Boy Nobody Read Online Free

forever, frozen in time. Who and what his father was will never be known. Not to him. Not to anyone.
    Here’s what Jack will remember:
    The beautiful lie that defined his family.
    I am not lucky like Jack.
    I know the truth about my family. Or some of it.
    I know my father was not the great dad I thought he was, or the man he pretended to be to the world. The Program tells me one thing, but my memories tell me another.
    I don’t know which to believe.
    It’s enough to make all my memories suspect, to make the past a mystery from which I cannot escape.

CHAPTER EIGHT
IT WAS A SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN EARLY NOVEMBER.
    I was twelve years old.
    I was waiting for my father in his office at the university, and I got a call. There had been an accident, and I had to come home immediately. That’s what the caller said.
    I ran home to find Mike sitting at our kitchen table. I was surprised to see him there.
    “Where are my parents?” I said.
    There were cookies on a plate in the middle of the table. Oatmeal raisin. Mom used to put them out for us. I was skinny and hardly ate. Mike was big for his age and ate a lot.
    “Your parents,” Mike said. “I need to talk to you about them.”
    I noticed a can of diet ginger ale on the floor by the refrigerator. It had spilled and formed a sticky brown-yellow puddle. I was looking at it, wondering how it got there, wondering why nobodyhad done anything about it, when Mike reached out and touched me with something.
    Something sharp, like a thumbtack.
    I suddenly felt tired.
    “Don’t be afraid,” he said to me.
    “Why would I be afraid?” I said.
    My head started to spin, and I fell. Mike steadied me. He propped me against his shoulder and led me into the living room. A friend helping another friend in distress.
    My father was sitting on a chair in the living room, his head slumped in front of him, his legs duct-taped to the legs of the chair.
    “That’s funny,” I said.
    When you see something absurd, something that is beyond your power to comprehend, your mind interprets it as a joke. It is a natural human defense mechanism. I’ve used it to my advantage many times.
    I didn’t know things like that back then. I was young and stupid. I thought we were playing a game.
    “It is funny,” Mike said. “Funny and sad.”
    “I don’t understand,” I said.
    Mike snapped his fingers hard. Once, twice.
    My dad’s head shot up. He could not speak. There was tape over his mouth.
    “Dad,” I said.
    His eyes told the story.
    This was no game. It was danger.
    Mike grabbed the back of my collar, pulled me close to my father, so close we were almost touching.
    “Do you see?” Mike said.
    But he wasn’t talking to me.
    I was only twelve, but I understood. I might not have been able to put it into words at the time, but I got the idea.
    Mike hadn’t brought me to the living room to show me what he’d done to my father; he’d brought me there to show my father what he was going to do to me.
    “This is not your son,” Mike told my father. “Not anymore.”
    I tried to reach out to my father, but Mike pulled me away.
    I was more than tired then. I was falling asleep on my feet.
    “Who are you?” I said to Mike.
    “I’m your friend,” he said. “I’m Mike.”
    “You’re not my friend,” I said.
    “You’re a smart kid,” he said.
    The way he’d said it, it was like he wasn’t a kid. He was something else, something I didn’t yet know existed.
    He led me outside. I had no ability to resist. He put me in the back of a waiting cab. It looked like a cab, but the windows were blacked out.
    That was the last time I saw either of my parents.
    It was the end of everything.
    It was the beginning of everything else.

CHAPTER NINE
I STEP ON THE GAS AND FEEL THE ENGINE RESPOND.
    I look out the window as mile markers pass in a blur. Buildings in a blur. Faces in a blur. I learned long ago that the world is blurred by speed. The greater the speed, the more the blur.
    If I keep moving