Going the Distance Read Online Free PDF Page B

as a rail would not make me that sensitive, but you’d be so wrong it’s sick. My dad would just look at me and make me laugh because I knew what was coming next. It was a humbling moment that made me remember no matter how tall I might get, my dad would always kick my ass.
    He had me begging him to stop almost instantly. At the thirty-second mark, I would have told him nuclear secrets if I possessed them. At forty-five seconds, I might have agreed to kill someone if I didn’t know them personally. “You going to unpack your room?” he asked with real glee in his voice. I nodded quickly, though at this point, I would have agreed to paint the house and detail his Jeep to get free. “And no fucking around reading comics?” I agreed to that and was pretty sure I would have burned them in the center of my room if he would stop. “Hurry up, because we need to get to the mall to buy you some new clothes for school.” Again I agreed, not sure what I was agreeing to until his words penetrated.
    “W-what?” I cried, trying not to laugh hysterically.
    He stopped. The smile on his face made it clear he was more than satisfied he had this power over me. “You heard me. New clothes if you can get this crap unpacked.”
    There was an afterimage of me on my bed as I was already running around my room unpacking boxes like The Flash. I didn’t even notice he had walked out of the room. I was too busy working. Within twenty minutes the boxes were empty, and my room was… well, it was my room. When I walked out, he was sitting in the living room flipping through the comic I had thrown at him, ignoring me in a pretty bad way. “You ready?” I asked, putting my shoes on.
    “Yeah, when I’m done with this,” he said holding up the comic.
    I saw him laugh when I sighed and sat on the couch waiting.
    “Dad!” I complained after an hour, which was probably in actuality two minutes. He put the comic down, and we walked outside.
    I had forgotten my dad’s Jeep and how much I wanted it when he eventually bought another car. It was a black ragtop that just screamed coolness in a way I will never be able to explain to someone else. I always felt the Jeep was like the brother I never had, because I know we were both fighting for my dad’s love.
    There were days I’m pretty sure the Jeep won.
    We headed past the line of crack houses on the way to the freeway, and again we didn’t say a word about them. This was not the place we’d thought it would be, but as with everything that had come before in our lives, we had little choice over it. You have to understand that I was as much under the military’s whim as my dad was, and complaining about it did nothing but make me miserable. This was my life. My very first memories were on a military base. I’d never known any other way of living. I knew on the edge of my thoughts that this time our move was more about me than my dad, but that didn’t make being stuck here any better.
    I wondered idly if my dad resented me for getting us dumped here.
    If I was sure this town was not what we were expecting from the freeway, it was solidified when we got to the mall. There’s a mall in Waukegan, Illinois that is so big you can fit two normal-sized malls inside it, easy. During Christmas, it’s so packed that the population of the mall is larger than most small cities. In San Diego there were three different malls I’d loved to go to when I was a kid even if I wasn’t going to get to buy something. From the outside, this mall looked more like two big stores with a couple of smaller stores connecting them. When we got inside, it was exactly what it looked like from the outside.
    There were more people than I expected, which was a start.
    The stores were a little different, though I saw a Spencer’s and a Hot Topic as well, which was cool, I guess. I was so busy taking everything in that I missed the two girls passing by us who checked me out and giggled as I walked by. My dad elbowed me and