Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands by Chris Bohjalian Read Free Book Online

of blade. Obviously, I never wanted him to know I was a cutter. But he was careful. And by the time he was done with the horse,it looked like the sort of psychedelic animal you’re supposed to see when you’re tripping. (I say “supposed to see” because I know I never saw anything like that.)
    We also read a lot. Yup. Crafts and reading. That igloo was just like a home school, right?
    I remember one time I stole a copy of
Anastasia Krupnik
from the library to read to him, but already he was a little too old for it. Also, he was a boy. He was definitely more of a
Johnny Tremain
or
Harry Potter
kind of kid. I took the first
Harry Potter
when I brought back
Anastasia Krupnik
(which I really did return), and I read it to him so many times that I had the plot totally memorized. Okay, maybe not totally memorized, but pretty close. One night after we lost the book, when we were in the igloo, I told him the whole story, scene by scene, and he repeated back to me some of Ron’s or Hermione’s best lines.
    There was another week when I read to him nothing but Louis Sachar’s
Sideways Stories from Wayside School
. They were crazy fun and Sacher wrote lots of them. Also, the books were these little paperbacks that were very easy to lift.

    My mom was the communications director for the plant. (You’d think someone who was in charge of communications and her daughter, an aspiring writer, would be better at communicating. In hindsight, we both just sucked, which is too bad.)
    That meant my parents were—and this was a pun that was used to describe them in an article in the
Burlington Free Press
years before the accident—“Vermont’s power couple.” The article was very nice. It didn’t say anything snarky about nuclear power. A few months later, tritium was found in a groundwater monitoring well at a nuclear power plant in New Hampshire, which suggested there was a leak at that plant somewhere. The newspaper interviewed my mom again, and this time the paper wasn’t so kind. My mom was annoyed that she even had to talk about it because the New Hampshireplant was three and a half hours away from Cape Abenaki and she had nothing to do with it. But it was the same kind of boiling water reactor as Abenaki and built about the same time, and so I guess it made sense to ask her about it.
    Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. That’s probably more than you need to know. All you really need to know is that it’s radioactive.

    Obviously I made some bad choices. I’m still here, however, so I made some okay ones, too. But leaving the dining hall at the college when I did? That was bad. I get it. Looking back, trying to get back to Reddington and find my parents and Maggie was the chain reaction that started everything. It’s that whole butterfly effect. If I had just stayed where I was and waited like everybody else, I have to believe that social services would have found someplace for me. Or one of my friends’ families who wasn’t homeless would have taken me in. People blamed my dad but no one was going to blame me, right?
    Yes and no. There were a lot of people who wanted nothing to do with me. I wasn’t radioactive, but I might as well have been. Look at the way that girl at the shelter treated me when she began to figure out who I might be. Look at what I overheard at the staging area. Look at what happened at that convenience store on my way into Burlington.
    But none of that matters now because I did leave the dining hall that day. Like I said, I was on the verge of hysteria all morning and early afternoon. What finally pushed me over the edge? Around one o’clock, one of the news sites said there had been an explosion at Cape Abenaki. Another said there had been two. Both reported that there were fatalities, perhaps as many as seventeen, which they said was an indication of the size of the explosion—or explosions—because no one had been killed when a reactor had blown up at Fukushima. And, of course,