Bullet Point Read Online Free PDF Page A

Wyatt’s nose. Then came a cracking sound, like a wishbone on Thanksgiving, followed by pouring blood and a sharp pain radiating from Wyatt’s nose across both sides of his face; sound coming first, pain last.
    Wyatt sagged backward, knocking his mom, not a big woman, to the floor, although he didn’t fall himself. He glanced around to see if she was all right, and Rusty got him again, this time on the jaw, but not dead on. Not dead on, but Wyatt went down anyway, hot and raging inside, and the next thing he knew his vision had a reddish tinge and he welcomedit, might even have growled like an animal. He rolled over and dove at Rusty’s legs.
    Rusty toppled backward, cracked his head against the edge of the doorframe, and spun into Cammy, who’d suddenly reappeared in the doorway, holding the handle of the pot of spaghetti sauce in both hands. Cammy flew across the hall. Rusty fell and lay still, spaghetti sauce splattering everything: walls, floor, each member of the family. Then Cammy and Wyatt’s mom were both in tears, wailing, really, and Rusty was rising to his knees. “Gonna fuckin’ kill him,” he said. Wyatt thought of the small automatic Rusty kept under the bed in the master bedroom and took off. In seconds he was outside and in the Mustang, peeling away from home, rubber shrieking in the night.
    Wyatt drove, fast at first, and with no plan, no idea where he was going, and then slower, out of town and down a narrow lane to a beach by the riverside, where kids went swimming in summer. No swimming tonight: in his headlights he saw that the river was frozen over, except for a narrow black channel in the center. For a moment, a pathetic moment—as he realized while it was happening but let happen anyway—he wondered how it would be to slip down into that icy dark water. Wyatt shook his head, clearing it of shit like that, at the same time setting off a sharp pain in the middle of his face.
    He switched on the interior light, checked his face in the rearview mirror. Two or three smears of blood on his cheeks, but his nose had stopped bleeding. The problem with his nose was its new shape and location. Wyatt’s nose, to which he’d never paid much attention, had always been straight, not toobig, not too small. Now it was big and swollen, and worse, crooked, bent one way in the middle, then angling off in the other direction at the tip.
    Wyatt leaned forward so he could see better. There were tears in his eyes. That made him angry at himself. Suck it up , as Coach Bouchard always said. Wyatt spoke the words aloud: “Suck it up.” Then he got a good grip on his nose, thumb on one side, fingers on the other, took a deep breath, and yanked it back into place. Another cracking sound, more blood, more pain, and he might have let out some cry—but when he checked the mirror, his nose was straight again. The thought hit him that maybe Coach Bouchard wasn’t really an authority on the subject of sucking it up.
    Wyatt sat in his car, parked in this place—familiar, except he’d never been here in winter; kind of like a stranger in his own hometown. At first he ran the engine to stay warm, but the needle was dipping down toward empty—a great car and he loved it, but not good on gas—and he switched it off. Then it was quiet, the sky full of stars, the only movement that black rippling out in the middle of the river. It got colder and colder in the car. Wyatt was wearing only jeans, sneakers, a short-sleeved T-shirt. He could see his breath. It fogged the windshield. He didn’t like that, wanted to see out, so he kept a little porthole-sized circle of glass clear. After a while he started shivering and couldn’t stop. He felt alone. That was new.
    “What’s the goddamn point?” he said.
    Wyatt started the car, backed away from the river, U-turned, and headed into town. By the time he got to hishouse, he was nice and warm again. A light shone in the kitchen, and in Linda and Rusty’s bedroom, but otherwise