooth—root and all—onto the clay of the batting cage at Pioneer Field. The tooth looked like one of those Halloween candy corns that had been boiled in sewage. Most of the boys watched in a kind of hero worship combined with fear and tobacco-buzzed disgust.

Coach Ritchey's tooth became a sort of religious artifact for the team, like the bones or dried innards from a Catholic saint. Somebody—and I am certain it was Cade Hernandez—must have picked the thing up, because Coach Ritchey's rotten tooth had a way of showing up in a randomly selected boy's sanitaries, cap, or athletic supporter before every game we played.

It was such good fun.

• • •

“One of these days, they are going to kick you out of school for all the shit you do, and I will have to walk here, or hitchhike and risk getting picked up by a child molester or some shit,” I said.

“Your dad or stepmom would drive you,” Cade said.

“I don't want to ride with my parents. What eleventh-grade boy rides with his parents? They treat me like too much of a baby as it is. I'd rather take my chances with the molesters.”

Cade Hernandez drove a two-year-old Toyota pickup. Every day, we left school for lunch but came back for last-period baseball practice. Our season ended that first week in May, not so victoriously for the Burnt Mill Creek High School Pioneers.

We'll get 'em next year.

Cade looked me over and answered, “I think you're safe as far as perverts are concerned, Finn. Just sayin'. I mean, you're pretty damn ugly.”

“Yeah.”

Of course he was joking. Cade Hernandez and I looked so much alike that people who didn't know us often thought we were brothers. We both were tall and bony, and blond headed, too. Cade kept his hair trimmed short, and he had a very sparse golden beard that went from his sideburns and curled almost invisibly just around the lower edge of his jaw. I didn't have the first nub growing out of my face yet, and my hair was long and unruly.

BOOK: 100 Sideways Miles
7.28Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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