Raising Stony Mayhall Read Online Free PDF Page A

pronounced judgment.
Delicious, spicy, yummy
were colored toothpicks he stuck into whatever appeared on his plate and remembered for next time. Chocolate, according to Chelsea, was the best food ever invented. Mrs. Cho’s kimchi was the worst ever, unless you ate with Mr. Cho and heard him grunt happily through a plateful. Stony didn’t want to offend Mom or Mrs. Cho, so he decided early on that he should
really like
everything put in front of him, and the way you proved you really liked something was to chow down. He taught himself to chew chew chew, letting his gut fill up like a lawn mower bag, and then later he’d slip out to the bathroom and throw everything up. He’d long since stopped thinking of this process as weird—it couldn’t possibly be weirder than pushing poop out your butt—but it was time-consuming. He kept up the pantomime because he loved sitting around the table with his sisters and hearing them talk about best friends and former best friends and the biology teacher with Jack Lord’s hair, and he loved the way his mother smiled to herself when he told her he liked the burnt spaghetti noodles at the edge of the casserole dish.
    Junie suddenly glanced out the window and saw him. Hefroze, and then Junie turned back to the table and announced at the top of her voice, “We forgot to say grace! Everybody close your eyes.”
    He ducked down, laughing silently, and then crept back to the barn with his prize.
    Kwang somehow figured out that Stony was in the barn. A little after five, he sneaked through the big doors and climbed up the ladder to the loft.
    “Hey, are you okay?” he said. “Did they get it out?”
    Stony sat with his back against an ancient bag of seed, staring straight ahead at nothing, the
Time
magazine open on his lap.
    “Look, I’m sorry I shot you, okay? I promise I won’t do that again.”
    Stony seemed to focus on him for the first time. “I—I think I’m …”
    “What? Is it hurting?”
    Stony handed him the magazine. On the cover was a black-and-white photo of a field full of bodies. In red letters it said, “The Fifth Anniversary.” Then in black letters below that: “Can It Happen Again?”
    “Look at the pictures.”
    Kwang flipped through some of the pages, and stopped at the two-page spread that showed a grassy field full of corpses. Men were tossing bodies into a huge bonfire. “Wow, there were a lot of ’em.”
    “Zombies,”
Stony said. He’d never said the word aloud before, didn’t really know what it meant. “A lot of zombies.”
    He took the magazine from Kwang and flipped to another page. “There were thousands and thousands of them. They were all over New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvaniaand some other places. They killed tons of people. They didn’t tell you about how big this was in school?”
    “Maybe. I don’t know. In social studies we haven’t even gotten to the Korean War yet.” Kwang said nobody knew about Korea. All the kids at school thought he was from Vietnam. “So what’s the deal? There were a lot of dead people.”
    “Kwang, they killed them all. Every one of them that had the disease.”
    “I thought they sent them to a hospital or something.”
    “That’s what I thought. That’s what Mom told me. But there never was a hospital. They just rounded them up and shot them and burned them.”
    “Geez,” Kwang said. Together they looked through the pictures again. Then Kwang said, “Does your mom know?”
    Stony stared at him. “Of course she does—they all do. My sisters, your family. Everyone’s been hiding this from me my whole life.”
    “It’s not like you’re very old.”
    “Shut up.” Stony got up from the floor and walked to the loft door, which was slightly ajar. He could see his mother’s station wagon in the lane, and the beater pickup that Alice drove. The Hardy Boys would call it a jalopy. “If the police found me, they’d kill me.”
    “They can’t kill you,” Kwang said. “You’re the