Read Online How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers - Free Book Online Page B

less in control, less focused on the outcome of the game.
    He broke a guy’s leg once. The weekend was warm; there were about twenty playing. One guy had borrowed cones from his construction job, and they figured they could have a proper game, with a kickoff even. So they split into sides and booted the ball. They started running like madmen at each other, and a boy named Catanese, older but spindly, everywhere elbows and knees, caught the kickoff, the ball delivering a thump to his concave chest.
    He was running for the sideline, when Adam burst through the pack unblocked and just flew, for a frozen second almost perfectly horizontal, and finally spearing him, his shoulders plowing into Catanese’s legs. There was a crack like a broken bat, and everyone cheered because Catanese was barely out of the end zone and his team would be screwed for field position. But then Catanese went red, blood swimming in his face, and he was holding his leg, one hand on either side, gently, like it was too hot to touch. He recoiled from it, screaming, out of his mind, feral.
    The leg, the tibia, was snapped in two. It was a battlefield kind of gore, the bone poking through his corduroys like a stick through a garbage bag.
    “You see that, what I did?” Adam said. Fish had found him up the hill, by the new playground, hiding in a chute. He thought Adam was going to brag about hitting Catanese so hard, but instead he said, “Why the hell would I break some kid’s leg? What the hell is wrong with me?”
    Fish told him that it was an accident, it wasn’t his fault, it was football, a violent game, so what. Now Adam was pulling on the skin under his chin, grabbing it and pinching it. “I shouldn’t play tackle,” he said, pulling harder on his chin. “The craziest thing is that I’ve thought about something like this happening, you know?” Here he adopted a meaningful whisper. “I knew this would come to pass. When I get hold of someone I just get too… I feel like I want to tear them in half, know what I’m saying? Like I want to run through and get a bunch of people near me and then explode.”
    Fish nodded. Adam seemed to be horrified and proud and enthralled all at once. He had an aura that wasn’t right, the wild glow of a scientist who’d discovered a formula that could kill millions.
    The ambulance was loading Catanese now, and had pulled right up onto the field, which everyone thought was great; that had never happened before. Fish walked with Adam across the grass, now black and wet, without saying much. The light was almost gone, so they headed home, afraid of the night that would soon bring Monday. Into the house, through the mud-room, past Fish’s parents playing Pong and up the stairs, Fish quiet, now running his fingers over each baluster, while Adam talked, sighed, touching nothing.
    Fish finds a parking space under a wide wall of the hospital, pink-bricked and bisected by the kind of steel ladder you see on water towers—a fire escape, maybe. The grounds are lavish, or seem so in the dark—cobblestone paths winding around willows and palmettos, sprinklers hissing. As Fish is walking in, a man in institutional blue holds the door for him.
    “I assume you’re a visitant?” he says.
    “I don’t know,” Fish says.
    “Of course you are. You have that radiant look.”
    The man giggles and Fish says thank you, unsure whether or not to encourage him. He says thank you, tells the man, an aide of some kind, where he’s headed, and the aide, in his scrubs and with plastic bags around his shoes, walks Fish all the way to the Nursing/Trauma Unit. “I’d just confuse you otherwise,” he says. Fish isn’t sure if that’s an insult or what.
    Adam is in Room 318, on the far side of the building. Fish hopes he doesn’t have a roommate, because the roommates in hospitals are always deformed and either too sick or not sick enough to be there in the first place. They listen to conversations and make judgments. But when