Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival Read Online Free PDF

barely-lucid tales of frat boy hazing,
off-the-cuff quasi-metaphysical observations he'd gleaned from
years of study, and everything in between.
    He's so funny and
smart , he could swear he heard one of the
girls say.
    Sometime deep into the night—he saw little
reason to check his watch at this point—he found himself in a
rather heartfelt sidebar with the Hawaii boy-man.
    One or five beers too far
into a haze of bad judgement, Wayne decided this would be the place
and time to unload on his buddy how he really felt about his brother and
his brother's relationship with Susanna.
    She's like, a goddess, man. I know how to
take care of a girl like that, better than Jesse can. He doesn't
care about anyone else, you know? But girls always go for the wrong
guys, you know? I don't know what that's about.
    It's like, what—huh?
    I'm not being too loud.
    Am I?
    I mean, we're outside. I don't need to use
"inside voice."
    Jesse? He can't hear me. I haven't even seen
him for, like, the last three hours.
    He's probably bending her over the back of a
truck or something. He's disgusting.
    He's behind me? Jesse is?
     
    Suddenly, Wayne realized a circle had formed
around him and his new friend. He scanned the crowd, looking for
Susanna. To his relief, she wasn't present.
    He turned around.
    There was Jesse, fuming.
    The sound of his brother's fist impacting
with his jaw didn't sound like a punch in any movie.
    It was more real, a sound from Wayne's
adolescence that he'd never been able to forget, but one that he'd
hoped was behind him.
    At the moment of impact, every locker room
beat-down he'd experienced flash-fired across his neurons.
    That's okay, for once I deserved it.
    The ensuing contest was more or less
one-sided. Wayne's occasional punches, spurred on by only a
molecular sense of survival and not any real desire or expectation
to beat his brother, were just enough kindling to keep Jesse
punching.
    They were just enough to make the pain worse
for Wayne.
     
    Susanna didn't hear the fight playing out.
She was peeing behind one of those dry California bushes, the kind
that must be where tumbleweeds come from, a safe distance from the
campgrounds. And in the open plains of the high desert, sounds die
quick deaths. They dissipate in churning winds that blanket the
dusty earth.
    One thing she did notice, though, was that
the weather was changing. It was cloudy now, humid, when it had
been dry and arid all day long. The winds were kicking up in all
directions.
    And there was a strange smell, like ozone. It
was the same unnatural scent she'd noticed when her little brother
would play with slot cars when they were kids, or at the auto shop
where Jesse picked up some work hours during the daytime.
    Her hair was beginning to defy gravity, like
she'd rubbed it against a balloon. Just like the hairs on her arms
had stood up in the cavern an hour earlier.
    As she finished and hiked her pants back up,
she thought of the hike back to camp with Jesse just now. It had
been awkward; the kind of unspoken awkwardness where you're not
sure if it's the other party behaving oddly, or if you're
projecting your own discomfort onto them.
    He seemed to understand her reasons for
rejecting his proposal for the time being. But as the minutes had
gone by, he'd become quiet again, like he had been in the car that
morning.
    She'd give him some space for the night,
that's what she'd do. He could enjoy the party, enjoy the adulation
he always got from this crowd. Then, in the morning, she'd have a
heart-to-heart with him before the day's work. They'd patch things
up then.
    She took one more glance at the sky, its
strange milky clouds ebbing and swirling around Devil's Peak. Then
she began walking back to the campgrounds.
    Something was off. No one was talking; they
were standing around in a big circle. She could only barely make
out two people in the center of the ring, tussling on the
ground.
    She cut through the outer ring of partiers,
bumping past the two girls