The New Elvis Read Online Free

atop boxes stacked on chairs and tables. She was nearly in a trance, listening to the Andrews Sisters singing “Sincerely” in distinctive three-part harmony.
    Logan had trouble getting to her and nearly tripped. He ended up falling in front of her, into in a pile of used, folded, recyclable plastic bags she refused to discard.
    Over three-hundred-and-fifty pounds, Ramona used a walker for support, clinging to walls and furniture to navigate piles of debris. At twenty-nine, she looked two decades older, with strikes of gray throughout her knee-length, straight dark hair, which took two hours daily to wash and braid. Wrinkles creased her forehead, eyes, and mouth. She smoked not one, but three packs of Camels every twenty-four hours, leaving overflowing ashtrays in her wake whenever she moved from one room to the next.
    “Mas música,”
she cried out in Spanish, lapsing into her mother’s native language.
    More music. Logan tugged at the collar of the T-shirt he’d slept in and kept his distance lest she pull him into a smothering bear hug. She loved her only boy, even if she didn’t know how to take care of him.
    “I’m sick. It feels like I swallowed eggs.”
    “Your glands. Swollen again?”
    He nodded.
    She struggled to get up from the cushioned chair, but he put out his hand in protest. “I’m just going to sleep.”
    “What about breakfast?”
    Logan knew what was in the kitchen: dirty dishes piled on countertops, unwashed pots in the sink, rotten food in the refrigerator, ice-encrusted artifacts in the freezer, and no place to sit down because the dining table and chairs were buried in clutter.
    “It’s OK.”
    He picked his way out of the room and made his way back to his bedroom.
    He didn’t have a bed, so he usually formed a pile of clothing—some clean, some not—in the corner and crawled on top, pulling something weighty—usually a coat—over his frail frame so he could stay warm. For a pillow, he used a bolt of quilted fabric his mother bought at the Salvation Army down the street. It didn’t matter to him if he didn’t eat that day. He had gone hungry before rather than eat something spoiled that had been unrefrigerated too long. If he were lucky, Ramona would muster up the energy to get her walker in gear and head to McDonald’s for some fast food. And if her conscience rumbled louder than her stomach, maybe she would consider saving half a bite for him.

Chapter 8
    Ryan Wyatt got his first guitar the Christmas he turned ten and wrote his first song two days shy of his eleventh birthday in the privacy of his bedroom. The décor hadn’t changed much as he got older, save for the addition of an ivory coin bank shaped like a skull that sat on his desk, watching his pen move across the pages of his early American history notebook, where he dutifully entered multiple choice answers to questions from his textbook on the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
    The words running across the page
…blah blah blah…
were nudged by strings of new ones.
All my worries used to be…blah blah blah…where to go and who to see…blah blah blah…now I’m older, lookin’ around…blah blah blah…wondering about the new girl in town
. Ryan threw down his pen and ran to his bed, where his Les Paul sat in its open, velour-lined case.
Oh, she’s blond, and she’s boogie, wanna call her my shoogie, with hair down to there and a thousand-yard stare, she’s a cinnamon heart of a cutie
.
    An electric thrill raced down Ryan’s spine. He sprinted back to his desk, wrote two more verses to run against the chorus, and returned to his bed to bang out the melody. Inspiration struck swiftly, and the payoff rolled out faster than a greyhound on race day. He’d been barely able to write down one line before another tumbled out and rendered him deliriously happy. He ran over to the mirror to make sure he hadn’t been transported to another realm. His handsome young features—clear blue eyes, thick dark hair,