The Hungry Season by T. Greenwood Read Free Book Online

they’d eat until their stomachs hurt.
    But then Franny was gone. And he couldn’t even look at Jessie anymore. He transferred to Country Day, he met Misty, and that was that. Franny wouldn’t have liked her at all. She would have told him to turn the other direction and run away. That he knew for sure.
    God, this sucks, he thinks, peering out the window at the lake. There is haze covering everything. It’s hanging in the trees like ghosts.
    He’s been thinking about how he can get back to California. He knows it’s probably ridiculous, but there’s got to be a way. They can’t watch him twenty-four hours a day. This isn’t fucking prison. If he had some money, he’d hitchhike into town and get on a bus. He’s pretty sure there’s a Greyhound that comes through Quimby. But he has no cash. Not a dime. They took away his credit card after he took out the hundred-dollar cash advance to buy weed. Maybe he could hitchhike home to San Diego. Kerouac his way back. Or maybe, instead, he could just kill them with kindness. Show them what a good boy he is. Convince them that he can be trusted. Then maybe they’d realize what a mistake they’ve made. Let him go home .
    But he knows this isn’t even totally about him, not really. Granted, he’s been getting into a lot of trouble lately, smoking too much weed, the whole TJ thing, and then his taking off that night. But his mom and dad are cool. They’ve always been way more understanding than anybody else’s parents. Some of his friends’ folks are so uptight. They act like they were never kids. Like they don’t remember anymore what it’s like to be young. But his mother and father at least always listened to him. If he had a case to make, he was always allowed to make it. At least that’s the way it used to be.
    They told him this is about the X they found in his pants pocket after his father found him camped out underneath the lifeguard tower that night, about his not coming home, about anything but what was really the problem. Franny. Why wouldn’t somebody fucking say it? Nobody even says her name anymore. Franny. They lost their grip on her, and now they’re afraid they’re going to lose it on him too. They’re cool, but they’re afraid. Both of them. Terrified of everything.

T here must be a word for this, Sam thinks. For the sound of Mena downstairs when she thinks that no one else is awake. For the quiet careful sounds of her feet moving across the floor. There must be a word for a woman awake and moving in the glow of dawn. Once, a long time ago, he had called it Tara. Once, when he was young and his father was newly dead, he had decided that writing was the best way to deal with the overwhelming pain and panic and pathos. The words are what saved him. They helped him identify, classify, protect. He had only to sit down and tap at the typewriter for a few minutes before the letters formed words which formed sentences and paragraphs and chapters which compartmentalized his grief. Transformed it into something real: the blocky letters of the typewriter ribbon’s ink making solid all that liquid horror. And soon the words grew fluid again, into the hips and calves and breasts of a woman standing at the edge of a forest in a crimson coat, rubbing her hands together, leaves crackling under her small feet. He’d called her Tara. And later, Mena.
    It used to be that the words came in a seemingly limitless supply. He had simply to sit down, and they poured out: copious, an endlessly replenished stream. He was wrong. He did take things for granted. He took a lot of things for granted.
    He can’t write. And he and Mena haven’t had sex in months.
    The last time they tried was the night before they left San Diego. It was three o’clock in the morning before they finished packing. Their backs were sore, their hands tired. But she had moved toward him, her hands reaching to cradle his face. It was the first time he’d seen anything even remotely resembling