Paranoid Park by Blake Nelson Read Free Book Online

old Etnies.”
    “Dude, what happened to you? You’re borrowing my shoes? Did you borrow my underwear?”
    “No,” I lied, “I just... I just got a little wet. And I stepped in something. And I didn’t want to track it all over your house.”
    “Just gimme my stuff back. Bring it to school tomorrow. And what’s going on with Jennifer?”
    “Nothing. I don’t know exactly.”
    “Well if that’s not happening, you should definitely check out Oregon State. I’m serious. I’m gonna need a wingman. I’m not even going to waste my time with stupid high-school girls anymore, not with that kinda action around.”
    “No, yeah, it sounds cool,” I said, trying to sound like my old self. “It sounds awesome.”

    That night I went to bed at ten thirty, which was early for me. I turned off the lights and lay in my bed.
    I didn’t sleep. I lay staring at the floor in the dark. I was tired, more tired than I had ever been. But sleep was impossible. So I got up and pulled my chair to my window and sat, looking at the trees in our backyard.
    I dug out an old Walkman and tuned it to KEX. Surely there would be something about the security guard. It had been twenty-four hours.
    But there wasn’t. The big news of the night was they had hired a new Portland Trail Blazers coach. The newspeople acted like it was the biggest event ever. I couldn’t believe how much they went on about it. So they had a new coach. Big deal.
    I kept tuning my Walkman to different stations. I listened to bits of music. I listened to bits of talk radio. I stared at the trees.
    Then I got mad. It made me mad that people always talked about helping teenagers. There was always some new program, some new plan to help kids. There were ads on TV, on the radio. Hotlines, and this and that. But did any of it work? Not in the slightest. Here I was, with a real problem, with a serious problem, but was there anywhere I could go? Who do you call when something really goes wrong? Those geeks in the studentcounseling office? When you had a real problem, there was nothing you could do, no one you could talk to. It was so typical. And so unfair. Why didn’t they set up an anonymous number you could call, so you could talk to someone who actually knew something, someone who could give you real advice and tell you what your options were?
    For once in my life I genuinely needed help, and where could I go? There was nowhere. There was nothing. And it really pissed me off.
    Later, I fell asleep in my chair. I still had my Walkman headphones on, and I must have heard something about a murder. I woke up instantly and turned up the volume. But it wasn’t local. It was the national ABC news. They were talking about a boy in Texas, a seventeen-year-old who had shot his next-door neighbor. He had been sentenced to death and was going on death row. His lawyers were appealing to the Texas Supreme Court; they wanted to get his sentence reduced to life in prison. They said it could take ten years of appeals.
    I thought about that. Ten years. Death row. Life sentence. I pulled the headphones off my head and let them drop to the ground. What was I supposed to do?
    What was I supposed to do?

JANUARY 5
    SEASIDE, OREGON
    (8:30 A.M.)
     
    Dear ___,
    So that was the first day.
    The next day I went to school. I was a total zombie. I stumbled onto the bus, stumbled to my locker. I was so in shock I barely knew where I was.
    In math I didn’t have my assignment. I hadn’t done it, hadn’t looked at it. Mr. Minter got kinda pissed. I had an A in math up till then.
    At lunch I sat with my friends Parker and James. They talked about some Japanese horror movie they had seen. I didn’t say anything. Then, as I ate, tears suddenly came into my eyes. The veggie burger I was eating turned to mush in my mouth. I felt so sad and so exhausted. Everything was like a terrible dream I kept waiting to wake up from. But I never did.
    Parker and James took off, and I ended up eating by myself. I