Road Rash by Mark Huntley Parsons Read Free Book Online

question, and I’ll answer yours.”
    “Her older brother was at the store and saw it. He says you broke some guy’s nose! Did you?”
    “I don’t know about that. But yeah, I hit him.”
    “Wow! How come?”
    For once, I decided to treat her like an equal instead of a little kid. “Can you keep this just between us? Not tell anyone, even Mom and Dad?”
    She seemed surprised. “Oh sure—I promise!”
    “Okay … Basically, this guy was saying some really bad things—lies—about a friend of mine. I asked him to stop a couple of times, but instead he got worse. So I hit him.”
    “And then?”
    I smiled. “He stopped.”
    “That’s all?” She seemed disappointed.
    “Pretty much, yeah. Since he was on the sidewalk bleeding …”
    That cheered her up. “So who was he saying bad things about?”
    “Doesn’t really matter.”
    She looked at me for a minute, then raised an eyebrow. “It was a girl, wasn’t it?”
    I raised an eyebrow back at her.
    She stared off into space for a second, then her eyes opened wide. “Kimber! It was Kimberly, wasn’t it?”
    Wow.
    She must have read my face. “I was right!” she said. “Hey, if someone had said that about me, would you have hit them?”
    “Naw, I don’t think so.”
    She looked bummed. “Really?”
    “Yeah.” I paused for a minute, to let her stew. Then I wriggled my eyebrows in what I hoped was a sinister fashion. “They’d have to call the coroner.”
    “Wow … awesome!”
    Sometimes she cracks me up, with the things she’s impressed by.
    Then she said, “Wait till I tell Jody …!” and turned to go. I was ready to unload on her about her promise when she turned back and pointed at me.
    “Gotcha!”

7
“Summertime Blues”
    I decided to go to the movies. There was only one more week of school, and homework was pretty much just studying for finals. Besides, ever since I’d been kicked from the band, my dad had been on me about getting a “real” job this summer, and I didn’t want to hear about it tonight.
    So I didn’t even look up what was playing, and I didn’t bother borrowing my dad’s truck. I just hopped on my bike and headed down to the Creekside Complex. I figured with ten screens they had to be showing
something
passable sometime soon, and I didn’t really care about the details.
    Usually I’ll go for an action film, but for some reason there was a romantic comedy that caught my attention. And since it was starting in fifteen minutes, I figured what the heck.
    It actually wasn’t too bad, except for one tiny detail … the plot. It was all about some guy who gets his first “real” job with some big corporation, but he secretly spends his evenings playing guitar in a band, and he really wants
that
to be his career.And of course it all ends happy-happy—he dumps the nine-to-five, gets the dream rock-star gig, and gets the girl. The End.
    Okay, so I was rooting for the guy to kick the stupid suit-and-tie job and start playing guitar again. But gimme a break. It was so far from reality—at least from
my
reality. And the few parts that were fairly realistic—mostly the scenes at the early gigs—only bummed me out.
    I didn’t feel like going home after that, so I went next door to Starbucks for a while. I got myself a coffee and managed to snag a tiny little table in the corner. I was lucky to get that—the place was totally crowded, probably with people like me who didn’t really care that it was a weeknight because school was almost over.
    So I sat there and watched the crowd from back in the corner, kinda like watching the audience from behind the drums at a gig. After a while I borrowed a pen and a piece of paper from a girl behind the counter and started working on a song idea I’d had for a while. It was only half formed, but basically it was about loyalty and loneliness and feeling like you didn’t fit in. It wouldn’t take a PhD in psychology to see where this came from, but I worked on it anyway