Just Beneath My Skin Read Online Free PDF Page B

over — though he never made it as far as Canada because he didn’t know where it was on the map. It said he was a great warrior, the greatest ever, and after he beat all those people up and killed the soldiers and raped the wives and took over the land he was kind and just and a good king.
    Whenever I think of my middle name I feel good about it somehow. I whisper it to myself sometimes when no one’s around: Alexander. It’s like Jake has buried something special right inside me somehow by naming me that, like there’s this great warrior caught between my first name and my last, waiting to come out.
    Whenever things go bad I try to think of him and what a great fighter like him would do in my place.

WHEN I WAS FIVE I fell in my grandfather’s barn. I liked to go into the loft because I liked the smell of the hay. He stored it in stacked bales ten high and when he needed some he and I would climb up and he’d let me help throw the bales down to the floor of the barn and watch them break open then pull them into rows to pitch to the cows. But sometimes I would go up alone and climb the bales and sit at the top and breathe in the smell of the fresh-cut hay and watch the hay dust drift into the shafts of light cutting in from the barn windows. My grandnan didn’t like me in there. She was afraid I would fall, but Grandad didn’t mind as long as I was careful. But one time climbing the tallest stack of hay in the loft I lost my footing, grabbed hold of a bale to keep from falling, and the whole stack came down. I landed on my back and the bales tumbled down in a pile on top of me.
    Later everyone said it was lucky I didn’t break a bone, or my back. Granddad said there must have been ten bales or more on top of me when he found me. But I wasn’t hurt. I lay there smelling the warm hay, feeling its weight on top of me, wondering about the darkness because the bales had sealed me off from the world and the light. I wasn’t scared. It was the first time I remember thinking it was strange how the world could go from one way to another in a minute, from one simple misstep. From light and air to darkness and heaviness and the smell of hay so close around me it pressed in like a blanket. I’ve thought of that many times since. I didn’t fight my way out from under the hay. I lay there for what seemed like hours, until my granddad came up to check on me and found me under the hay and lifted it all off and set me free.
    â€œYou gave us half a scare, boy,” he said later. “Thought you were dead for a minute.”
    I never told my granddad I could have made my own way out from underneath the hay any time I wanted. That I didn’t because I liked the darkness, and the smell, and I knew things under the hay I couldn’t have known at any other time. I was only five.

WHEN I WAS FIVE I almost died.
    Mom said it was something called a “summer complaint.” I got all filled up and couldn’t breathe and they took me to the Oldsport hospital. A whole bunch of doctors and nurses put needles in my arms and took my temperature.
    I was really scared. Jake and Mom weren’t allowed to see me, because the doctors thought they might get it too. The doctors and nurses who came into my room had to wear masks. The nurses were really nice, but I still wanted to go home. I couldn’t sleep at night. There was too much light, and the nurses kept coming in and waking me up. Once during the day I fell asleep and when I woke up Jake was sitting beside my bed with a white mask over his mouth and nose. It looked like he was crying.
    â€œWhat’s wrong, Jake?” I asked.
    â€œNothing, squirt,” he said. “How you feeling?”
    â€œI want to go home, Jake,” I said.
    â€œSoon, squirt,” he said. “Soon.”
    I was in the hospital for almost a whole week and when I went home I didn’t have to go to school in September when it started.