The Year of the Storm by John Mantooth Read Free Book Online

seconds. Twenty. Thirty. I stopped counting and opened my eyes. The white of the porcelain sink was bright. I wanted to breathe so bad, but I kept my head under anyway. I’d read somewhere that you passed out before you died when you were holding your breath.
    The world shook. It was like the water was moving in the sink and not just the water; the sink moved too. I was fading, slipping away, or maybe it was the world that was slipping. The last thing I saw before sucking in a lungful of water was the sky over tall trees at dusk. Then my lungs filled up, and I began to choke. I pulled out of the sink and fell back against the window. Outside, I heard my father. “What the—?”
    Coughing didn’t seem to help. I couldn’t remember what I had been trying to prove. I just knew I wanted to live.
    Daddy lifted me off the floor, hugging me from behind. His big hands balled themselves under my rib cage, and he squeezed hard, sending the water out of my lungs and all over the bathroom mirror. He dropped me.
    â€œNext time,” he said, “try a gun.”
    After he left, I stayed on the floor. There was a part of me that wanted to go get his gun—I knew right where it was—and hold it under his chin and make him squirm before I pulled the trigger. But there was another part of me that was too glad to be alive to do anything as stupid as that.

Chapter Five
    I t was October when I heard about it. I was sitting in English class. Mrs. Harris had forgotten to pull the shades down, and outside it was one of those special fall days Alabama has: bright blue sky and red leaves, every tree blazing like a fire. I was watching a baby rabbit hop across the grass when I heard a girl speak.
    â€œShe’s been gone since Saturday night. My uncle said she was just going out to check on the puppies in their barn. That was just about dark, Saturday night.”
    I turned around and saw Meredith Garrigan across the aisle from me. She was talking to Tina Bray, a girl I’d liked since the sixth grade.
    â€œHow old is she?” Tina asked.
    Meredith shook her head. “Ten.”
    Tina made a face, wrinkling her nose like she was disgusted.
    â€œI know. It’s terrible.”
    Seth sat in the desk right in front of me. He had his head down, his usual position. Since the stuff that happened with Jake and Ronnie back in the summer, Seth and me had become casual friends, and I got used to seeing him like this in class. School was so easy for him, he barely paid attention. Once the teachers realized how smart he was, they pretty much left him alone.
    Seth seemed like he wasn’t listening until Meredith said, “It’s terrible.” Then he sat up.
    â€œWhat’s terrible?” he asked.
    She looked a little put off. “We were talking about my cousin.”
    â€œWhat about your cousin?”
    Just then, Mrs. Harris looked up from the essays she’d been grading. Her gaze fell on our group. I’m sure we must have looked like we were having quite the conversation, leaned over across the aisle like we were.
    â€œSomething you’d like to share with the class, Miss Bray?” Mrs. Harris always went for Tina first. I believed it was because Tina represented a lot of things in a girl that Mrs. Harris didn’t like. Things like brains. Not get-the-right-answer kind of brains, but the think-for-yourself kind. To make things worse, Tina was something of a looker. First girl I can ever remember fantasizing about that wasn’t in the pages of that ’59
Playboy
.
    â€œYes, ma’am,” Tina shot back.
    Mrs. Harris smiled and got up from her desk. She walked to the front of the room and addressed the rest of the class, the ones who had at least been pretending to quietly work on the sentences they were supposed to be diagramming. “Please listen, class. Miss Bray has something that she deems more important than learning the correct functions of our