After Eli by Rebecca Rupp Read Free Book Online Page B

King.
    We never thought then that when I was eighty, Eli would still be twenty-two.

M ost of the guys I hung around with had jobs that summer. Peter Reilly was using all his Bowflex biceps to haul cement blocks and boards for his dad and his brother Tony, who ran the family construction business. Mickey Roberts was doing dishes at the pizza parlor, which included getting a twelve-inch pepperoni-and-mushroom pizza every night for free, which Mickey didn’t need, having inherited the Roberts family tendency for flab, and Ryan Baker was pumping gas and changing tires at his uncle Bug’s garage.
    All Ryan’s uncles have weird nicknames. Bug got his name from once eating a Japanese beetle on a dare. His uncle Rat, who works at Rudy’s Beverage Bar & Barbecue Grill, is called Rat because when he was about ten, he lost a little piece of his thumb by getting it caught in a rat trap, and his uncle Chop is named for Precious Pork Chop, which is what his mom used to call him when he was a fat little baby, though when Ryan told me that, he said never to mention it in front of Uncle Chop unless I wanted to lose my front teeth.
    Ryan’s father, who must have wised up fast about the nickname thing, refuses to answer to anything but George.
    My dad didn’t want me to get a job. He wanted me to spend the summer in remedial school, cranking up my math scores and improving my reading comprehension and study skills, which basically he did not think it possible for me to do.
    “I can’t force you to make an effort, Daniel,” my dad said.
    The “Daniel” being a bad signal, since I had learned in Eli’s Education Days that nothing good comes of an authority figure using your full name.
    “But I’d like you to realize that unless you start thinking seriously about the future, you’re not going to have much of one. Look at Jim Pilcher.”
    Jim Pilcher was Eli’s best friend in high school, and my dad always brought him up after viewing my pitiful report cards.
    My dad thinks Jim pretty much screwed up his life, because by now, instead of hoeing potatoes, he should be working for NASA, designing space colonies, or working for some gaming company inventing something like
Half-Life II
and making a gazillion dollars. Jim had an engineering scholarship to the state university, but he got hung up on this girl who dumped him, and then he got burned out on drugs and then he dropped out of college in the middle of his sophomore year. Then he was in rehabilitation for a while, and later his grandfather, old Mr. Pilcher, gave him a piece of land and he started an organic farm.
    My dad says that, what with the drugs and all, Jim is now one taco short of a combination platter. Though sometimes he says “two bears short of a picnic.”
    “If I’m so dumb, more school would just be a stupid waste of money,” I said. “Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with Jim.
Eli
liked Jim.”
    “Don’t take that tone with me, young man,” my dad said. “Do you
want
to spend your life flipping burgers? You want to be one of those guys that says, ‘Want fries with that?’ Well, that’s where you’re headed if you don’t watch your step. This is for your own good.”
    On one of Eli’s Education Days, I’d learned that “This is for your own good” is one of the four crucial Bullshit Alert Phrases, along with “You’ll just have to take my word for it,” “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” and “You kids these days don’t know when you have it easy.” Eli always said there should be some sort of inoculation for bullshit, like for measles and chicken pox.
    “That’s bullshit,” I said.
    “That’s enough of that lip,” my dad said. “And let me tell you something else, Daniel. That book of dead people you keep messing with isn’t doing you any good either. It’s not normal, sitting up in that room and collecting dead people like they were stamps. You think it’s good to be mooning around about death all the time? The best thing