Untaken by J.E. Anckorn Read Free Book Online Page A

in good order, and they were the toughest guys around.
    I lay on my bed, listening to Dad thunder around the house, like a lightning storm that had flown through the window and gotten trapped indoors. I let myself daydream about me and Stevie leaving town and starting a band, just like we’d always bullshitted about. Playing in big cities and getting girls and seeing the world, but thinking that way made me feel guilty.
    My Dad gave up everything for me, and I couldn’t even look after him when he was low? I knew that the mean reds would lift eventually.

Gracie
    shoved open the door of Beantown Scoops, still trying to push back the tears welling up behind my eyelids. I wasn’t even hungry anymore, but the last place I wanted to be was home. The kid across the street, Erin, called Beantown Scoops the booger store, because she swore that one day there’d been a booger on top of her raspberry ripple. But, new people owned it now, and it was always packed with folks from the neighborhood.
    The line stretched all the way back to the door, and the girls behind the counter scowled as they ran back and forth, getting in each other’s way as they tried to keep up with the orders. Neither of them went to my school. I wondered if they looked like the types to put a booger in your cone, but I didn’t see how either of them would have had time.
    The frappe machine roared, making my head pound harder. The two little girls in front of me shrieked and giggled over some secret joke and slapped sticky handprints onto the freezer case so you could hardly read which flavor was which. Me and Katie had been like them once. I wondered if they’d still be friends when they were my age. Would one of them grow up to be the swan, and one the big ugly duckling?
    “What they doing? Churning the damn milk themselves?” grumbled the old guy behind me. That would probably be me pretty soon—talking out loud to no one in particular, just to feel like someone was listening.
    When it was finally my turn, I ordered a Mocha Chip. As cold as it was beneath the blast of the air conditioning, the cone was already melting by the time I’d fumbled my change back into my pocket. I stooped to take a lick, pushing my way out of the store into the wall of summer heat. The door of the ice-cream store swung shut behind me, producing a jolly jingle-bell clatter.
    Now that I had my cone, I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t want to wander the neighborhood and risk running in to Katie and the guys, but I didn’t want to go home and sit in that big empty house by myself, either.
    As I stood trying to make my mind up where to go, a breeze stirred up around my ankles. Down the block, a pair of trees began to nod back and forth, dry leaves rustling. The colorful flag hanging out front of the store fluttered and snapped, softly at first, then harder, nearly whacking me across the back of my head. The wind snatched the Red Sox cap off one of the kids lounging on the bench and spun it down the road as his friends jeered.
    “We expecting a storm?” the little old man who’d grumbled in the line said from behind me. He had his ice-cream cone clutched carefully in one hand, and a folded newspaper in the other, which the rising wind was now snatching at like it wanted to rip it to confetti.
    There’d been no storm clouds when I’d walked to the ice cream shop, no breeze whatsoever, but as they always say in New England, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.” I guessed I was going home after all. I kind of liked the big summer thunderstorms. The house would feel cozy instead of empty. I could watch the black clouds roll in from the attic window, and picture Katie and her dumb friends getting caught in the storm.
    “Whoa!” The colorful flag ripped free of its moorings and sailed off down the road. Clouds moved like molasses across the sun, and the difference between the soupy summer heat and the chill of sudden shadow made me shiver. Candy wrappers