Hero–Type Read Online Free PDF Page B

too late at night, eating buckets of takeout wings from Cincinnati Joe's and drinking beer in the bushes so that no one busts us and smoking and listening to Flip, who blathers on about whatever wild thoughts have invaded his brain lately—radiation from quasars, prime numbers, college student plagiarism, last night's TV, sex. Whatever.
    By the time the sun's gone down and the park has emptied out of the families, we're all pretty smashed, except for Flip, the designated driver. ("Dying in a car wreck isn't Foolish—it's just stupid.") Then again, Flip's permanently high on his own adrenaline and brainwaves, so he doesn't
need
booze or drugs.
    Speedo had the foresight to bring a little baggie of pot, so we roll up and light up and sort of blunder around the park, losing more and more touch with reality. It's a great way to access Fooldom. You think and say stuff while drunk or stoned that you'd never think or say otherwise.
    I end up lying in the grass near the baseball diamond with Tit, the two of us just staring up at the stars, which suddenly look like giant, winking eyes. I've known Tit the longest of the whole Council. We grew up together in my old neighborhood, back when Mom and Dad were still together. We always end up doing this—splintering off—when the Council gets together. Flip calls us the Subcommittee.
    Tonight, it's like the sky is
watching
us from every angle, and even though I'm stoned, this doesn't worry me or make me paranoid. It sort of makes me feel safe and secure. Like someone has my back.
    It makes me think of my favorite verse from the Bible. Not that I know much about the Bible, tell the truth. I mean, I'm no scholar or anything. But I paid attention back when I used to go to Mass, and this one verse really hooked me one time when Father McKane was giving his sermon, so I looked it up later.
    "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will
fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered."
    That's from Matthew. And what it basically means is that God's watching and he doesn't miss anything, which is a good thing.
    And it makes me think like maybe tonight God punched holes in that big black vault overhead so that he could keep tabs on me and keep me from doing anything else really, unbelievably dumb or evil.
    It's too late for the dumb, evil things in my past, but maybe there's still time to rescue me from my future idiocy.
    Tit starts blabbing about girls.
    We Fools, we tell each other everything.
    Almost.
    We keep no secrets from each other.
    Almost.
    So Tit's babbling about girls and that makes me think about Leah, and I wonder how the universe can be so screwy that I've ended up in this position—called a hero when I know I'm nothing of the sort.
    Flip says that chaos dominates the world. That everything is made up of these things called fractals, which I don't understand, but Flip's brilliant, so I just believe him and he says that with fractals, the
ending
of something is completely dependent on how it
starts.
So what if ... What if I'd never bought the video camera? What if I'd never worked at the Burger Joint two summers ago? Would I still have ended up in that alley? And would the world still believe the great lie, maybe the
ultimate
Fool prank, that Kevin Ross is a hero?
    I don't know. I'm not smart enough to know. But I think Leah would probably be dead, if that was the case. So do I have to bear the burden of my guilt to save her? Is that the price I pay?
    My head starts to hurt from all of the thinking. Fortunately, Tit interrupts me.
    "Who would you do?" he asks. He blows out some smoke and passes his cigarette over to me. The pot and beer are gone, and the two of us are down to two cigarettes, which we're sharing to try to make them last longer. Neither of us feels like getting up to look for the others to bum more smokes.
    "What do you mean?"
    "C'mon. Of the girls at South Brook. Who's in your top