Torched by April Henry Read Free Book Online

cops had taken us away, we had to call a taxi to get home. Crammed next to him in the backseat, I looked at Matt whenever I thought he wouldn’t notice. In his shadowed eyes, I saw how exhausted he was. Exhausted and old and scared. And that scared me more than Richter had.
    When we got home, there was no marijuana growing in our basement anymore. The only clue the plants had ever been there was the metal tracks on the ceiling where the grow lights had run. The house had been thoroughly searched, but the only stuff missing had to do with my parents’ pot.
    That didn’t mean everything wasn’t a mess. Closets and cupboards had been flung wide open. Everyone’s dresser drawers gaped, even mine. Grossed out by the idea of some pervy cop rifling through my underwear, I dumped the entire contents of the drawer in my laundry basket and carried it to the washing machine.
    When I walked past my parents’ room, I saw Matt lying on his back on the bed, his eyes closed. His arms were by his sides, and he was absolutely still. When I was thirteen, Matt had had a heart attack. So I stood for a long moment in the doorway, watching to make sure his chest still rose and fell. My head felt like it might split in two. How could my parents have been so selfish?
    In the kitchen, I found Laurel. She was making a stir-fry. It was nearly ten o’clock at night, but it was like she was pretending it was still dinnertime, that nothing had happened.
    “What am I going to do now?” I said. My voice was hard and harsh.
    Laurel put down her chef ’s knife and put her finger to her lips. “Shh! I don’t want Matt to hear us.”
    “I don’t want to do this,” I said. My voice wasn’t much softer than it had been before.
    She tried to put her arms around me again. For a second, I wanted to close my eyes and lean into her soft warmth. But I wasn’t a kid anymore. And it was Laurel and Matt who had gotten me into this mess, with their stupid reluctance to admit that it was no longer 1972. I shook off her hands and took a step back.
    “How could you do this to me?” I crossed my arms.
    “We didn’t do it to you. The Man did.” I heard the capital letters in Laurel’s voice, as if she were speaking about a real person.
    “For once, couldn’t you have done what ‘the Man’ said? Couldn’t you follow the rules?”
    “Even when the rules don’t make any sense?” Her tired eyes pleaded with me. “In a lot of countries, pot’s legal. Cigarettes are a lot more harmful.”
    “But we don’t live in other countries, Mom, ” I said sarcastically, watching her flinch. “We live here. Where it’s not legal and where they can use it as an excuse to get the MEDics.”
    “Look, we’ll figure out something,” Laurel said again , turning away to slide some chopped onions into the wok. “But our first priority is to keep Matt out of jail. He couldn’t hack it, not at his age. With his heart, and the sentences they give out now, he could even die there. You saw how bad he looks tonight. I want him to call his cardiologist, but he won’t.”
    Laurel picked up her knife again. “Besides, it’s the lesser of two evils. Whatever the MEDics are, it’s up to them to prove it. If Richter is wrong and they aren’t turning to violence, he promised me they would drop the investigation.”
    “But what if he’s right?” I had to ask. “If he’s right, then what?”
    “Then,” Laurel said as she brought her butcher knife down with a thwack on the green tops of a bunch of carrots, “then they’ve made their bed. And they’ll have to lie in it.”

CHAPTER SEVEN
    That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about what Richter had said. So I got up and Googled MED. One article said that MED was “dedicated to taking the motive out of environmental destruction by causing economic damage to businesses.” But most of what I found called them ecoterrorists.
    In Oregon alone, MED had claimed responsibility for seven “actions” since