Save the Enemy Read Online Free Page A

long after that, while riding a motorcycle on a two-lane highway in rural Massachusetts. She’d taken up bikes as a hobby after her husband died. Mom blamed both their deaths on cigarettes.
    By ten o’clock I can’t sit still. I used to call the police on my parents when I was a kid if they were out too late—which they were quite often, which only made me more anxious. Mom once said I should try St. John’s Wort. Then she was randomly murdered. There is no root that cures justifiable paranoia. For all I know, Dad is at the library (which closes at ten), or attending a meeting of Libertarians Anonymous, or doing any number of the Dad-like things he does when he bothers leaving the house.
    “Should we call the police?” I ask Ben.
    “Dad thinks that the police are an unwelcome use of tax dollars,” Ben says.
    “Brush your teeth. Go to bed.”
    Ben brushes his teeth. He refuses to floss. He will need a lot of dental work one day. I go into his room, decorated in
Star Wars
paraphernalia that Dad bought on eBay after Mom died, and pat his head. He flinches. I shove my hand in my pocket.
    “I still keep dreaming about Mom,” Ben says.
    “It must be nice to see her every night,” I say to him.
    “She’s telling me that it isn’t Dad’s fault she got killed,” Ben says.
    “Did we ever think it was?”
    “I haven’t come to a determination,” he says. “I’m going to sleep now.”
    I squeeze my eyes shut, trembling. “Say hi to Mom for me if you see her,” I say, quietly, so Ben won’t really hear. Then, louder, while turning out the light on the way out: “See if you can find out where Dad is.”

HELLO PM COLUMBUS
Chapter Three
    The next morning I oversleep. I know even before I get up that my dad isn’t home. He’s the one who nags me out of bed in the morning.
    I scramble out from under the covers, heart pounding, and check on my brother. His room is empty. He’s been an early riser all his life, like Mom always was. Dad claims he was once like me, prone to laziness. It’s through sheer act of will that he became a Responsible Adult. Or so he likes to remind me over and over. He also claims that he doesn’t tell me these things to be annoying or preachy. I think he wants to let me know what’s in store for me when I grow up. If I grow up.
    I race downstairs. My brother is sitting in the kitchen, reading
The Wall Street Journal
on his iPad and jotting things in a notebook.
    “Did you eat?” I ask.
    “I had some ice cream,” Ben says.
    “ ‘The cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast,’ ” I quote from a movie, but Ben doesn’t get the reference or thehumor and my memory is so god-awful I can’t remember which movie I’m quoting. I’m more certain about breakfast: cereal and coffee. Mom and Dad let me start drinking coffee young. It stuck. We learned I have an addictive personality. Self-awareness and honest insight about oneself are other important keys to survival, as I’ve also learned from You-know-who.
    “Ice cream contains vital calories, sugars, and nutrients,” Ben says.
    “Dad’s not home,” I say. It’s not a question.
    That still does not mean that there is a crisis on our hands. This is Dad. One time, a few years before Mom was killed, he vanished for two days. Just took off to go hike some old train line that got turned into a walking trail. He wanted to see it because, he said, it had been transformed using only private funds, no government money, and also it was supposed to be very pretty. Pretty, but not well-marked; he apparently got lost, and then, once he realized where he was, discovered it was only one more day’s hike to the execution spot of a famous abolitionist. So he stopped at a little store to buy water and food and kept walking, spending a tentless couple of nights at campgrounds along the way. Mom got a call at the end of it, asking for a ride back to his car.
    When I asked him what he could have possibly been thinking with such an idiotic move,