Read Online Running Wide Open by Lisa Nowak - Free Book Online Page B

completely.”
    The place still looked pathetic at seven o’clock when the Charger pulled into the driveway, but at least you could see the floor.
    “Wow,” Kasey said as she sat down. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this chair without a pile of laundry on it.”
    “Actually,” said Race, “it’s a little better looking with the laundry. I need some new furniture.”
    “Dude, you need a new house,” I said.
    The minute the two of them got comfortable, the conversation turned to racing. They might as well have been speaking Klingon.
    “Ah, hell,” I said, flopping down at the far end of the couch and leaning back into the cushions. “Am I gonna have to hear about race cars again all night? I thought we were going to a movie.”
    “We are,” Race said. “It doesn’t start till seven forty-five.”
    Sighing, I slid down until my butt was balanced on the very edge of the couch.
    “Kid, if you’re that bored, you can go wash my van.”
    I considered flipping him off but didn’t want to be that crass in front of Kasey. “I think I’ll go down by the river.” The previous morning I’d noticed that there was a trail leading along the bank. I’d wanted to explore it, but there hadn’t been time before we’d left for the speedway.
    “Well, just stay within earshot,” Race said. “We’re gonna leave in about half an hour.”
    Outside, I saw a kid pushing Matchbox cars around the roots of a cottonwood tree directly across from the driveway. He looked Robbie Davis’s age, maybe eight or nine.
    “Hey,” he said. “I haven’t seen you before. Did you just move in?”
    I wasn’t in the mood to be chatted up by a third-grader, but you can’t bite a little kid’s head off. “I’m staying with my uncle,” I told him, jerking a thumb over my shoulder at the trailer.
    “Race?”
    “Yeah.”
    “He’s cool,” the kid said, sitting back on his heels. “He gives me all his cans and bottles to take back for the deposit.”
    Now why didn’t that surprise me? I told the kid I’d see him around then continued toward the river.
    As dumpy as the trailer park was, there was still something wild and soothing about the stretch of the Willamette that ran behind it. I slipped along the bank, pushing my way through the shrubs and clumps of fern that intruded on the narrow pathway. Above, clouds clustered, shafts of sunlight glinting against their sinister gray. The scent of impending rain and the sweet smell of cottonwood hung in the air, pushed along by a faint, damp wind.
    I hoped that if I got far enough downstream, out of sight of the bridge that crossed the river into Springfield, I might find a peaceful retreat. A place I could sit and read without being discovered. A place where I could pull out my notebook and engage in a little creativity.
    The truth was, reading was only half my secret. The thing I really kept under wraps was my ambition to be a writer. Since the summer after sixth grade, I’d spent a good part of my free time messing around with short stories and song parodies—stuff like Weird Al sang. I’d have been mortified if anyone found out. Mom had hassled me enough when I was younger for being a geek. She had this idea that creative, bookish guys were destined for a pathetic life of working minimum wage jobs and having their asses kicked regularly by real men.
    There was only one person I’d talked to about my writing—my English teacher last fall. After he’d shoveled on the praise about the first couple essays I’d turned in, I mustered up my courage and showed him one of my stories. It took him most of fall term to get it back to me. Even then, he didn’t give me any real feedback. He just corrected the spelling and grammar in hateful red pen, taking all the art out of it. And he put the dialog in proper English, not getting that I wanted to write it the way my characters would really say it. When I tried to explain that to him, he said, “You have to learn the rules before you