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

me. Everyone.
    That’s how I knew.
    And then Ms. Gagne started walking over to me.
    So I grabbed my phone from Dina’s hand, turned around, and ran like a madwoman out of the cafeteria, down the corridor, and then outside into the rain. I heard them yelling for me to stop, to come back, but I wouldn’t. I didn’t. I wanted my mom. I wanted my dad. I wanted my dog.

    I divide my life after the meltdown into two parts: B.C. and A.C. B.C. is “Before Cameron.” A.C., obviously, is after.
    That’s totally simplifying things, of course. I mean, I had a whole life—sixteen years—before the meltdown at Cape Abenaki. And all of that, technically, was B.C.
    But you get my point.
    I guess right now I’m telling you the B.C. part of my story.

    One day in the fall after the meltdown, Andrea and I were chilling on a bench on Church Street in Burlington. The night before, we had taken the bus to the University Mall, because it’s right by the highway and there are all these exits with gas stations and motels. It’s where the truckers gas up. So we’d gone there and hooked up with these two really sketchy, kind of disgusting truckers from Montreal. They were in their forties, and they actually listened to that embarrassing
Playboy
porn on the Sirius in their truck. But it didn’t take very long.
    (God, here’s a weird little news flash for you: I was a virgin when Reactor One exploded. True story. So, maybe we should file “Emily Shepard’s First Time and Sexual Awakening” under Yet One More Grotesque Nuclear Mutation. I mean, it’s probably true I wouldn’t be a virgin by now anyway, but with any luck the first time I had sex it would have been with some boy my age whose biggest issue would be—and here is more therapist-speak—“learned behavior.” By that I mean learned porn. If I’ve figured out anything the last few years, it’s this: everything boys and young men know about sex, they got from Internet porn, which means they have seriously unrealistic expectations. And girls my age? Sometimes they do freaky shit because they’re simply afraid to sayno. They want to be cool. They want to be liked. Yup, for a girl who they say has, like, zero self-esteem, I know my stuff.)
    Church Street is made of bricks, and it’s an outdoor mall smack in the middle of the downtown. Pedestrians only—no cars. Burlington is so crunchy that the bricks have capitals and cities and countries carved into them, including places that were seriously communist when the mall was designed. It was a Wednesday, and it was an Indian summer kind of day. (I know “Indian summer” isn’t perfectly PC, but it works. It’s two words and they say exactly what I want.) We were both wearing these blue-and-yellow rugby shirts we’d lifted from PacSun. They weren’t as nice as the ones at Abercrombie, but it’s much more difficult to shoplift there. You’d think with the way Abercrombie blares their music it would be easy to steal from them, because the kids who work there must be deaf and stunned from the noise. Think lab rats, maybe. Also, it’s much darker inside an Abercrombie than inside a PacSun. But Abercrombie always has a lot more staff and the people at PacSun are way more “whatever.”
    There were lots of leaf peepers strolling up and down the middle of the street, and most of them were somewhere between the age of seventy-five and embalmed. Everyone had said the tourists wouldn’t come that autumn because of Cape Abenaki, and I imagine a lot did stay away. But mostly they just stayed away from the Northeast Kingdom. Plenty still came to Lake Champlain and the western slopes of the Green Mountains. I mean, Burlington must have been sixty or sixty-five miles from the edge of the Exclusion Zone. And southern Vermont was nowhere near it. By the fall, Burlington’s biggest issue was dealing with the last of the walkers and the last of the refugee tent camps. But most were gone and most of the people in them had found homes