Read Online Skinny by Donna Cooner - Free Book Online

our moms called us to dinner or until the moon rose so high in the sky that hiding in the dark was almost impossible.
    The game went like this. If you were “it,” you won the game by shining the flashlight onto the hidden person like a spotlight. They’d have to freeze in the position you spotted them — arms stretched out, legs crouched, mouth wide open — until you released them with a click of the flashlight. If you weren’t “it,” there was only one place you could be safe from the flashlight’s beacon and only one way you could win the game. If you could successfully hide from the spotlight long enough to make it to the big boulder out near the walking trail, climb atop it, and proclaim loud enough for everyone in hearing distance, all the open back windows and sliding patio >doors that surrounded our little piece of wild, “Home free!” — then you were the winner.
    I picture Jackson, atop that granite boulder, arms out-stretched above his head. In my mind I see him punching his clenched fists at the carpet of twinkling stars overhead with a look of absolute delight on his face shouting, “Home free!”
    Don’t you remember? I think.
    I fidget with the cover on my notebook, trying to collect my thoughts, and desperately search for words of the past that will trigger the memories. I think about how we used to lie for hours in the grass out by the soccer fields and look at clouds. Rat saw cirrus and stratus clouds. I saw circles and triangles. Jackson saw bunnies and alligators and pipe-smoking old men. He was the best at finding something out of the white clumps of nothingness. When he was older, he was going to become a pilot and fly right through those clouds, he’d tell us.
    “Do you still like planes?” I blurt out into the sudden silence.
    Look at me, Jackson , I want to say. Look for the something inside clump of nothingness.
    He turns back around to glance down at me. Finally. But he still has the same puzzled expression on his face.
    “Sure,” he says, vaguely.
    “You had all those models of planes in your basement.” I don’t give up. I need to see the recognition in his eyes now. Before the surgery next week changes me forever. “You wanted to be a pilot.”
    He laughs. “I don’t have much time for airplane models these days. With football and band and” He motions toward Mr. Blair’s desk. “. . . homework.”
    “You wouldn’t understand,” Skinny hisses in my ear. “You just hang around the house eating yourself into a stupor.”
    “I guess you’re really busy,” I say.
    “And I have to get a workout in there somewhere or I’m never going to make varsity.” He flexes his arm. His bicep bulges against the short sleeve of his T-shirt. The height and the muscles are new this year. He doesn’t look the same, but I haven’t forgotten what he’s like on the inside. And his eyes are exactly the same. I know those blue-green eyes with the darkly fringed lashes. I’ve seen them crinkled with laughter, muddled with fever, sparking with anger, and squinting in pain. I saw those eyes when they were blue-green with delight at his first time on a skateboard. And when they were gray-green and clouded with tears over the death of his cat, Mr. Whiskers.
    Once they were even black-green when they glittered at me from behind a Spider-Man mask on Mr. Peter’s front porch. But most of all I remember the deep, grass green of his eyes, intense and compelling, right before I closed mine and kissed him.
    Look in my eyes, Jackson. Remember. Me.
    But there is no sign of recognition. Mr. Blair finishes with Kristen and waves Jackson up. I watch as he leans over the desk, listening intently, his rumpled brown hair falling down into his eyes. My hands itch to push it back away from his face, but I just stand there. Remembering.

ABRACADABRA

Chapter Seven
    What if I don’t wake up?” I mumble under my breath. The annoyingly cheerful woman with the smiley-face scrubs wraps a big rubber band