Just One Day Read Online Free Page A

troll on the run. That could be the funny story around the office. How the great Brad Marcus’s girlfriend dumped him, lost her mind, took his car, and never returned.
    I was delirious. Maybe because I was hungry. Maybe it was the hangover, or the thickening wind whipping my hair around. The air did feel different, the further I got from the coast, getting heavier instead of lighter. It was odd, I thought, since nothing could be heavier than the muggy Gulf Coast. There were some ominous-looking clouds far ahead in the distance, but even with that there was something different about it. Something I couldn’t quite name.
    “Great, a storm,” I said. “Just your kind, Dad,” I called out so that the wind would suck my words behind me. He’d loved storms, and we’d sit out on the porch and watch them blow down the street when I was little. He’d say that each one had a purpose and a story. We’d watch torrents of rain break down an ant bed, and then afterward watch the ants carry each tiny grain to another location to rebuild. While the rosebushes behind them flourished from the fresh influx of water.
    “Every storm has a balance, Andie,” he’d say, as we’d huddle on the porch, just out of reach of the rain, drinking Coca-Colas and eating Cheetos from a big bag. “For everything it floods or tears away, it gives something else new life.”
    “Tell me what to do, Dad,” I whispered against the wind. “Because that up ahead doesn’t look like fun.”
    As I topped a hill, a little mom-and-pop diner slid into view, and I shook my head in amazement. Breakfast.
    “Of course!” I said on a laugh. “Breakfast cures everything.” I remembered how many times teenage angst resulted in pancakes. Sometimes even in the middle of the night. “Wasn’t really what I meant, but I’ll take it.”
    I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had the real deal. Brad hated breakfast. Said it slowed down his productivity, and that all he needed was two cups of black coffee and a protein shake. Eyeing the diner, I felt a giddy sense of nonproductivity settle over me. I wanted waffles, damn it.
    The dark band of clouds looming on the horizon added every other possible excuse for stopping. I could ride it out there. Grab a table, have a waffle, read my book. Made perfect sense to me.
    The dust swirled around the car as I pulled off the road onto crackling gravel and hard dirt, making me cough. I covered my face, and then felt a little bad for Brad’s interior as the fine haze of dirt settled into the fabric. I hurried to put the top up before more dust settled in. His car was his baby. So much so, in fact, that he really must have wanted to win me over to hand over the keys like that. That had to be a point in his favor.
    I squinted through my dusty windshield, at the diner’s equally dirty windows, sunbaked already even at nine in the morning. Only a few bodies moved around inside, and from the look of the beat-up pickup trucks next to me, they were local to the rural area I’d entered. I was glad of that, remembering that I hadn’t done a thing to myself since the previous night’s escapade. I glanced in the rearview mirror with a wince and twisted up my matted-hair-sprayed-and-then-put-through-seventy-mile-an-hour-wind hair with a hair band I’d had the forethought to bring, and then attempted to scrape away the dried eyeliner.
    “My God, Andie, you look like a psychopath,” I mumbled. No one would notice me, anyway, I figured. I’d sit in a corner and graze in peace.
    I looked around before I opened the door. I was truly in the middle of nowhere. Hills that led to more hills, connected by parched-looking earth that hadn’t seen rain in a while. Everything, including the building, just looked dusty and hot.
    “Well, there you go,” I said aloud. “Every storm has a purpose.”
    I knew, just off outward appearances, that Brad would never have stopped there. He would drive ten miles out of the way to find a nice