After Eli Read Online Free PDF

county hadn’t come out yet to put calcium chloride down on the dirt road, but then Ryan Baker got up in the aisle and started playing air guitar and Earl Keever bellowed at him to set his scrawny rump back down, and I didn’t think about Walter anymore.
    Final exams had been pretty excruciating, though a bright spot was that we’re allowed to wear anything we want within reason to school in exam week, and Amanda Turner showed up in a halter top and a pair of little shorts that barely covered her rear end. Peter Reilly said at lunch that it was her fault if he flunked ninth grade because every time he looked up from thinking about algebra or American history, there was that halter top across the aisle and then everything would go right out of his head. Peter said he’d heard somewhere that men think about sex every ten seconds, but he figured Amanda in that halter top brought it down to five.
    The teachers must have realized this too, because Amanda got called to the office, and when she came back, she was covered up from neck to knees in one of those baggy white coats from the chemistry lab.
    I ended up with one B, four C’s, and one A, which was in physical education, which yet again dashed my dad’s hopes of me ever making something of myself someday. I knew he looked at my report cards and thought what a waste I was, and how Eli could have been out of medical school by now, with a profession and a title. That’s what Eli was going to be, a doctor. Except he decided to go to Iraq and be a combat medic first.
    “Yeah,” my dad said, looking at my card like it was an HIV-positive blood test. “You know, I don’t think Eli ever got less than a B in high school, and he only got one of those.”
    He dropped my report card on the coffee table.
    “It was in German,” he said. “He got a B in German. From that bald guy who didn’t like him. The one who looked like a Nazi.”
    “Mr. Trossel,” I said.
    “Those A’s in phys ed, I read they don’t mean anything when it comes to getting into college,” my dad said. “Colleges want the kids to play some sport, sure, but when they look at a GPA, all they want is the academics. The academics, that’s what counts.”
    By which time I felt lower than a worm’s belly. He never said I was a failure straight out, but it didn’t take a genius to see what he was thinking. Like those canaries that can sense poisonous gases in coal mines, I could sense the condemnation in the air.
    So that afternoon I took my bike out and went for a ride.
    Walter says the only way to solve problems is to think them through in logical sequence, but I know that if you go far enough and fast enough on a bike, you can leave them all behind, at least for a while. I used to pedal and pedal until the muscles in the calves of my legs burned and my eyes teared up from wind, and then I’d feel things sort of loosen up inside, like they didn’t matter so much anymore. I always thought that maybe Lance Armstrong is such a great racer because he had a crappy dad and this terrible cancer and he knew what it was like to have problems to outrun.
    I had two or three different favorite rides. One went up over the top of Turkey Hill, and that was the hardest, because it’s really steep, and when I first started riding there, I used to have to stop in the middle and get off and push my bike for a while. It was always worth it though, because coming back down was wild, as good as a roller-coaster ride, with the bike going about a hundred miles an hour and me feeling like I wasn’t on earth at all but was some kind of supermagic creature flying on the wind. Then the road levels out past the Monroe place and through the back end of the Pilcher property, where Jim has his blue-potato farm, and then out to the Fairfield Road and back home.
    Or I’d ride out past the old Sowers place and take a left onto Scrubgrass Creek Road, which goes back through the woods and across this rickety little bridge over the