Rewrite Redemption by J.H. Walker Read Free Book Online Page A

depression. Dinner would be drying out in the kitchen. My dad would be at the office, waiting until the last possible minute he could justify before returning home to join the death march. My mom would pounce on me the moment I walked in the door and steer me over to break Devon out of his gaming coma. So that we could all eat in morose silence watching the nightly news.
    Whoo hoo! Rockin fun.
    I walked in the door. No need to elaborate. The preview had been spot-on. After my tour of duty was complete, I escaped to my room. Things were harsh, yeah, but I had hope now. That night, I hacked into the school network and reworked my schedule. I would now have Spanish fourth period. I downloaded the class roster and stuck it in my wallet.
    I’d narrow it down the next day in room 217.

 
    I watched Sam lug the box to the trash bin. He didn’t notice me, high in the sky, on my tree house porch. I counted the clinks…two, three, four wine bottles dropping. Next crashed a cascade of beer bottles. He went back inside, taking the box with him. It was empty now…but not for long.
    “Sam dumping bottles?” Ipod stuck his head out the tree house door. “Sounded massive.”
    “Tell me about it.”
    Ipod wore a black tee shirt that said “E=mc2” and a pair of old jeans with big pockets. He was a packrat and the pockets were full of stuff. Normally he ate lunch with us, but today he had violin practice, and he’d just gotten home. Other than passing by me on his way to the fridge two minutes ago, I hadn’t seen him since before school. The fridge was always his first stop.
    “Lex told me there was weirdness at school today,” he said, climbing into the hammock with a yogurt and a granola bar.
    “Yeah, I felt something…some kind of—I don’t know—energy,” I said, taking off my hoodie and tossing it over the porch rail.
    “You always feel energy.”
    “Yeah, but this was different.”
     “Describe it,” he said, waving his fingers at me. Ipod has very expressive hands. He uses them a lot when he talks. It’s as if he’s making everything three-dimensional in his mind. The guy is seriously smart, pretty much a walking Wikipedia.
    “Well,” I said, “you know how it is for me when I’m away from my tree, right? Especially at school.”
    If I’m away from my tree too long, I get this prickly-panicky feeling…like ants crawling under my skin. If I’m gone for a really long time, then my senses just go haywire, and I have to struggle to hold it together. All my nerve endings buzz—total sensory overload.
    “You mean the static thing, where your brain goes all carbonated?” he asked, reading the label on the granola bar.
    “And the creepy-crawly thing,” I reminded him. “The only place I’m really okay is here in my tree. So, you know how I do the white noise thing, to dampen down the static and keep from whacking out?” I kind of hum in my mind to help me focus and block out all the interference.
    He nodded.
    “It takes a lot of concentration to do that and walk and talk and whatever at the same time. But if I don’t do it—”
    “You get all agitated and twitchy.” He finished my sentence. “Like that time when the Bratz Doll—”
    “Don’t remind me, but yeah.”
    Nobody could listen like Ipod. He was intensely curious about my strangeness and never got tired of hearing about it. It always helped to talk it out with him, especially since Sam was in denial about the whole thing.
    “So what happened today?” he asked, wolfing down the granola bar.
    I closed my eyes, reflecting. “It’s funny. Usually by fourth period, I’m pretty drained. I have to really concentrate on managing the sensory input. So there I was in Spanish, doing what I usually do, and all of a sudden the static stopped and the creepy-crawly thing vanished, just like that. I felt this calm feeling wash over me, and—I know it sounds crazy—there was kind of this gentle music in the background. It wasn’t any instrument