The Road to Amazing by Brent Hartinger Read Free Book Online Page A

probably more
in the trees. There might even have been a "main street" at one
point.
    There were ruins here after all,
really obvious ones. I'd just missed them.
    It sort of gave me the chills knowing
that Amazing was real. Maybe that meant the story about everyone
disappearing was also real.
    Where did they go? I wondered.
    I wanted to ask Min, but I felt
stupid. I had a way of letting my imagination get away from me.
It's possible I could even be a teeny-tiny bit melodramatic, and
Min had been known to (affectionately) tease me about
it.
    We started meandering among the ruins.
Christie had said something about an abandoned well, but I didn't
see that anywhere. That was all I needed, to accidentally fall down
an abandoned well. On the other hand, it would definitely give this
weekend some drama.
    "So," Min asked me, "how are you
feeling?"
    "What?" I said.
    "About the wedding."
    "Fine. I mean, Kevin is stressed, but
I'm great."
    "Yeah, I sensed that. About
Kevin."
    "I wish I could do something," I said.
"He's such a good guy. But for the time being, I'm trying to be
supportive and just listen."
    Min nodded.
    "I liked what Gunnar said
last night," I said. "About how Kevin and I first met. And how
we're destined to
be together."
    "You so are."
    I stopped at one of the stacks of
rocks — part of a foundation. I touched it with my foot, and to my
surprise, a couple of the rocks fell over with a
clatter.
    I laughed. "Isn't that funny? It's
been standing all this time, and I barely touch it and it
collapses."
    Min smiled, but didn't laugh. I
stopped laughing too. Suddenly it didn't seem so funny anymore. I
tried to rebuild it, but I couldn't figure it out. It was a puzzle
where nothing seemed to fit.
    "You okay?" Min said, watching
me.
    "Huh? Yeah. Why?"
    "It feels like there's something on
your mind."
    Min knew me really well, and at that
moment in time, it was kind of annoying the shit out of
me.
    "No!" I said, but maybe it
was more to myself than to her. "For the first time in my life, I'm
determined to not be neurotic about something. Kevin is the neurotic one this
time."
    "What's going on?" she
said.
    I didn't answer.
    "Oh, come on," she said. "You think
I'm going to tell?"
    She kept staring at me, her eyes never
blinking, a little like a Russian interrogator.
    I cracked under the
pressure.
    Okay, yes, there may have
been one little thing that had been on my mind about the wedding.
But it was such a teensy-tiny thing that I really wasn't lying
before when I said I was perfectly calm about getting married. It
doesn't mean I'm an unreliable narrator, and it absolutely didn't mean I was being
neurotic.
    "It really doesn't have anything to do
with Kevin," I said. "I love him completely and totally, and I want
to spend my whole life with him."
    "Who wouldn't?"
    "I also don't have cold feet, or
last-minute jitters, or anything like that."
    "Of course not."
    "But, I mean, marriage . What does that
even mean?"
    "It means whatever you and Kevin want
it to mean," Min said.
    "Oh, everyone always says
that, but what does that mean really ?"
    "It means a lot," she
said. I started to talk, and she interrupted me. "No, wait, hear me
out. Being able to define your own marriage? That's literally what
the last century has been all about. All the social changes — the
whole trajectory of the twentieth century, and the twenty-first
century so far — when you boil it all down, what it's really about
is you and me, every one of us, being able to decide for ourselves
how we want to live our lives. It's no longer up to our parents, or
decided by our religion, or dictated by our communities and our
government. We get to decide how we want to live our lives, all of us, as
individuals. You get to decide. Rich straight white men have always been able
to do that — they had the privilege to be able to choose their own
destiny, to change or rewrite the rules whenever they wanted, but
now more and more people can. And that is literally what this
upcoming