Taming the Star Runner by S. E. Hinton Read Free Book Online

her.
    He wasn’t cool. He wasn’t tough. He wasn’t even good-looking. He just stood there, a brainless, homesick idiot.

Chapter 4
    Dear Travis: Every thing is OK hear. The Twins got Fired for comin in stoned so me and them are doin stuff for Orson. NOT DEALING. Kirk is going preppie. It make you sick. He is even dating Lisa Mahoney. Hows it goin
.
    Joe
    A short letter, but a lot to think about. Travis wished he had the twins here, so he could knock their heads together. He knew it. He knew the minute he left town, they’d turn into dopers. Here he’d gone to a lot of trouble to get them into his group, get them some friends because they were too shy to get their own, and they knew how he felt about heavy doping.
    Billy and Mike weren’t book smart, but in their field, mechanics, they were damn geniuses. Travis was awed by the way they could take things apart, put things together. They had a ticket there, and they were going to blow it.
    Fired. How were they going to pay their car insurance? And the three of them, Joe included, were idiots for “doin stuff” for Orson.
    You’d better get paid in cash, up front, guys, he thought.
    Kirk going preppy, huh? Travis, looking back, could see it coming; he had noticed last summer when Kirk gave up cutoffs and sneakers for Jams and loafers. No, that didn’t surprise him at all. He’d known all along Kirk planned on college—he’d never tried to hide his good grades, like Travis sometimes had.
    Not that there was anything to hide, now.
    â€œHow’s it going?” Well, Travis thought, I’m hanging out with an uncle, a little kid, and a bunch of girls. It is just going super.
    He could still hang out with the girls. He’d followed Casey down to the barn and silently taken the shovel and wheelbarrow and helped clean up the stalls.
    In return she’d told people the water pump had broken.
    It’d been one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do, but if he hadn’t he’d never go to the barn again, and he had to have
somewhere
.
    He wasn’t sure yet how he felt about the little kid. Christopher was a big pain, just as he’d expected. But there was something kind of interesting about someone who just said and did whatever came to mind without worrying about it.
    Christopher was the roundest person Travis had ever seen. His chubby face was round. His big brown eyes were round. His blond haircut was round. His chunky little legs and arms were round.
    And his round mouth moved constantly.
    â€œWell, hi.” He crawled up into Travis’s bed early Saturday. A lot earlier Saturday than Travis liked.
    â€œAre you sleeping?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œ ’Cause I’m sleepy.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œ ’Cause it’s early.”
    â€œWhy?”
    In a very short time Travis thought he’d freak out at the sound of that word.
    Christopher was exact. If you failed to say please, thank you, or you’re welcome, he’d correct you. If you called something by the wrong name, he’d correct you. “It’s not a cuckoo clock. It’s a bird clock.”
    You couldn’t have a sandwich or a Coke to yourself. You had to share. He was real big on sharing. And it was a little disconcerting to be around someone you didn’t know too well who didn’t hesitate to crawl all over you.
    Christopher poked into everything, messing up his tapes, drawing on his papers. And Motorboat, who had stared down Ken’s Labrador and slapped the chow’s nose the first day he was out of the house, spent the weekend cowering under the bed or behind the sofa.
    But Ken seemed to think everything Christopher did was cute, and took it for granted that everything revolved around him. He jumped when Christopher said, “More juice please,” scrubbed his hands before every meal, and when Christopher waddled bare assed into the den with his underwear