100 Sideways Miles Read Online Free PDF

name.”
    â€œIt’s from Mark Twain.”
    Julia Bishop took her schedule from my hand.
    â€œWhy are you wearing a hood? Aren’t you hot?”
    I was definitely hot.
    Without thinking, I put my hand on my head to see if it was true. I was, in fact, wearing a hood. I was also unaware of just about anything in the universe that wasn’t named Julia Bishop.
    I pulled the hood down. My hair was a mess. Some of it fell across my eye. I refused to blink.
    I only stared at her. I realized, relieved, that what I smelled on the air must have been atoms from the perfume on her neck floating across the gap between us, because Finn Easton would have been on his back and staring out at the wordless universe by now if he were having a seizure.
    And Julia Bishop said, “I’m not flirting with you, you know.”
    â€œI didn’t think you were,” I said.
    â€œI’m not,” she said.
    The door shut.
    She disappeared inside.
    Six foot one, I mouthed. No sounds came out.
    Eventually, staring at the shut door, I got my lower jaw to rejoin the upper.

SPACE DOGS AND BULLFIGHTERS
    My dog enjoys rolling around in dead things. Her name is Laika.
    Laika was named for the dog who died in space.
    I have always been somewhat obsessed with that unfortunate animal.
    When she slept outside, which is what we made her do whenever she rolled in dead things and then returned home stinking with a guilty canine grin on her snout, Laika was exiled to a small plastic cube with a barred chrome door that made it look like an old jail cell.
    I penned “ Sputnik 2 ” and drew the ringed planet Saturn, stars, and comets on the outside of Laika’s crate.
    Almost nobody gets the joke.
    There is more room for my little dog inside her plastic crate than there was inside Sputnik 2 for the original Laika.
    Laika means “barker” in Russian.
    At least my Laika lives through her Sputnik experience. The original Laika, as most accepted theories go, died about five hours into her spaceflight when the internal temperature of Sputnik 2 began to rise sharply and the satellite lost communication with the planet of humans and dogs. Nobody really knew what Laika was doing up there, besides getting uncomfortably hot.
    For all that the scientists down here on Planet Earth knew, she could have been singing “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” to herself over and over and over.
    Not a very cheerful voyage.
    But the satellite stayed in orbit for more than five months after that—a lonely and most certainly dead dog circling and circling overhead while the earth traveled about 240 million miles through space. Eventually, Laika and her spacecraft were incinerated when their orbit decayed in April 1958.
    She was definitely dead after that happened.
    Laika’s fourteen-billion-year-old atoms were free again.
    I believe many of those atoms found their way into my corpse-loving rat terrier—possibly into me as well.
    The knackery never shuts down.
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    After that first day, I did not manage to catch a glimpse of Julia Bishop for the rest of the week.
    Thinking about Julia Bishop made me crazy. I found myself considering doing things I would never have thought possible: waiting for her outside classroom doors or taking a walk up the canyon to see where her home was.
    I didn’t have the nerve.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    I did not say anything to Cade Hernandez about meeting Julia Bishop.
    What could I say, anyway? That I had fallen in love with agirl I didn’t even know, just because she admired the socks I was wearing? That she actually noticed my eyes?
    That was ridiculous.
    But I had never felt so messed up on the inside. I imagined myself as some kind of hero who could overcome all his self-doubt and do something absurd like ask Julia Bishop, since she was practically my next-door neighbor, if she would like to come over to my house and visit, or maybe look at my socks,