Nothing Special by Geoff Herbach Read Free Book Online Page A

what? I marked the Randy Stone email as spam. Take that, Randy Stone!
    Then, because I can’t calm myself without running, I tried running even though I could barely walk. I limped into my shorts and shoes. I limped out on the driveway. I zombie-walked down the hill to the main road. Then I turned and attempted to bolt up the hill toward the house. But, holy crap, in about three steps the little man ripped me up, Aleah. I ended up lying on the lawn crying. (Oh, I am not proud.) Jerri had to come out in the yard, help me up, and half drag my ass back into the house.
    â€œI can’t believe you tried to run,” she said. “The doctor said not even light jogging for a month.”
    â€œOh crap,” I cried.
    Who am I if I can’t run?
    Squirrel Nut.
    â€¢ • •
    Jesus. I have to go to sleep. I have to be at the gate by like nine.

August 16th, 12:05 a.m.
O’Hare Airport, Part IX (Hotel)
    Are you in love with some Amadeus Vienna Weiner musician, Aleah?
    Sorry. We’re on break.
    I shouldn’t care if you’re in love with some German sausage.
    Crap.
    When I finally got my driver’s license in February, I figured we’d drive out in the country and go to the Mississippi and drive into the bottoms around Bluffton and see everything, but that never happened. Not once. We never even parked at the big M to make out.
    Maybe you were with Wolfgang Amadeus Schlong during the break, but I have not been with another girl. I stayed alone, and the rest of the school year went okay. Jerri and I watched a lot of TV. (I told Cody and Karpinski I had to rest for therapeutic reasons, which Cody accepted. Karpinski kept asking me to do stuff, but I wouldn’t.)
    It was weird to have no sport to play. It was totally, painfully, depressingly, completely awful not to be able to run. (Except when coaches visited me in May and Jerri cooked them bad dinners—I liked not running then. Unfortunately I had no doctor excuse to keep me from talking, so I had to talk, which made me sound like an idiot.)
    During track practice, while my friends all ran, I lifted weights like a crazy man, and for a month or two I sort of looked like a dude who takes steroids to model tight underpants in some gross magazine. I got so bulky that I felt kind of embarrassed. (Thankfully, when I started running again in June, I dropped a little bit of the bulky-underpants-model weight. Now I look like me but just a little bigger).
    Maybe the best thing about April and May is that I received no more email from Randy Stone. (Turned out to be the spam filter at work.) Gus didn’t want anything to do with me. I didn’t want anything to do with him. I began to think his Randy Stone stunt had sealed the end of our friendship.
    Andrew was the only weird part. He didn’t hang with Jerri and me at all. He stayed in his bedroom all the time. He read this fat book constantly (Spinoza’s The Ethics— Spinoza is some old philosopher). He stopped talking. He stopped eating with us (ate only crackers and cheese). He got sent home from school for fighting one day (crazy). And, what’s worse, he did what he always does when something is filling his little, obsessive walnut brain: he stopped showering ( gross ).
    Weirdo. You probably haven’t seen his eighth-grade yearbook picture, huh? Everyone else is smiling in the yearbook, but he took off his glasses and rested his hand on his chin and stared at the camera flat, like he was some kind of old man artist or something. Freak boy. But I guess Andrew looks sort of cool in that photo.
    Finally, in mid-May, while we were watching a seriously horrifying episode of Hoarders (lots of dead cats buried in piles of junk), Jerri said, “Oh crap. Does that lady remind you of Andrew or what?”
    â€œYeah,” I nodded. The hoarder lady had plastic nerd glasses. She was tiny and frail. She had giant stacks of fat books. She fought with the people who were trying to