Undercurrent by Paul Blackwell Read Free Book Online Page A

anywhere near me—I don’t think my door opens even once. Which is strange, I think, because don’t the nurses have to check on people?
    Apparently not on me.
    When morning comes, I begin to wonder if I’ve been making a big deal out of nothing. Maybe I’m just shaken up from the accident. Who wouldn’t be?
    Still, it’s a happy moment when my mother arrives. Shortly afterward I get taken for some tests. Then there’s a wait before the all clear to go home.
    “If you’re free of symptoms for a couple of weeks—no funny stuff like vision problems or nausea or anything—I see no reason why you can’t play sports,” the doctor says.
    “Great,” I answer, as if this is somehow a priority for me.
    Whatever—I’ll nod and smile at anything if it means getting out of here. And from the looks I get on the way out, I’m not the only one who doesn’t want me hanging around any longer.
    An orderly pushes me to the exit in a wheelchair like we’re in a race. He dumps me outside—no “get well soon,” “best wishes,” or any of that. He just abandons the chair and heads back in. My mother even notices and glares after him.
    “Hey, what a nice day,” I say, hoping to distract her from the fact that the whole hospital hates her younger child.
    “Yeah, sunny, huh?” she answers, helping me up.
    It hurts to walk, and I’m limping as we cross the parking lot to my mother’s car. “Oh, you poor thing,” she says, looking at me. “You should have waited in reception. I would have driven up.”
    “I’m fine, Mom.” It’s probably mostly just stiffness from lying around for so long, I tell her. My joints do feel swollen and sore though. But no wonder—I fell over a waterfall and must have been thrown around like a rag doll.
    Mom unlocks her trusty but rusty red hatchback, which she bought for five hundred dollars shortly after we arrived in Crystal Falls. My brother, a self-proclaimed auto expert, poked around its insides and gave the car a year’s life, max. But somehow it refuses to die. We used to joke that you could probably drive the car off a cliff, and it would still run.
    Well, it turns out that the little rust bucket and I now have something in common. The car doesn’t return the fond feeling, however, making me pull four times before giving me enough slack to buckle up. Pain shoots through my shoulder, and again I feel like the stitches on my head are about to pop open.
    Safely secured in the cozy little death trap, I try to relax. It really is a nice day, I notice through the grimy window. Crystal Falls is beautiful in the fall, I’ll admit. And as the cool nights drive off most of the campers and tourists, you can finally get a parking spot on Main Street and seats in the diner whenever you want. By November the town is ours until the weather turns mild again in May.
    Well, maybe not completely ours.
    It’s funny how you can spend four years in a place like Crystal Falls but still be an outsider. Even Bryce, who moved here when he was five, isn’t “OT”—an Original Townie. Meanwhile there are families with streets named after them: the Mayfields, the Daniels, the Wiltons, and the Guises. Those are the names that mean something in Crystal Falls.
    And then there are the Holdens, of course, one of whom blows by in a luxury SUV as we exit the parking lot. Their liquor business has been here for 130 years—even operating in secret during Prohibition, I heard, inflating their fortune tenfold. And now they practically own the town.
    Which might explain why Mrs. Holden—whose bleach-blond hairdo I glimpse behind the wheel—feels entitled to drive sixty in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. The road now clear, my mother pulls out. I stare blankly out the window as we head down Main Street.
    “Wait!” I suddenly exclaim. “What happened to Electronica Veronica?”
    “Pardon?” my mother asks.
    “Electronica Veronica,” I repeat. It’s a store that Bryce and I spend a lot of time in, as it’s