100 Sideways Miles Read Online Free PDF Page B

or do the kind of shit that normal kids do.
    But I knew there was not the slightest chance of that happening.
    I didn’t know what normal kids did in these situations.
    If I asked Cade what I should do about Julia Bishop, he would ruin everything. It would be innocent enough—just Cade being Cade—but it would happen as inevitably as the pull of gravity.
    I couldn’t let that happen.
    So Cade and I drove quietly to school the morning after I met her. We stopped at Coffee Kiosk and bought coffees with sugar and cream, and we drank them in the student parking lot at Burnt Mill Creek High School while everything kept moving, twenty miles per second, twenty miles per second.
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    My actual next-door neighbor in San Francisquito Canyon was a very old man named Manny Castellan.
    Manny Castellan was seventy-three years old. That’s an awful lot of miles through space. His atoms were probably getting very tired of holding on to one another.
    We lived on four acres. Most of the homes in the canyon had enough land to keep horses. Manny’s house had stables, butthey were empty. Our place had a pool, a gazebo, and an entire guest house.
    Dad’s imagination paid all the bills we ever had.
    We lived well.
    Manny was from Mexico. His real name was Manuel.
    Manuel Castellan used to be a bullfighter in Mexico, forty years ago and about twenty-five billion miles away from here. He complained to me once that modern people had generally lost their respect for the art of bullfighting.
    He told me his bullfighter name was Manolito.
    I thought it would be cool to have a bullfighter name.
    One time I said, “What do you think my bullfighter name would be, assuming I ever fought with a bull?”
    Mr. Castellan studied me thoughtfully. He looked me up and down as though he were receiving some signal from out there, somewhere.
    He said, “I would call you Caballito.”
    â€œWhat is that?”
    â€œ Caballito is a little horse.”
    â€œI am not little,” I argued.
    â€œYou are for a horse,” Manuel Castellan said.
    I nodded.
    I wrote down what Manuel Castellan told me. Sometimes I carried a small red moleskine journal in my pocket.
    He asked, “Why are you writing that down?”
    I said, “I never get to talk to bullfighters.”
    â€œBullfighting is dead,” Manuel Castellan said.
    Good for the bulls.
    I asked Mr. Castellan what they did with the losers of thematch, if they were rendered into useful products like explosives, or lubricants on condoms.
    Manuel Castellan asked me, “What are condoms?”
    I had to tell him what condoms are. It wasn’t embarrassing, and the bullfighter was fascinated by my description of how condoms worked. Then he asked if I had one I could show him, and I told him no.
    Why would I ever need a condom?
    The bullfighter said, “You never know, Caballito.”
    Manuel Castellan told me the dead bulls were dragged away and their meat was sold in butcher shops. Dead, tormented bulls produced a very popular meat.
    Who knew?
    They could have thrown them from bridges for all I knew.

THE POLITICS OF TEENAGE GRUDGES
    At the end of the school week—the week of Nazi Day and Julia Bishop—Cade Hernandez brought a suitcase filled with his belongings to my house in San Francisquito Canyon.
    My parents and sister were leaving to spend five days in New York City without me.
    I pouted to Mom and Dad, “I never get to go anywhere.”
    As soon as I’d said it I calculated the worthlessness of this autopilot adolescent protest.
    Tracy said, “What about that trip you have planned to visit Dunston University with Cade this summer?”
    If Cade didn’t get drafted into the big leagues in his senior year, we had plans on going to college together, and Dunston was the place. Dunston University was a private school in Oklahoma, with a top-notch baseball program and one of the nation’s best liberal