Andreo's Race Read Online Free Page A

gonna tell me your story, or whatever fib your parents told you? Or do I guess right that your super-uptight mother has never told you anything?”
    I sigh and shine my light on a sparkling droplet clinging to the end of a mud-colored stalactite. Even my best friend and fellow adoptee Raul has no idea what a huge hole in my heart exists from not knowing much else aboutmy birth parents. For as long as I can remember, I’ve fantasized about finding them—maybe because I’ve never felt that I’ve fit in with my adoptive family. I’ve never even been sure my adoptive mother loves me. But precisely because I’m so obsessed with the issue, I’m determined to hide it from Raul. Still, maybe it’s time to tell him the one stupid story I was given.
    â€œDad told me I was born in Cochabamba. My birth mom was a teenage beauty queen. She got herself pregnant thanks to some married doctor. Her family didn’t want the scandal. The doctor—my birth father—wanted nothing to do with the whole thing.”
That’s why I’ve concocted a dream
,
a story I like better. Except it keeps turning into a nightmare
.
    â€œSeriously?” His headlamp beam, frozen on my face, blinds me to his own facial expression.
    I nod and glance at the coffin-size opening between slabs of rock that we’ve promised to tackle today. “That’s what Dad told me when I was, like, twelve, and there’s no way anyone in my family wants to talk about it, especially my mother, as you bloody well know. I don’t want to ask questions. I don’t want to get anyone’s nose out of joint.” I gesture to the crumpled-up printout sticking out of his pocket. “So stop digging up this shit off the Internet.”
    â€œNo effing way.”
    I stare at Raul, who I can see now is staring bug-eyed at me. We’re still sitting cross-legged in our cramped rotunda, our breaths coming out in pockets of steam. “What?”
    â€œMy parents told me the same thing. The beauty queen and doctor line!”
    â€œDid not. You told me a whole different story.”
    â€œÂ â€™Course I did! No way was I gonna ’fess up to a lame-sounding tale like that. Beauty queen? Sucky.”
    I shine my light on a colony of daddy longlegs on the walls. “You’re not making that up?”
    â€œYou’re not making up yours?”
    â€œNo.” Sweating and rattled, I turn and enter the space ahead of Raul, wriggling on my stomach, hands ahead of me like I’m swimming. Raul has recently decided this isn’t a dead end as the rest of the caving community believes. The reason we’re here is that last weekend, he crawled in, reached the end boulder pile, hammered on it with a crowbar until he felt air flow, then shoved a few more stones away. He thinks that we, being smaller and skinnier than adult cavers, can now carry on to what may be a new exit. I’m barely in, though, when hands close over my ankles and Raul jerks me all the way back into our conference room.
    â€œStop, Andreo. You gotta think about this one. So both our adoptive parents got fed a line. A big sales pitch that some black-market dude thought up. It’s perfect, don’t you see? This baby’s got beauty-queen looks and doctor brains, and no birth parents who are going to ask for it back. The perfect history. Maybe all six hundred babies he collected money for came with the same damn story.”
    I lean forward and blow a long breath of steam into Raul’s face. “Guess that means the beauty queens in Bolivia keep pretty busy. Or maybe we have the same beauty queen mom and doctor dad, which makes us brothers.” My sarcasm drips with the same ping as the stalactite’s droplets.
    â€œ
Ha
! Not possible, ’cause I’m way better looking than you, not to mention I was born just four months after you.”
    â€œDrop it, Raul.” I reach out and grab the printout from