Read Online You Don't Know About Me by Brian Meehl - Free Book Online Page B

didn’t, for another reason: the Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Mom followed the rule; so did I. And if she could rob me of a dad for sixteen years, I could rob her of her little shining candle for a couple days.
    A car gunned up to the gas pumps in front of the Oasis. It was the SUV. I watched the man get out and talk to a service guy: probably asking if anyone had seen a kid on a bike. He didn’t look like he was getting the answers he wanted. He threw up his hands, got back in his SUV, and slammed the door.
    As he drove back up the overpass, I noticed a group of people, a mom and three kids, standing in the parking lot. When the SUV reached the group the man gestured at them. They all got in and the SUV headed back toward the interstate.
    I was right about one thing: they had enough money to lose a bike, and vacation on. It didn’t make me feel less rotten about stealing some kid’s steed. But it was too late to do anything about it. I was a liar, a runaway, and a thief. I’d sunk as low as Huck Finn.
    The wail of sirens froze me. That’s who Brother Jeremy had called: the cops. The sirens came from all directions. One cruiser came down the interstate and zoomed off the exit toward the truck stop. Another came up from behind the truck stop and was the first to get to the bus and Brother Jeremy. Then a third squad car came flying down I-70 from the other direction, took the exit under my nose, and shot across the overpass.
    The first cop started talking to Brother Jeremy. When the other two got there, one spoke to Ben, and the other talked to the kids. They were probably getting a description. Ben might remember what I was wearing. Even though my clothes were in my suitcase, I’d stuffed a last-minute T-shirt in my backpack. I dug it out, stripped off my bluebutton-down, and put on the T-shirt. With cops all over, grabbing the bike out of the Dumpster and riding west would have to wait.
    It took an hour before Brother Jeremy stopped talking to the police, making phone calls, and filling out paperwork. The cops covered both sides of the interstate, looking around, talking to people and probably giving them my description. But they never checked the Dumpster, and they never came up on the roof. The bus finally took off for Bible camp. Now they had something else to pray about when they got there: the kid who ran away to sin camp in New Orleans.
    I didn’t take any chances. I stayed on the hot roof all day. Whenever I moved to stay in the shade of the sign, my sneaks would stick to the tar seams like gum. I didn’t have any water, so I ended up with wicked cotton mouth. I fell asleep and woke up to the sound of a fly. It buzzed out of my gaping mouth. If I’d come to any faster I might’ve gorped it.
    Whenever I needed to distract myself from being hungry and thirsty, I read more
Huck Finn
pages. But reading about Huck and the runaway slave, Jim, hanging out together on Jackson’s Island only reminded me how much better they had it than being stuck on a tar roof in the middle of a Midwestern heat wave. They were on an island in the Mississippi River, and had all sorts of berries, food, and plenty of water. But then Jim did get bitten by a rattlesnake and got drunk as part of his cure. My hideout only had tar snakes that smacked at my sneakers. The Diamondback I wanted to get to was down in the Dumpster.
    Every once in a while, I checked to make sure the bikewas still there. It was, and getting covered in layers of trash. My new plan was simple. In the morning, I’d wait until there was traffic, dig the bike out from the garbage bags and old auto parts, and start riding west on small highways. After I’d bought a map and a GPS device and gotten far enough away from the exit where I’d disappeared, I’d dump the bike and start hitchhiking.
    That night, by the glow of neon, I started the last
Huck Finn
chapter I had. In Chapter 11,