Growing Up Dead in Texas Read Online Free PDF Page B

proper, in imitation—one day when the clouds were trailing what looked like smoke at their southeast edges, the sky green and quiet like it can get, everybody from both houses ran for the cellar. Only, at the metal door, there was this awkward moment, this bad piece of luck.
    Kelly’s aunt’s big sister, she was pregnant at the time, and pretty far along.
    And Kelly’s aunt, that month she had measles.
    They couldn’t both go down into that cellar.
    So what happened, Kelly said, why her aunt chases tornadoes now and is probably going to die from it someday, is that she had to stand out there by the door, holding onto the cable so tight that the rusted cable left a print in her jaw, her family all right there under her until the storm passed.
    I always wanted to have a dream about that, about being that girl left up there like that for the storm, my hair lifting all around me, but you don’t get to choose, I guess.
    Me, I went for the library option, looked up the Stanton coop fire in my grandmother’s scrapbook, recited what I could. Nobody cared, least of all me.
    Michael Graham got a few laughs, though. What he’d done at the last minute was make a two-page list. The title was “Things The Wind Has Taken Away.” What he had listed were frito pies and hats and homework, especially—grinning at us over the top of his paper—homework.
    Ms. Easton looked over her glasses at him, about this. Tried not to smile, I think.
    We all wished we’d thought of that list, too. All had one ready, I mean, and were calling it out to him.
    It was a hard act for Adam Moore to follow. Tommy’s littlest brother.
    Because even as a freshman Tommy had already been a basketball star, Adam got his report from the box of newspapers his dad had saved. It was a run-through of last year’s district-winning season, of all the juniors returning that year as seniors, and then he broke down each player’s stats, finally trailed off when none of us were listening. Making a show of not listening, really. If we could have made cricket sounds with our mouths, we would have.
    “Good, good,” Ms. Easton said, and then the bell rang and we were gone, and I never thought about that Stanton fire again until about a month ago, I don’t think.
    Kelly Janer’s aunt’s story, though, it made sense just a year or two later, when I got to know her better, doing homework at her house, back in her bedroom, the door always open, her mom never more than a few feet down the hall. Her mom who had obviously written that report for her. Her mom who was that older sister, who had got to step down into that cellar. Kelly the oldest of her daughters, the first one, the one who had to be protected from the measles, from bad grades, from boys—from me.
    If not for her aunt, though, then Kelly, right? Who wouldn’t even be at the front of the class to read that story then.
    And, Adam. Adam Moore.
    He won all-tournament in Crane as a sophomore, all-state his senior year, when basketball made regionals, but he fought too much in the parking lots too. He’s a roofer in Odessa now, in spite of his picture-book jumper, the way he could just launch back and hold, hold, release. The last I heard of him, I was already at college. He was doing the Midland thing. What it involved, mostly, was fighting, at least until he met a certain Stanton Buffalo in a field just north of town, one of the ones being converted to a neighborhood, so that it still had volunteer cotton coming up around the poles.
    Did he remember that Stanton’s who we played that first Friday, after the fire?
    I think so, yeah.
    It’s the first thing I thought when I heard about it, anyway.
    As to who that Buffalo was, it doesn’t matter. Or, I don’t want to make up a name for him. It’s enough that he came from a family known for fighting, and took Adam down fast and easy.
    But Adam, he wouldn’t stay down. That was always the thing about him.
    He came back again and again, and each time that