though. I’ve got cuts and bruises on my shins. My foot hurts (stomped on). My left hand is throbbing. It’s swollen. I’ve got a big bruise and bump on my hip.
I’ve never been this beaten up, not even when I crashed my Schwinn Varsity and slid on the gravel. Beat to hell!
2:38 a.m.
Story. Story. Story.
CHAPTER 14: THE HILLS ARE ALIVE WITH THE SOUND OF MUSIC
The morning after I wrote my to-do list, I seriously got up at the butt crack of dawn. It wasn’t really intentional—I’d just slept so much of the day before that I couldn’t sleep any longer. Why not hit the road, get it over with? It, of course, being the paper route. So I rolled out of bed, checked to see if Gus emailed me back (he hadn’t), and picked up the papers super early and then went silent through the neighborhoods.
The route skirts the edge of town where there’s a mixture of new and sort of old ranch-style houses. Jerri hates ranch-style houses. I don’t know why. On the route, when it was later and people were awake, I really liked those houses because they have really big front windows, and I could look in and see what the people were up to. All these houses have lots of very dark, prickly evergreen bushes in front of them, which sort of scared me the first few days I did the route because they seemed like good places to hide if you wanted to surprise and kill the paperboy. But I’d begun to like these bushes because they smell really good. They smell like the holidays, I guess. Really piney. That morning, most of my route smelled like Christmas in the summer (not the farm poop smell that Bluffton usually has). And I couldn’t see in houses because nobody was awake yet, but I could imagine all those normal people cuddled up in their beds, sleeping, which was kind of comforting too. And there wasn’t much noise, no radios or TVs or lawn mowers or anything, but I could hear farmers in their tractors, probably miles away, and the occasional semi driving down State Highway 81. I liked how dark it was. I was unseen in the dark, sliding from house to house like a ghost.
It was still pitch-black dark when I got to Gus’s house. Aleah wasn’t asleep though. She practiced. I could hear her for a couple of blocks before I arrived. The sound wasn’t loud, but it carried. Piano floating on dawn air. Sort of spooky, and classical music sounds really old, like something ghosts would listen to, and so I might have been scared if I didn’t know it was her.
Like the day before, the front door was open, and Aleah Jennings—because it was definitely, no doubt, the same girl Andrew showed me on YouTube winning the Chicago Competition—was at the piano playing in her white nightie. And once again, I couldn’t help it: I set down my bike, walked to the door, pulled open the screen, and leaned my head in so I could watch her hit those keys. There was something sort of angry and ferocious in the way she pounded that piano. There was like this “Don’t eff with me, mother effer” feel to it. Amazing. More than that. I guess hypnotizing is a better word. My mouth was open, and I was probably drooling. I was halfway breaking and entering to hear her, and I couldn’t help it because I was glued in that spot and then she promptly stopped and spun around on the piano seat. She looked directly at me.
“Daddy said you stopped to listen to me yesterday too.”
“Uh!” I felt my muscles coil. I could feel the animal spring about to happen, that damn squirrel nut donkey leap. But instead, I breathed out slow and said “No.”
“You didn’t watch me yesterday?” she asked.
“No. I did. Uh. This is my best friend’s house.”
Then, Aleah jumped. She leapt from the piano bench, a shocked look on her face.
“And I think I’m a little freaked by you guys being here in Gus’s house.”
“I thought…Daddy and I thought that you were slow.”
“Slow?”
“Retarded.”
“No. I mean, maybe a little.”
“Because you ran away like that
I’ve never been this beaten up, not even when I crashed my Schwinn Varsity and slid on the gravel. Beat to hell!
2:38 a.m.
Story. Story. Story.
CHAPTER 14: THE HILLS ARE ALIVE WITH THE SOUND OF MUSIC
The morning after I wrote my to-do list, I seriously got up at the butt crack of dawn. It wasn’t really intentional—I’d just slept so much of the day before that I couldn’t sleep any longer. Why not hit the road, get it over with? It, of course, being the paper route. So I rolled out of bed, checked to see if Gus emailed me back (he hadn’t), and picked up the papers super early and then went silent through the neighborhoods.
The route skirts the edge of town where there’s a mixture of new and sort of old ranch-style houses. Jerri hates ranch-style houses. I don’t know why. On the route, when it was later and people were awake, I really liked those houses because they have really big front windows, and I could look in and see what the people were up to. All these houses have lots of very dark, prickly evergreen bushes in front of them, which sort of scared me the first few days I did the route because they seemed like good places to hide if you wanted to surprise and kill the paperboy. But I’d begun to like these bushes because they smell really good. They smell like the holidays, I guess. Really piney. That morning, most of my route smelled like Christmas in the summer (not the farm poop smell that Bluffton usually has). And I couldn’t see in houses because nobody was awake yet, but I could imagine all those normal people cuddled up in their beds, sleeping, which was kind of comforting too. And there wasn’t much noise, no radios or TVs or lawn mowers or anything, but I could hear farmers in their tractors, probably miles away, and the occasional semi driving down State Highway 81. I liked how dark it was. I was unseen in the dark, sliding from house to house like a ghost.
It was still pitch-black dark when I got to Gus’s house. Aleah wasn’t asleep though. She practiced. I could hear her for a couple of blocks before I arrived. The sound wasn’t loud, but it carried. Piano floating on dawn air. Sort of spooky, and classical music sounds really old, like something ghosts would listen to, and so I might have been scared if I didn’t know it was her.
Like the day before, the front door was open, and Aleah Jennings—because it was definitely, no doubt, the same girl Andrew showed me on YouTube winning the Chicago Competition—was at the piano playing in her white nightie. And once again, I couldn’t help it: I set down my bike, walked to the door, pulled open the screen, and leaned my head in so I could watch her hit those keys. There was something sort of angry and ferocious in the way she pounded that piano. There was like this “Don’t eff with me, mother effer” feel to it. Amazing. More than that. I guess hypnotizing is a better word. My mouth was open, and I was probably drooling. I was halfway breaking and entering to hear her, and I couldn’t help it because I was glued in that spot and then she promptly stopped and spun around on the piano seat. She looked directly at me.
“Daddy said you stopped to listen to me yesterday too.”
“Uh!” I felt my muscles coil. I could feel the animal spring about to happen, that damn squirrel nut donkey leap. But instead, I breathed out slow and said “No.”
“You didn’t watch me yesterday?” she asked.
“No. I did. Uh. This is my best friend’s house.”
Then, Aleah jumped. She leapt from the piano bench, a shocked look on her face.
“And I think I’m a little freaked by you guys being here in Gus’s house.”
“I thought…Daddy and I thought that you were slow.”
“Slow?”
“Retarded.”
“No. I mean, maybe a little.”
“Because you ran away like that
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