Glass Boys Read Online Free Page B

smooth. Garrett kept a hand cupped over his mouth, could smell dirty metal on his skin. If he threw up now, Eli would certainly pull over, kick open a door, toss him out onto the dirt shoulder, and tear on over the highway. No flicker of brake lights. Garrett swallowed constantly, kept his head turned away from Eli, and scanned the rocks and barrens and clumps of straggly trees. Imagined how he would survive if the acid and the mangled French fries spewed onto the worn floor below.
    He would be alone in the woods, with the bears and foxes and the moose. But, Garrett told himself, he might be okay. He had some smarts. His father, his real father, had taught him plenty of things when Garrett was a small boy. How to make a snare from a stretch of spruce root or some wire, how to strip bark from a birch to kindle a fire. How to sleep comfortably on dry boughs, away from the wet ground. Garrett ran his hand over his pockets, felt nothing. No perfect coil of wire appearing out of thin air, no fishing hooks, not a candy to tease an empty stomach. He didn’t even have his pocketknife. “You can’t take that into a courtroom, for God’s sakes,” his mother had said when she saw it in his hand, and she’d grabbed it from him, tossed it into an overflowing drawer.
    Garrett tried to distract himself. Thought about the farm. Thought about school. He didn’t have a single friend. He had tried to blame it on the white scar that snaked from his upper lip and right nostril, or the red flaking patches on his elbows and knees. Perhaps his clothes were too small, sweaters darned, white worn line where the hem on his trousers had been let down. Or that his shoes were oversized, paper stuffed in the toes, and he clomped when he walked. Maybe it was because his mother insisted on shaving his scalp so he wouldn’t catch ticks. But he couldn’t deny there were other kids who wore worse clothes, had worse haircuts, and they still managed to find their pack.
    In the woods up behind the school, older boys often surrounded him, pulled crushed stone from their pockets and chucked it at his head. If Garrett couldn’t escape the enclosure, they might pin him down and let long strings of slime hang from their mouths, dangle just an inch from his face. Or, roll him over, jam a hand down the back of his trousers, grab his underwear, tug until his private parts chafed and burned. They ignored his cries for mercy, chanted “hinbreed, hinbreed, you’re a hinbreed,” made him crawl home on hands and knees, torn cotton up around his ribs, sharp sticks and pine needles stabbing his palms.
    Once, in a moment of bravery, he asked what it meant to be a hinbreed, and this fellow named Willie called him a dickhead, told him he was the spawn of boy cousins poking girl cousins and brothers poking sisters. “You knows,” Willie had said with a filthy wink, and he rammed his index finger into his loose fist, gave a few throaty snorts, hips bucking in time with his fingers. Blood going sour, he said. Babies with their feet on backwards. Fingers for toes. “That’s why you got donkey ears, stupid-ass. And your snout is like a bloody faucet. Shit, you’re lucky your eyes idn’t crossed. You’re lucky you got eyes t’all. Some hinbreeds only gets holes and they sticks marbles in their heads.”
    Growing up on a farm, Garrett knew all about poking, and, in the case of two beagle dogs his stepfather Eli kept in a chicken wire pen, the occasional getting stuck. When he asked his mother for the truth, if his real father had been her relative, and if she knew she was going to grow a hinbreed, her mouth hung open for a moment, then she cried, “You, my son, is fortunate to have your feet on this earth.”
    â€œThat’s not what I asked you.”
    â€œOf all things. You are a perfectly fine little boy. Perfectly fine. Can’t you think for yourself?”
    â€œI am thinking.