In the Path of Falling Objects Read Online Free

should ask them for a ride.”
    “No.” I put my head down like I didn’t even know or care about that car coming up alongside us. I began walking forward, just looking at the ground, listening to our feet, the scattering sounds of tires on the gravel and dirt of the road.
    I warned Simon again, “Don’t even look at them.”
    So I just concentrated on not paying that car any attention. I could hear Simon following along, scooting his feet in the rocks and dirt. And it wasn’t until later, until it was too late for both of us, that I found out Simon was sticking a thumb out to beg a ride.
    The car swerved out, passing us, giving us a wide share of the road. The driver never turned to look at us, but my eyes were drawnto the girl. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t stop myself from looking across at her as she sailed by us on that road, her hair swirling wildly in the wind, eyes shaded behind black glasses. And I could see she was watching us, her head turning farther around so she could look at us through the haze of rising dust as she passed. And as the car receded before me, the girl waved her open hands imploringly, saying something to the driver, and twisted around back over the seat and smiled at me and my brother before the car came to a stop a hundred yards in front of us.
    Simon slid his hand in his pocket.
    I stopped walking and watched.
    The car’s doors swung open, and both riders stood in the road, looking back at us standing there, watching them.
    “They look like hippies,” Simon whispered.
    “They probably think we do, too.”
    I looked at my brother, but he kept his eyes fixed down the road.
    Simon straightened himself, flicking his hair back over his shoulders with both hands.
    The driver was thin, shorter than me, and had long and wavy black-brown hair that nearly reflected the sunlight. His face was covered with hair, beard untrimmed, and he wore low-cut bell-bottoms and an unbuttoned patchwork vest with no shirt beneath it, a fishing-line string of beads hanging down into the black hairs on his chest. Except for the uneven beard, he didn’t look too old, maybe eighteen, maybe twenty. I guessed the girl was even younger than that.
    She was taller than the driver, hair windblown and light, wearing jeans torn at each knee, and the sunglasses, and a tight pink tee shirt with three buttons on top, all unfastened.
    They were walking toward us; Simon, squinting in the glare and dust at the driver, the car, the strange metal thing sticking up fromthe backseat, and me, dumbly mesmerized by the glint of light from the black lenses on the girl’s glasses in the hazy fog above the roadway, the way she moved inside that pink shirt.
    “Hey, Tom and Huck, aren’t you a long ways from home?” the driver said, showing yellowed teeth and pivoting his head, birdlike, from me to Simon and back to me.
    “Not that far,” I said.
    “Where are you boys going?” the girl asked.
    “Nowhere.”
    “Arizona,” Simon said.
    “Either way,” the driver said, punctuating his speech with the clink of a Zippo lighter he flicked open and shut with his thumb, “Arizona. Nowhere. They’re both pretty far.”
    “Mitch,” the girl said, “we could give them a ride.”
    I pulled the shirt away from my head. I was sweating, my shoulders and back were sunburned, and the air felt cool in my damp hair.
    The driver looked right at me and said, “Do you want a ride?”
    I shot a look at Simon, hoping to stop him from talking, but I knew it was already too late for that and Simon immediately said, “Sure! Thanks!”
    And then Simon looked at me, grinning, and nodded in the direction of the girl, and the way she watched me made me feel like I was some kind of captured specimen. And Simon whispered to me, “Now go draw
that
on your stupid map.”
    The driver swept his arm in the direction of the open door.
    “My name’s Mitch,” he said. “And this is Lilly. And the backseat’s a little small ’cause of Don being