Angry Management by Chris Crutcher Read Free Book Online Page A

any drugstore in the country—reads SARAH .
    “Let’s go,” I say.
    Sarah stalks toward the trailer.
    “Come on, Sarah. Let’s go.”
    She disappears through the door. Shit.
    Might as well make it a party. When I get to the door, Sarah is face-to-face with her sister. Backlit by the living-room window, their profiles are astonishingly similar. My Sarah is bigger and stronger, but Little Sarah is a miniature replica. Their mother sits on the couch.
    Little Sarah says, “Hi. Who are you?”
    “I’m Sarah.”
    “Really? Me, too. What are you doing here? Do you know my mother?”
    “Not really,” Sarah says. “I knew her a long time ago.” She reaches up, almost involuntarily, and runs theback of her finger along Little Sarah’s face. Little Sarah doesn’t pull back, stares at Sarah’s scars.
    “What happened?”
    “A guy burned me,” Sarah says, and turns toward the door. “Get me out of here,” she whispers, and steps past me.
    In less than a minute we’re speeding toward the freeway.
     
    “She replaced me.”
    I start to protest, reframe it, but no. She replaced her. We’ve driven in silence more than an hour; leaving the outskirts of Reno, then Sparks, in the rearview mirror, hurtling into the desert. I’m averaging twenty miles above the speed limit, trying to get the girl I hope to love far away from that horror as fast as I can. Man, nobody should have to go through that. That shit is biblical.
    We ride another half hour or so, then, “Right when you think things can’t get worse.”
    “It gets way worse,” I say back.
    I want to say, It’s okay. Screw her. You don’t need her. But it’s her mom . I mean, she marries a guy mean enough to scar you for life, then he does, then she leaves , for Christ sake. She leaves . How do you not take yourkid with? I can’t stop asking that question. I mean, you buy your kid a dog, the dog gets rabies, and you send them out to play? It isn’t okay; it will never be okay, so I don’t say, “It’s okay.”
    “She was pregnant. She left because she was pregnant,” Sarah says. “That girl was just the right age. I was already ruined, and she knew she couldn’t protect her new baby.” She shakes her head, stares out at the desert whizzing by. “But she named her Sarah.”
    “I don’t know what to say,” I tell her. “That’s just so goddam low.”
    She plugs in the Nano, and John Dawson Read sings sweet through the car speakers. “A friend of mine is going blind…”
    “When I was little,” Sarah says after long miles of the same song over and over, “I couldn’t shake the idea that something was wrong with me. I mean, I knew I was burned, I knew that was wrong, but I couldn’t shake that something was wrong with me before that. I thought I must have been shiny before it happened, because everyone said so. But it couldn’t have been true, because every shiny thing I ever had, I protected; little charms and rings you got out of Cracker Jack, steely marbles, cheap necklaces. If it was shiny, I sheltered it. Even if my mother didn’t take care of me, I would havefound a way to protect me if I was really shiny. That’s what I thought.” She shakes her head, and for the first time in our short life together, I watch her floodgates give.
    I pull the car onto the shoulder, shove it in park, and wrap my big ol’ meaty arms around her. She struggles for a split second and melts, sobbing until the front of my shirt feels like my undershirt at the end of two-a-days in August.
    “You’re way shiny,” I tell her. “You are.” She shakes her head no and sobs harder. I stroke her hair and rub her back and we sit.
     
    I awake to a sharp rap , and my driver’s side window is filled with the torso of a Nevada highway patrolman. “Everything all right in there?” he says as I roll down the window.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “So why are you parked on the freeway and not at the rest stop two miles down the road?”
    “It was kind of an emergency,”