Saving Lucas Biggs Read Online Free Page B

up. Anyway, I was at the lunch afterward—there’s always a lunch afterward—and I was eating the pastitsio and thinking that it was the best food ever invented, and I heard what I thought was this booming laughter. It turned out to be crying. The woman’s back quaked and heaved inside the black fabric of her dress. Bobby Fitzgerald, who was sitting next to me, whispered, “It’s because she’s a widow. Her husband is never coming home because he’s dead.”
    With that bite of pastitsio, the rock-solid knowledge that my father was never coming home ran up and punched me in the stomach, and that was it. I dropped my fork and cried like a baby, or more like a toddler in a fit, did the whole falling down and screeching thing I’d been teetering on the edge of since the jacaranda flowers had refused to turn black and fall off their branches.
    After a long time, I got up and half crawled up the stairs, using my hands the way I used to do when it was summer and I was a little kid, wrung out like a sponge from playing all day in the hot sun. Then I fell down onto my bed and into despair, where I stuck like a bug in tar.
    I wasn’t usually so hopeless. When I was in third grade, I discovered the word “equilibrium” in some book my parents left lying around. I happen to be a person who collects words the way other people collect rocks or Beanie Babies. I keep the words in notebooks, the black marbled kind, and keep the notebooks, years’ and years’ worth, stacked inside my closet.
    “Equilibrium” got a page all to itself. It’s really just a fancy way of saying “balance,” but I loved how long and ripply it was and how it did what it meant, how that “eek” at the front was balanced out by the soft humming “um” of the end. I guess it became a kind of motto for me. I am not necessarily a balanced person by nature, but I try. When I think a bad thought, I try to balance it out with a happy one. It doesn’t work all the time, but if I do say so myself, over the years, I’ve gotten good at it. My mom would never let me have a tattoo, but if I ever got one, it would be that one word, “equilibrium.”
    What happened the evening of my dad’s sentencing is that I lost equilibrium. All my life boiled down to one fact: my dad was never coming home because they were going to kill him. I knew in my bones there was nothing else, no other fact or thought or feeling to offset it, no shot at equilibrium. I guess that’s my version of hitting rock bottom: being so low that even your favorite word can’t save you.
    I just lay there on my green flowered quilt, helpless, letting everything that had happened, all those events that had driven me to this rock-bottom spot, rumble and roar through my head and over my broken heart like a freight train.
    It started with my dad becoming a whistle-blower.
    “Whistle-blower” is a tricky word. On its face, it means a person who uncovers secret wrongdoing in an organization and lets the public know. But depending on your point of view and your tone of voice, it can also mean either “traitor” or “hero.” When it came to my dad, a lot of the people in our town subscribed to the second definition, which was great, except that none of them were people with the power to make what they wanted to have happen happen. All those people, the ones with power, the ones who didn’t just work for but were Victory Fuels—including Judge Biggs—grabbed the first definition, “traitor,” with two hands, like a baseball bat, and used it to beat my family down.
    Before he was a whistle-blower, my dad was a geologist, and man, did he love it. He studied rocks, which might sound boring, except that our planet happens to be made of them. So he was really studying the earth, the ground under our feet, which gives us almost everything: food, water, a place to build our houses, and a nifty little thing called fossil fuel. Coal, petroleum, natural gas. It’s sort of cool to think of actually,