Streams of Babel Read Online Free

figured I could just sit and watch something very cool like
Lawrence of Arabia
and not be a jerk in public.
    The phone rang again as Scott came in the door. He was closer to the cordless than Mom was.
    "
I'm not home!
" I shouted again.
    Mom was tousling my hair now, which was normal, but she'd gotten even more touchy-feely lately, it seemed. Ever since she got sick a few weeks ago. "And if you want me to tell the coach to quit throwing recruiters at you, it's no problem."
    "No! Just gimme ten feet. Sorry, Mom, but—"
    "He caught Mom's flu. Lying down," my brother said into the phone, and I shot an evil glance at him through the kitchen doorway. "Nope, not coming. Call him tomorrow."
    He hung up, parked his paramedic jacket on a hook behind the kitchen door, and came into the living room.
    "Do you have to tell them I'm sick?" I griped. "Sounds wimpy."
    "Sick in the head." He swatted my hair on his way past and plopped down beside me. "If I tell them you're not here, they keep calling back every five minutes. I'm not your ... lying social secretary, dig? What's up? That douche bag from over on the Gold Coast get to you worse than you're letting on?"
    He grabbed my bag of pretzels, stared at the TV.
    "She's not a douche bag."
    "That's generous of you."
    Since I couldn't exactly deny anything on Myra's long list of my weirdness traits, I sat there trying to decide why I didn't feel all that upset. She had some problems of her own, maybe that was it.
    "She's all right, she just ... gets drunk. You ever been at a party with a slurring, giggling, drunk girl who totally stinks of tired booze?"
    "
Mm-hm.
" He sent his eyebrows up and down a few times. "They get even better after the party."
    I grunted. "That's romantic"
    He kept watching me, crunching on his pretzel way too loud. "You know, if you don't get over this notion that you're holding out for love, I'm gonna have to call up Candy Cane, have a bunch of your buddies tote her over here."
    Candy Cane is this hooker from Atlantic City who had been
hired by the crazier guys for parties when Scott was a senior. My friends hadn't done the Candy Cane routine yet.
Whew
on that one. For the most part, stuff like that had all the appeal of sticking my face in a bucketful of other people's spit.
    "Yeah, yeah, yeah." I grabbed the bag of pretzels back. "I'm a freak of nature."
    "No, you are not." He slapped my knee and swung it from side to side. "You are ...
extraordinary,
and don't forget it. Hey. Wanna watch
Superman
?"
    I bit into a pretzel, smiling. I used to watch the movie
Super man
when I was around eleven and totally related to this gigantic, spazzy kid who dropped into this perfect little American town, where everybody's great—and yet, he just can't get comfortable. And it was kind of easy for me to dream up strange ideas, like our dad was a superhero. Mom used to avoid questions about who and where our father was by joking that we came from a bolt of lightning that dropped from heaven. I used to actually hope it was true. When you're five-ten in sixth grade, already kicking field goals from the thirty-yard line—
but wishing you were off in the woods with your dog
—it helps to think of yourself as some mutated version of a Clark Kent.
    Fortunately, I quit growing last year—at six-four. I won the South Jerseys in wrestling at 189 after pinning two guys, one from Ocean City and one from Toms River, and then I overheard a
Press
reporter telling another that "Owen Eberman probably just peeled ten thousand off that kid's scholarship" to some school I can't remember. He was laughing. I guess anyone else would have thought,
Oh well.
But I was like,
That sucks ... why am I doing this?
    "Nah, no
Superman,
" I said. "You wait. Now that my phone's
not ringing, somebody's going to walk through the door any minute, and then we'll have to explain why we're watching
Superman.
"
    He tossed the remote in my lap. "Your call, bro."
    He got up. I could hear him in the kitchen, chasing