Read Online Exley by Brock Clarke - Free Book Online

followed him, still pushing his vacuum cleaner. “Don’t go,” I whispered to S. What I really meant was,
Don’t do this to me. Don’t dothis to my dad. Don’t be S. Be Exley
. But S. probably knew what everyone knows: that the only time you say “Don’t go” to someone is if it’s too late and he’s already gone. Anyway, he went; he didn’t even look at me to say good-bye or apologize with his eyes for letting me think he was one guy when in fact he was another. When they got to the truck, the Indian took the vacuum cleaner away from him and chucked it into the bed of the truck. S. staggered around the truck and got in the passenger’s side. The Indian got in the driver’s side. His window was open; unlike S., he looked at me one last time, like he expected me to say something. I was so mad at him because he’d turned Exley back into S. and he’d done it so fast, without seeming to care at all about what it would do to me or my dad, and so I said, “I’ve never seen an Indian drive a pickup truck.”
    â€œI’m from Pakistan, dude,” he said. “Or at least my parents are.” And then he started the truck, hung a U-turn, and headed back up Washington Street, toward the New Parrot. I watched them until they crested the hill and were gone. I was sad, of course, that S. was S. and not Exley. But I shouldn’t have been. Because it was my fault for really believing I’d found Exley so easily. I should have known better. Like I should have known finding Exley wasn’t going to be easy and would take more time than I wanted it to. That made me sad, of course. But I was also still pretty excited, because my dad was home, and even if he was sick, I had a plan to help him get better. Just because S. wasn’t Exley didn’t mean that Exley wasn’t out there, waiting for me to find him. Just because the plan hadn’t worked yet didn’t mean it wouldn’t work ever. In other words, I was part let down and part
jazzed up
. And when you’re a boy and you’re part let down and part jazzed up, you do one of two things: you go see your mother, or you go see a woman who is definitely not your mother. I decided to go see a woman who was definitely not my mother.
    HER NAME WAS K. She was a student in my dad’s class, which I was teaching for my dad until he got back from Iraq. Every Tuesday night I took attendance, gave the students an A for attending or an F for not, and then let them go. K.’s was one of the names I’d called. Apparently, she liked the way I called it. She lived going out of town toward JCCC. About three miles from where I’d left Exley. It was getting cold; by the time Ibiked there, my nose was running, and I wiped it with my sleeve, just like Mother always told me not to. Funny. I never could stop thinking about Mother whenever I was with K., maybe because they were about the same age.
    I climbed off my bike and leaned it against the side of K.’s house. K.’s house was made of limestone, big blocks of it. It was three full stories, with a cupola on top. It had been a rich person’s house once. Now it was divided into apartments for poorer people. K. lived in one of the two first-floor apartments. She called it a garden apartment, even though there was no garden. There were no plants inside, either, except for a potted impatiens in the kitchen that always looked like something was wrong with it. Maybe it had been mispotted. I knocked on the white storm door. It rattled in its frame. The front light came on, and then the door opened and a hand reached out, grabbed mine — the hand felt leathery and warm, like a saddle that had just been vacated — pulled me inside, then closed the door behind me.
    â€œOh, honey,” K. said. She put her arms around me; I put mine around her. We stood there like that, in the front hallway. Not talking, just hugging until a