The Sovereign Era (Book 2): Pilgrimage by Matthew Wayne Selznick Read Free Book Online Page A

her knuckles gently. “I’m glad you told me. It’s…hard to think about. But I’ll leave it alone.”
    I was lying, too.

From The Journal Of Nate Charters – Seven
    If Carson’s band didn’t have a gig on Friday nights, they practiced in his big converted three-car garage. I usually hung out.
    Car and his friends were all, like, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two or something—all older than me by a few years—but Car was friends with Lina, and I was with Lina, so everybody pretty much took me in.
    Lina and Car.
    I didn’t really understand how I felt about that. It hurt, a little. It was…weird.
    Thing was, Carson Meunetti had never been anything but awesome to me from the moment we met, when he shook my hand and looked me in my crazy eyes and never flinched, never acted like I was anything more unusual than Lina’s (at the time) new boyfriend.
    When things got crazy and we hatched our stupid plan to get Byron Teslowski away from maybe being experimented on by Prentice-Cambrian’s flunky scientist Lester Brenhurst, Carson covered for us at no small risk to himself.
    The guy was like an older brother to me.
    And I had to admit it: no matter how much I looked for it, he never treated Lina like anything more than his best friend. Now that I knew what I knew, somehow, it was obvious to me that I’d never had a thing to worry about.
    So, sure, it was a little weird when Car came back with Tim, and the rest of Jesus Horse showed up with their girlfriends and everybody else. But after everybody settled in with their pizza and beer (I got my own pizza, but a while back everyone had come to agree that no one let me drink anything stronger than soda), things almost felt normal.
    Lina stuck close by me. I felt a little guilt when she’d hold my hand or touch me; I think I wanted her to be angrier with me over what had happened that afternoon. Maybe she wanted things to feel normal, too.
    I tried my best to go along. We went down to the converted three-car garage when practice started, and I hung out there with her as long as I could take the volume. I tried to convince myself life would keep moving forward and we’d work through this stuff.
    Except for the fact of some dude out there in the world who had never been punished for almost raping my girlfriend.
    The thought of it twisted through my brain like a worm through dirt.
    I tried to be cool. I sat there with Lina, earplugs jammed in my ears to protect my inhumanly sensitive hearing, and watched Car, Crystal, Alex, and Tim run through their set.
    With every tune, horror movies played in my head. Lina, helpless, while some faceless fucker hovered over her…or Lina, struggling but not strong enough to twist free, the weight of her would-be rapist pressing down…
    If I sat through another song, I felt like I would rip out of my own skin. I had to get out.
    Even with my ears plugged, the vibrations of the bass guitar and drums always get to be a little much for me, physically. Lina was used to my sensitivity, so when I got up to go back up to the house she didn’t seem to realize I was messed up. She kissed me on the cheek, squeezed my hand, and mouthed “I love you.”
    I silently said it back to her and pushed down the urge to cry as I passed through the side door of the garage and around to the front door of the house. What a day, and it wasn’t over yet.
    In the house, Katrina Lombaugh and Tammy Akui were sitting at the dining room table drinking Corona beer and playing some card game.
    “Hey, little Nate,” drawled Katrina. She raised her beer bottle. “They taking a break?”
    “Just me.” I dug the earplugs out of my ears. I could still feel the vibrations of the music through the carpeted floor, but the Cocteau Twins record playing at a reasonable volume in the living room was still a nice break. Elizabeth Fraser’s otherworldly caterwauling was almost soothing.
    “Want in?” She indicated an empty chair at the table with a nod of her head.
    I