Breaking the Fall by Michael Cadnum Read Free Book Online Page A

sweating and cold. Jared shook out a cigarette and I accepted it. We shared, for a moment, that almost sexy leaning-together over a match. He shook it out, and smoked with the glowing end cupped inward, toward his palm, a method I copied at once.
    Would I throw up?
    He looked away, distracted. From far off there came the mutter of a cop radio. The stabs of static drifted, and faded away.
    I was trembling, queasy, and the chain-link fence spun up and down, and then from side to side. Closing my eyes made it worse. The earth swung away from beneath me.
    â€œI walked out the back door,” said Jared. “Unhooked the chain. I took my time.”
    I bit my knuckle. I had abandoned him.
    â€œIt was easy,” he said. Then, as though I had expressed disbelief, “It really was.”
    Of course. Ash trembled off the end of my cigarette. It had been entirely easy.
    For him.
    The stalks of the fennel around us, and the old, cast-off stalks we were sitting on, gave off a fragance. The air smelled of licorice and tobacco. One of the white metal signs on the chain-link read PELIGROSA. There was a picture of lightning striking a human figure. The fence was old, a black net made of metal, and sloppy rolls of barbed wire festooned the top rail.
    â€œAnd I brought a really rare prize,” he continued. “It’s something pretty unusual. Which I give to you.”
    He tossed me something warm and round. I handled it for a moment, feeling the lightweight lump, fibrous and foreign in the bad light. Then I let it drop. I didn’t want to touch this stolen object. It was something medical, I sensed, something repulsive out of a person’s body, a hairball or a weird tumor.
    He drew on his cigarette and laughed. “You wear them,” he said, “on your feet.”
    I drew the smoke in all the way, so deep it burned, and let it out, pushing the entire shame out of my lungs until my breath came out clear, empty, and clean. “I’ll do it right,” I said in a little, dry voice.
    He smoked.
    â€œNext time,” I said clearly, “I’ll do it right.”
    â€œYou’ll have a chance. There’s something I didn’t tell you.”
    I let the smoke out in twin streams through my nostrils. The smoke was having an effect on me, making me feel separate from my arms and legs, and the nausea was completely dead. Jared leaned forward, waiting for me to ask. So I gestured with the glowing cigarette: what?
    â€œThey weren’t home.”
    I woke feeling dead.
    I did not move for a while, and when I began to find my way up, away from the pillow, I sat up quickly, clutching the sheets to my throat.
    The matter in my head had leaked out onto the pillowcase.
    There was not much of it, but there was a definite dark crushed substance, several fragments of it. I recognized it very slowly as snail shell.
    I washed the pillowcase out very carefully in the bathroom sink, and then I washed my hair under the shower, telling myself: my parents won’t know.
    Nobody will know anything.

13
    I couldn’t lean my head against my hand because my cranium was sore there. I tried slumping way back and down, but the chair met the back of my skull and that hurt, too. So I sat up straight.
    â€œThey charged into cannon fire. Eyes scalded, blinded by the smoke. Some of them permanently deafened by the noise. Deaf for the rest of their lives from that day.” Mr. Milliken paced up and down. He glanced at me, and I must have smiled or looked pleasant because he gave a quick little smile himself.
    â€œA cannonball didn’t blow up,” announced Mr. Milliken. “It didn’t explode and make a nice fountain of dirt, like you see in movies. Cannonballs took off arms. Legs. Heads.”
    I was not sure, exactly, how pain medications are supposed to work. Is it something they do at the synapse? Do they keep neurons from firing?
    The pills were having no effect at all, or only a little. I could