Mine by Brett Battles Read Free Book Online

bring the conversation to an end.
    Thankfully, there were no more fights before the school year finished. This had nothing to do with Joel avoiding confrontations, however. His growing reputation as a more than capable defender of the defenseless kept him from making a return trip to the principal’s office.
    On the first day of summer vacation, when his eyes opened that morning, his first thought was of Camp Red Hawk.
    This was unexpected. The camp hadn’t crossed his mind since the previous fall. Now that it had, any joy he should have been feeling about the days of freedom before him failed to materialize.
    He knew Red Hawk had been permanently closed, and that its director and owners had been charged with negligence and other crimes in connection with what had happened the previous July. What happened after that, though, he had no idea. Once he’d given videotaped testimony about what he remembered, which wasn’t much, he’d put the summer behind him, hoping never to think about it again.
    And yet here it was, once more fresh in his mind.
    Of course he knew the reason why. For the three previous years, his parents had sent him to summer camp, a different one each time. Though they hadn’t said anything yet about this summer, he assumed he’d be told soon enough where he was going.
    The thing was, Joel didn’t want to go to camp again. He had no desire to be anywhere remotely similar again.
    He waited a week, expecting his folks to pull out one of those glossy brochures and show him the “fun” they’d arranged for him to have, but each night passed without the topic coming up.
    He was getting so anxious about it that at dinner on the eighth night after school had ended, he broke down and asked, “So what camp am I going to this year?”
    Joel’s mother, who had been in the midst of dishing out salad, stopped, tongs in the air. “Camp? Don’t you remember? You’re not going this summer. We’re visiting Nana and Papa in St. Louis.”
    “We are?”
    “I told you that months ago, sweetie.”
    He didn’t remember, but that was okay. He wasn’t going to camp.
    Just like that, the dread that had wrapped itself around him like a straightjacket vanished.
    __________
     
    W HILE JOEL OCCASIONALLY accepted invitations from friends to go over to their house and play video games or swim or just hang out, more often than not he found himself drawn to the library.
    That was something new. For most of his life, his reading habits had been limited to comic books and the occasional sci-fi novel, but now he devoured books on dozens of different topics—biographies, science texts, histories, how-to manuals, even books on sociology and psychology, two topics he’d known almost nothing about before that summer. It felt like he couldn’t stop devouring knowledge even if he wanted to.
    And he didn’t want to.
    “Joel?”
    It was a Wednesday morning in late June, and he was deep in a book about the American legal system, entranced by a section on tort law.
    “Joel?” This time there was a touch on his shoulder.
    He finished the paragraph he was on before looking up. The instant he saw the girl’s face, his mind spit out:
     
Jasmine Hammond, aka Jaz
7 th Grade Just Completed
Lives Three Blocks from School
Excels at Math
     
    Instant information such as this had gradually been appearing more and more in his head. Assuming everyone had the same ability, he’d come to expect it rather than be surprised by it.
    “Hi, Jaz.”
    His knowing her name seemed to both please and fluster her. She glanced at the book he was reading. “Is that a textbook? Are you in summer school?”
    He shook his head but said nothing.
    She glanced at the floor and then back at him. “I just…I…um…I never thanked you.”
    She was talking about fight number two. A couple of idiots had cornered her by the lockers outside the science lab. Unfortunately for them, Joel happened to be walking to his locker nearby.
    “No reason you need to,”