Brother Word Read Online Free Page B

likes of community bake-offs and town hall meetings.
    Glancing at his watch, Travis now saw he had three more hours until the deadline for submitting his next piece, a yawner of a story about the proliferation of summertime gnats. The article’s subject—gnats—aroused as much interest as tickets to watch a family of turtles sprint around the Darlington Raceway, but Travis could care less. For all intents and purposes, the article was already written; it just needed a little polishing.
    Nobody’s gonna read it, anyway . . . why even bother?
    He popped another salty pretzel into his mouth and washed it down with a swig of diet Pepsi from the can always perched next to his keyboard. He didn’t even know why he was addicted to this particular soda, since it didn’t taste better than the diet brands of the other soft drinks. Maybe it was the baby blue and red colors. It certainly had nothing to do with dieting—Travis’s five-foot-eight-inch body perpetually fluctuated between 250 and 280 pounds, depending on how many trips he made to Damon’s Clubhouse in a given week.
    Speaking of Damon’s . . .
    The pretzels weren’t doing anything to appease his growing hunger. He glanced at his watch again and greedily calculated that he had time for one of Damon’s tasty barbecue sandwiches. And maybe a slice of cheery cheesecake to satisfy his sweet tooth. And, of course, another diet Pepsi to wash it all down.
    As he stood and retrieved his Clemson Tigers baseball cap, his arm accidentally knocked the framed picture of his nephew Eddie onto the desk, causing the glass frame to shatter. He automatically cursed, but was nevertheless relieved to see that his half-full diet Pepsi can hadn’t tilted over and spilled onto his keyboard. That had happened once before, earning him two weeks of Ryman Wells’s unrelenting wrath. Hadn’t the old buzzard ever heard of the word “accident” before?
    He reached over to pick up his wastebasket, then placed the metal receptacle at the edge of his desk. Carefully he swept the tiny shards of glass into the trash, idly wondering how much damage a piece of glass could inflict upon a keyboard’s internal wiring.
    “Hey, Trav, everything alright?”
    The question came from Benny Dodson, a fellow staff writer whose cubicle was adjacent to Travis’s. If Travis’s stigma was being Ryman Wells’s whipping boy, then Benny Dodson was the polar opposite. Benny kissed up to Ryman any chance he got, a tactic that the veteran editor loved. Partly due to such brownnosing (and to the fact that he was probably a better journalist than the other staff writers), Benny regularly saw his articles grace the Metro’s front page.
    “Yeah, Benny,” Travis responded, contemplating scattering a few shards of glass all over Benny’s chair. Now wouldn’t the chaos from
that
make for an interesting, exciting article? “Everything’s alright—go back to thinking of new ways to suck up to the boss.”
    Benny sighed loudly and Travis could visualize him rolling his eyes. “Give up, Travis. Will ya?”
    Travis started to respond with a nasty remark, but at that moment his eyes fell on the picture of his nephew Eddie, grinning in that “what, me worry?” way, a facial expression that was all the more remarkable considering Eddie’s medical condition. Eddie had been born with ectrodactylism, a rare birth defect that caused the tibia and fibula in both of his legs to be fused at the ankle, rendering him unable to walk. Eddie’s pediatrician had mentioned that only one out of every ninety thousand children in the United States was born with such a defect, causing Travis to sometimes wonder why fate had dealt Eddie such a cruel hand. And if that wasn’t misfortune enough, Eddie had also been born deaf. Both afflictions compounded Travis’s awkwardness around the kid, especially since Eddie was always reaching out with his arms, looking for hugs from his “Uncle Trav,” or pleading for someone to throw the