Random Acts Of Crazy by Julia Kent Read Free Book Online Page B

remnants of hair on the scalp of a long-time chemo patient. A chicken coop in one yard leaned so far to the right it looked like it was doing pilates, suspended in midair by a series of vines I would wager were poison ivy.
    “Um, sorta,” I answered, my voice sing-songy and my gut tight with a groaning fear and wretched sense that This Would Not Go Well. The man I sat next to about to get one hell of an education you don’t find at an upper-crust Boston college. If he thought my flip phone was out of date, what was he going to say when I parked in front of the faded, aluminum-sided old trailer with the crooked porch, torn screen and clutter that made the television show Hoarders look like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous ?
    Real Life, meet Fantasy Life. Bringing home Trevor Connor from Random Acts of Crazy hadn’t even been anywhere near my actual Bucket List of life goals. I had wanted to meet him, of course, since the first time I heard his smoky voice as he seemed to sing his way into my clitoris and my heart, but inviting him to a house with yellow walls –not from paint, or some Martha Stewart magazine photo, but from decades of Mama’s chain smoking, and linoleum held together with asbestos and apple juice spills – ground in just how bad my life must look to someone from the outside.
    What was Massachusetts like? I drove right past the park’s entrance and asked him that very question. Spending a little more time roaming dark country roads meant delaying the inevitable panic that was about to infuse my cells when Trevor met Mama. I could drive without thinking, the roads were imprinted in my mind, the map so embedded in me I could leave for fifty years and come back and still get around in the dark, blindfolded. Buying myself some time, I figured it couldn’t hurt to feel him out and get a sense of what his life was like, so I could compare.
    And cringe. Knowledge is power, though – right? If I knew what he lived in, how he functioned, what income level is family was at, then maybe I didn’t need to worry so much. There must be poor people in Sudborough. Maybe he was one of them.
    “I don’t know. It’s like lots of places, you know? We’re not rich.” He craned his neck around and spotted two guys sitting on the hood of a rusted out Cutlass, sucking off the teat of some 40s in paper bags. “Uh, not poor. Just, you know. Middle class. Everything is all New Englandy and the people are fake. Half the children are geniuses and we have to be diagnosed with ADHD and medicated to get extra time on the SATs so we can prove how perfect we are. You know.”
    Heh. Around here, half the children are diagnosed with ADHD and medicated so they qualify for SSI for their family income to go up by $700 a month, thereby doubling it. Maybe we weren’t so different after all.
    “Your fake sounds better than my real life,” I muttered as I recognized Old Mike, one of my mom’s exes, on that hood, standing and unbuckling his belt to take a piss. I hit the accelerator and whizzed by before he could whizz on my car.
    “What do you mean?” Those eyes searched my face and I inhaled slowly, turning the car onto a small road that I knew would circle us back eventually. The early May air made the trees sway a bit, their branches dotted with the tiny, unfurling green buds that would soon become lush leaves, making this bleak road a fertile, pleasant drive and, thankfully, hiding some of the junk that dotted the front yards along the path. Trevor seemed genuinely perplexed, as if he didn’t notice how fucked up my life really was, from my junky car to my stupid ex finding us having sex at a rest area to the rotted out shells of cars along the way to my house, all clues that pointed to a grinding sort of working-class life that made me nothing like him.
    “I mean that you are someone who is clearly accustomed to way more than I have,” I answered quietly, cracking my window and taking a deep breath, then tentatively,