Read Online Nothing Special by Geoff Herbach - Free Book Online Page B

black jeans and eyeliner in like a day. La chica ’s angry!” Gus said.
    â€œYeah, that’s true…” I said. I was drifting off. Andrew on an adventure? I couldn’t help but think about that word, adventure . Emily told Maddie that Andrew was on an adventure. Andrew told Jerri he wanted to go on an adventure by taking the bus to Green Bay alone.
    Adventure.
    Gus peeled around a corner. I heard my bike slide in the trunk.
    â€œJesus, Gus. Please slow down. Your crap driving is killing my bike.”
    â€œCrap driving?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œHow about this? How about you get out of my car? Our business is done.”
    Gus pulled over.
    â€œSeriously?” I said.
    â€œSeriously.”
    I got out and pulled my bike out of the trunk. When I closed it, Gus peeled away without saying good-bye. I watched his Celica go up Fourth Street and turn right at the next corner. I decided I’d never speak to him again.
    Then, a few days later, Friday, June 21st, Andrew called while we ate a dinner of organic chicken breast and bitter artichokes. (I remember this dinner well—right before we sat down, Jerri had made plans for us to meet up with your dad in Chicago on the way to the Michigan camp, which I hadn’t yet cancelled, and which I was beginning to seriously worry about.) As Andrew spoke, there was that sound of an orchestra warming up in the background, lots of sawing on strings and tuning. There were kids talking too.
    Jerri asked a lot of questions about what the orchestra was doing. “Lots of practice? Trips to the Door County coast?”
    â€œWhat? Coast?” Andrew asked.
    â€œI saw your pelican picture.”
    â€œOh. I didn’t know you looked at my website…Yes, we went to the beach last week,” Andrew said.
    â€œWhat website?” I piped in.
    â€œWell, your website,” said Andrew.
    He was referring to feltonreinstein.com, which he—very sweetly, I might add—had made for me to track all the articles and crap people wrote about me, which I never looked at because it made my stomach tie up in knots. My laptop was on the table, so I pulled it out and opened the site while Andrew described his work at the camp (in great detail), learning timpani from a music major named Rami (lie) who was about to be a senior at Oberlin College in Ohio (lie). “He is a wonderful teacher. A true percussion genius.” (Andrew is so crafty, just like Gus said).
    Here’s what I saw on feltonreinstein.com: a picture of a terrifying pelican (a little scratched lens fleck in the picture, which marked it as Andrew’s because he’d dropped his phone while hanging upside down from the bleachers during one of my football games in the fall). It was the first entry on the website in months. He’d abandoned posting otherwise in the middle of April.
    A freaking pelican?
    Andrew had written underneath it. These birds have terrifying rubber beaks. More power to them.
    â€œPelican?” I shouted.
    â€œWhat?” asked Andrew.
    â€œPelicans in Wisconsin?” I shouted.
    â€œSure,” Jerri said. “Pelicans migrate.”
    â€œRight,” Andrew said. He sounded nervous.
    â€œAre you meeting interesting students?” Jerri asked.
    I put my ear close to the speaker. There was something artificial sounding about the background sounds. Have you ever listened to sound-effect tracks on iMovie? Gus has a really nice Apple computer and he’s always made these dumb little movies (this summer starring Maddie smoking cigarettes like she’s some kind of weird French girl) and he’s always put lots of background sound in them.
    I thought: That noise is “Orchestra Warms Up” on a Mac computer. Hum, hum, hum…It just kept going and going while Andrew talked about his new friends.
    I kept my ear close, listening as hard as I could. Jerri swatted at my Jewfro a couple of times, but I wouldn’t move away from the