The Color War by Jodi Picoult Read Free Book Online Page B

Camp Konoke from any other New England camp, except for the nearly uniform contrast of white counselors to the campers-of-color.
    They weren’t all African American like Raymond. There were Latino kids and Hmong and Chinese, too. Raymond’s mother had dropped him off early at the Port Authority, with a package of oatmeal cookies and a picture of the two of them taken at Christmas to put next to his bunk. “Don’t you get poison ivy,” she warned, and she started to cry, although she was the one who had organized for Raymond to go in the first place. Raymond wanted to tell her he would be all right, but he couldn’t, because of the sadness swelling in his throat.
    No one chose to sit with Raymond on the bus. Behind him were two Latino girls, twins, who were chewing their way through a Slim Pack of Juicy Fruit. When a piece of gum had lost its flavor, the twin would pull the wad from her mouth and toss it over Raymond’s head to land in the trash can next to the bus driver. Someone in the back of the bus was wearing Beats, his music turned up so loud that the hammer of rap music throbbed over the roll of the bus wheels.
    The man sitting in the seat across from Raymond leaned over to ask his name, which made Raymond angry, because he remembered the man’s name—Reverend Helm—and it had only been ten minutes since they’d all had to go around the bus and say who they were and which church they went to. “Well, Raymond,” the pastor said, “I bet you’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.”
    “No,” Raymond replied. “I only just found out I was going.”
    The reverend was a thin man, completely bald, with a peeling sunburn on the bridge of his nose. “How lucky you are, then,” he said, not missing a beat.
    “Luck is for sinners, not saints,” Raymond said, something he’d heard fall from his grandmother’s lips countless times. He thought of her smooth pink palms, running over the edges of her quilt as if she could measure just by touch. He thought of how, when he was out on the street, he would hear his grandma’s voice, swooping and diving like a kite, and he knew she was in the bathroom with the tiny window open, scrubbing the cracked porcelain sink and singing her psalms. Suddenly Raymond was seized by a cramp that snaked around his belly and crept north, taking root in his heart. He looked outside to see fields of wild daisies lining the highway, big open spaces crammed with nothing, and he knew without being told that this was the ache of leaving home.
    Raymond slept for most of the ride. He dreamed about the best day of his life, which was really a night—last New Year’s Eve, when he and Monroe had sneaked onto the T and into the world that wasn’t theirs. You’d think, given that they were only a few miles from the Prudential Tower, that Boston was familiar, but to Raymond it was as faraway and exotic as Tibet. There were times when the gangs were out in Dorchester that he wouldn’t even walk a hundred feet down the block to visit Monroe, much less venture all the way to Copley Place. The people who lived and worked downtown worried aloud about things like the cost of parking and who was going to be elected mayor. Kids like Raymond knew that you only had time to worry if you weren’t busy actively trying to stay alive.
    The night had been Raymond’s grand plan. He would tell his mom that he was sleeping at Monroe’s, and Monroe would tell his mother he was at Raymond’s. Instead, he and Monroe sneaked onto the Red Line and stared at the drunk prep-school kids, puffed up like rain clouds in their parkas, weaving back and forth as they passed bottles of Jägermeister. He poked Monroe when a bearded man wearing a dress and high heels sat down across from them. Finally, he pulled Monroe off the train into the glittering hum of the Park Street station, up the escalator that belched them into the slush of the Boston Common.
    Surrounding Monroe and Raymond was a sea of