Read Online Nitro Mountain by Lee Clay Johnson - Free Book Online Page B

calling from her past, when she was young and innocent, or from her future, when she would be rescued from this house and these two useless men. I didn’t have the heart to let her down, so I just listened. “I know you’re there,” she said. “Who are you?”
    —
    I couldn’t sleep that night, and the next morning I’d barely closed my eyes when I heard Mom calling for me outside. Early sunlight on the floor. Dizzy from getting up so fast, I jumped out the back door and limped and hopped around the house over the gravel. Mom was standing in front of her car and staring at this mutt of a pickup rumbling and crunching into the driveway, a white Chevy cab with a black Ford bed angled behind it. The whole thing rattled in disagreement with itself. Jennifer sat behind the wheel, her hair up in rubber bands just how I liked it.
    “Don’t even tell me,” Mom said. “I don’t need to know.” She got in her car and pulled out around the truck, leaving tracks in the wet morning grass.
    Jennifer kicked the door shut and checked in her purse for something. She always did this when she was buying time to think about what to say. Seeing her standing there was like watching the last half-year dissolve. Maybe everything was cool. Here she was, here I was. Nothing different, nothing new. She took a bottle from her purse. It was purple glass without a label, not much bigger than her hand. She shook it at me and said, “This could be the answer.”
    I led her inside my dark place. Dad kept the blinds shut, and the window unit in the living room was surrounded with strips of cardboard duct-taped to the glass and covering up any space light might slither through. I usually didn’t notice this, but once she stepped through the door it was like I was experiencing the house for the first time. The old kitty litter in the carpet, left over from our dead cat. The smell of Hamburger Helper in the walls. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m moving out soon.”
    “Why? You’ll just end up right back here.”
    “Shh,” I said. “We got to be quiet.” I took her hand and led her down the hallway to my room, shut the door and pushed in the lock.
    “We got to be quiet anywhere we go,” she said.
    “Where you living? Are you safe?”
    It took her a while to get to it. “I’m staying with that guy, Arnett, in an abandoned inn. Right at the top of that stupid mountain.”
    “Which one?”
    “The stupid one.” She pointed past the wall.
    “They’re all stupid,” I said. “Why’re you out there?”
    “Renovating. Nobody knows we’re there,” she said. “Nobody even goes up there. It’s on Nitro.” She was still wearing her sunglasses, but I could see her right eye was dark and swollen.
    “He a lefty?” I said.
    “Good thing you’re not,” she said, looking at my arm.
    “I broke it the night you left me.”
    “And it still ain’t healed?”
    “It keeps breaking.”
    “Just like your little heart,” she said.
    “It’s not funny. I wrecked my truck chasing after you and Greg.”
    “Greg,” she said. “He seemed like a good idea at the time. Smart guy, you know?”
    “I don’t care anymore. Are you okay?”
    “We been renovating,” she said. “We can do whatever we want with the building. Nobody gives a shit.”
    “How long you been with this guy?”
    “Since he lost his job at Misty’s. That’s about the time we met. He doesn’t know how the cops figured out what he was doing. They found cameras. They were, like, in the bathrooms or something.” She looked away when she said it.
    “Why the hell’d you follow him up to Nitro?”
    “The cameras weren’t his. Swears he doesn’t know how they got there.”
    “So just to prove he’s not up to any illegal shit he breaks into somebody’s place.”
    “It’s his,” she said. “Or used to be his dad’s. Whoever owns it’s letting him live up there. We even have animals. Dogs, pigs. You know, real animals. It’s, like, ours. He’s happy. I’m not