One September Morning by Rosalind Noonan Read Free Book Online Page B

with U.S. flags flapping in the wind. “I’d like to honor John that way.”
    Her heart solidifies, a cold, hard stone in her chest as she proceeds with the details she’s spent her entire adult life learning, married to the military.

Chapter 6
     
    Washington
Madison
     
    A s Ziggy waves a match over the ends of two cigarettes—one for him, one for Sienna—Madison lets out a sigh over the injustice of it all.
    Why do her parents think she’s a criminal?
    They always suspect her, the straightest, most cautious kid in the pack. They’re sure she’s dabbling in drugs and booze and sex, when the truth of the matter is she’s just a sixteen-year-old innocent.
    Ziggy’s lower lip pokes out, releasing a stream of smoke that lifts the stringy hair over his forehead. “I can’t believe he wouldn’t sell me a pack of smokes.” He sulks.
    It is a little surprising, since Ziggy looks about ten years older than he is, with dark circles under his eyes and a barrel chest that you’d figure more for a prize boxer than the leader of the high school marching band.
    “Do you think your friend’ll score some for us?” Ziggy asks.
    “Don’t even ask her,” Madison says, shooting a look over at Suz, who’s talking with some old man gassing up at the station. “She doesn’t want to contribute to your sick addiction. And you know the word will get back to my parents that I’m smoking. Which I’m not.” She waves a hand through the air, trying to fend off the smoke. “You’re disgusting.”
    Sienna and Ziggy exchange a look and giggle.
    “Pollyanna.” Sienna accuses with thinly veiled disdain. “It’s a good thing we like you.”
    “Since when did this become about scoring cigarettes?” Madison holds up the sign in her hands, which reads: NO MORE BUSHIT — GET OUT OF IRAQ ! “I thought we came here to launch a war protest, get the message out.”
    “Whatever,” Sienna says in that sing-song tone she thinks is so clever but in truth is quite irritating.
    Sometimes Madison has to ask herself why it is she hangs out with this crew. She is the only squeaky-clean freak here, despite her parents’ suspicions.
    She has never been arrested.
    She doesn’t do drugs, and the few times she tried alcohol it was in small doses in safe venues, at the houses of friends, none of whom would be so boneheaded as to get behind the wheel of a car after downing a beer or a few drinks of vodka and orange juice.
    Madison is an A student, honor roll, National Honor Society, just one apple short of being teacher’s pet.
    She’s a vegetarian, a runner, and she showers on a regular basis.
    So what’s so incredibly wrong with me?
    For her parents, it’s all wrapped up in her political activism, which could be summed up with the sign she’s holding up to block the blinding sun.
    Get out of Iraq.
    She really believes this. She wants her brothers home—J-Dawg and Noah-Balboa. She wants all those young guys and women home. All those poor kids, not much older than she is, from places like Alabama or Ohio, who enlisted because they had no other job choices.
    Her mother says it’s wrong to hate anyone, but she hates the president. He claims that a soldier is obliged to serve his country without questioning decisions from a higher authority, but how can anyone not question? How can anyone not see how useless it is for our people to be dying, unappreciated and without gain, thousands of miles from home?
    And how could one man—the president—get away with it? Signing off on a few documents, giving a few orders and—POOF!—we were at war. And suddenly thousands of kids and fathers and brothers are sent off to a strange place where the air is dryer than Mars and the roadsides explode in your face.
    That’s what happened to Suz’s husband, Scott—a roadside bomb. One of Scott’s commanding officers wrote Suz a letter saying that the IED came out of nowhere, that Scott never knew what hit him, that he didn’t suffer. Which has to be a