Everybody Knows Your Name Read Online Free PDF

showing off his new .45 in the living room and accidently fired it while pretending he was a gunslinger. Cody couldn’t stop laughing about the look on my face. I couldn’t stop thinking about how stupid it would have been for my whole life to come down to being shot through the skull by some drunk dumbass. That’s when I decided I wanted out.
    Leander helped me set up the emancipation. Talked to my parents about signing off, telling them it would be better all around. They had never heard of emancipation, and they mostly saw it as me thinking I was too good for them. But in the end they signed off, because what difference did it really make? The judge determined that it was in my best interest and that I’d proved to be self-sufficient. And just like that, I was a seventeen-year-old legal adult and could live on my own.
    We’d been driving in Leander’s Cadillac for a while before he said anything else. “So that’s it, then?”
    â€œI guess so.”
    â€œWhat’s your plan? Work in my store for the rest of your life?”
    â€œWhat’s wrong with that?”
    â€œNothing wrong with it. I like having you there. It’s fine with me if you want to spend the next twenty years giving boogery kids guitar lessons and spending your lunchtimes eating with an old man.”
    â€œGood, because that’s what I want to do,” I said, even though it felt bad to say.
    Leander braked at a stop sign, but then he didn’t get going again. We just sat there. “Now that I’m old, I look back on my younger self, and I realize the number of chances a person gets to change their life—I mean really change it—there ain’t many. And most times, it ain’t even any.”
    â€œI missed the flight,” I reminded him. Now, I had some idea that I could call the producers and beg them to get me another ticket. Maybe they could do it. I didn’t really know. I’d heard that out in Los Angeles, people in TV just threw money around like it was confetti.
    But I couldn’t bring myself to pick up the phone. Asking for another ticket felt the same as saying that I was just some backwoods guy who had messed up before anything even started. What was I gonna say? Hey, sorry I missed the flight, got arrested for being at a drug party. Can you just send another four hundred dollars?
    I told Leander, “It’s over.”
    â€œThere’s more than one way to get to California.”
    â€œMaybe I don’t want to hear what those people think of my singing anyway.”
    Leander nodded again, like I was making some kind of sense, but then he said, “I think you’re lying to yourself. I think you do want to know. You think it’s common to have the kind of talent you have? That promise, it’s in your bones, and if you don’t let it out, it’s gonna burn you up. And I don’t feel like sitting around watching it happen. So you’re fired.”
    I smiled, assuming that he was joking. “C’mon.”
    â€œThat’s right.” He gave me a look that said, Cut the bull . Then he pulled the car up to my house and held out some cash. “Here’s two hundred dollars severance pay. That should be enough gas money to get you to LA. Don’t think it over another second. You get out of my truck, and you leave town right this minute.”
    When he wanted, Leander had a way of talking that cut right into me. So when he looked at me with those wise hard eyes of his and told me to leave town right this minute , that’s what I did.
    Twenty hours later I wish I’d at least stopped by a store to pick up some new shirts and maybe some provisions for the trip. Still, just driving through all that empty space has made me feel like I’m expanding. I want to keep driving. I don’t really ever want to arrive.

7
    It’s one a.m. when I walk through the doors of the hotel, only thirty-eight hours later than