Read Online Flyers (9781481414449) by Daniel Hayes - Free Book Online Page A

way he hunched over the wheel as he rounded the corner and putted toward the elementary school on his way back to Main Street, and I wished there was something I could do to make his life a little easier. And I wished, too, that if he still felt he had to work, he’d at least take on some easier cases—cases where John and Jessie Q. Public didn’t take such an active and angry interest. But I knew he wouldn’t. Whenever I said anything about it, he’d laugh and tell me, “I’ve always been a little skittish about being in the majority, Gabriel. The comfort level there is too high for somebody as cantankerous as I am.”
    Right. The world should be as cantankerous as Pop.
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    As if worrying about Pop weren’t enough, before I even made it to homeroom I’d come to the awful conclusion that I was in love again. With Katie Lyons thistime. A freshman. I’d noticed her sweetly shy smile when I passed her in the hall the week before. Then on Friday I happened to fall in behind her on the stairs and noticed that from that angle she was pretty impressive too. Later that day I saw her at her locker and came to the conclusion that her hair was nothing short of spectacular. That’s the way it works with me. I start by getting hooked on one part of a girl, and then, often as not, I can feel myself being reeled in by the rest of her. Next thing I know I’m like a fish out of water.
    Since seventh grade I’ve been in and out of love exactly eight times. I try not to let it throw me as much anymore. Long ago I decided that (in addition to the fish-out-of-water thing) falling in love was a little like getting a bad cold—sometimes the symptoms persist longer than others, but it’s only a matter of time before you feel like yourself again. Pop told me this was to be expected for somebody my age, an age he referred to as “the white-water section of life’s journey.” He said that for his first twelve or thirteen years he’d been what you might call the model of Irish-Catholic boyhood, following the commandments, serving on the altar, and praying regularly to the Blessed Virgin Mary. But then he’d hit puberty running, as he put it, and that all changed; overnight he turned into a kind of hormonal Mr. Hyde. Naturally, he explained, this knocked a commandment or two for a loop and made it hard for him to look at the Blessed Virgin in quite the same light. He assured me that he eventually adjusted to this new world view and that, knowing me, he had every confidence I’d do the same, and probably in a lot less time than it took him.
    I appreciated the thought, but didn’t have nearly as much confidence in myself as Pop did in me. WhilePop had charged into puberty, I had the sense that I’d limped into it and, at the rate I was going, would be lucky to make it out at a crawl. Of the eight girls I’d practically lost my mind over, Yd only spoken to three, and of those three I’d only actually asked one out. And by the time I’d worked up the courage to go for it, the major symptoms I’d been experiencing had pretty much run their course and the date had turned out to be kind of anticlimactic. I could only hope this time things would be different.
    I saw Katie soon after I’d completed a prehome-room girl-scouting trip down the freshman hallway. (Girl scouting was a term Pop used to describe the time when, in a beautifully mixed metaphor, his eyes started taking an interest in girls and asked his feet to lend a hand.) At first I thought Katie might be absent. She wasn’t at her locker, but her next-door-locker neighbor, Heather Lutz (grandniece of Clutz, I’d heard), was and spotted me on my first pass by. I could feel her watching as I continued down the hall. To make sure this wasn’t all in my head, I decided to test it out, acting as if I’d all of a sudden remembered something