Emory’s Gift by W. Bruce Cameron Read Free Book Online Page A

canceling mouth-to-mouth class.
    Where once I luxuriated in the languid pace of summer vacation, I now cursed it. Like every teenage boy, I had managed to turn lethargy into a defining form of personal expression, but now I was almost angrily impatient, glaring at the clock, outraged by its lack of progress. I went down to the creek a dozen times or so and saw nothing of the bear and that, too, made me restless and grumpy.
    I don’t think I slept much the Friday night before the big day. That morning I ate breakfast and then brushed my teeth eleven separate times. I swished nearly a pint of mouthwash, until you could use my breath to thin paint. When my father came home at lunchtime from the Shelburton ranch he found me on the front deck where I had been sitting for an hour and a half. I yanked open the door to the Jeep and bounded in.
    Dan Alderton had apparently dropped Lifesaving. This was the second class he’d skipped—miss two and you’re out, Kay had warned us. The sixth grader was also missing—the prospect of what we were about to do was probably just too much for him to bear. But all four seventh graders were there, nervously bumping into each other. Kay waved at us, leading us down a hall and unlocking a door to a conference room.
    “Come on in, guys.”
    We walked as if glued together, a gaggle of gangly geeks looking ready to bolt for the doors. The room was small, carpeted, with yellow walls and a black rubber mat on the floor. A large vinyl bag lay by the mat.
    Kay smiled at us as we fidgeted our way into the room and spread out on one wall as if preparing for a firing squad. She was wearing short red shorts and a simple T-shirt. Her jet-black hair brushed her shoulders and gleamed with a metallic sheen in the fluorescent lighting. Her lipstick matched her shorts, which I found to be an almost unimaginably beautiful combination, though both the shorts and her lips were plenty nice on their own.
    “So, did everyone read the chapter?”
    We gave nervous nods.
    Kay knelt by the bag, unzipping it. “Carl, come help me with this,” she said.
    Carl was a tall, sandy-haired seventh grader, who leaped forward with absurd eagerness. Kay had him unfold a life-sized mannequin and lay it on the mat. The plastic lips on the thing were open, the eyes shut. Carl lingered until he realized he couldn’t really justify kneeling next to Kay on the floor, and then he sprang back up to be with the rest of us on the wall.
    “Okay, so, we can do this two ways. You can do it either on the dummy or on me. Who’s first?”
    Relief and disappointment were written on our faces. The tension went out of our bodies like a breath we hadn’t realized we’d been holding.
    Carl, eager to exploit the incredible intimacy he felt he’d developed with Kay during the whole lay-out-the-dummy incident, stepped forward. He knelt by the mannequin’s head, unmistakably picking plastic lips over real ones.
    There was absolutely nothing in Kay’s expression to betray whether she was kidding or not about the idea of doing live lip-to-lip training. She lectured us about compressing the water out of the lungs and made sure Carl squeezed the nose shut. I listened numbly. The next boy in line picked the dummy, as did the next. I held back, asking myself what would happen if I told her I wanted to try it on her. Would she laugh at me? Tell me I was stupid for taking her offer seriously?
    The safe thing would be to do like everyone else and blow into the dummy.
    I stood there, locked in indecisiveness, until all the other boys had gone and it was my turn.
    “Charlie?” Kay said. “You ready?”
    I nodded. I stepped forward. I cleared my throat. “I’ll, uh, do you.”
    The boys on the wall straightened as if they’d just been hit with a cattle prod. As for Kay, those dark eyes flickered just a little—amusement? Pity? I stood, awaiting my fate.
    “Okay,” she said simply. She pushed the dummy off the mat and lay down. “What’s the first