Ryan White - My Own Story Read Online Free PDF

wonders too. Maybe five or six years ago, a long time after my parents had gotten divorced, Andrea decided to try to find the first Wayne. Without telling my mom, she called information in the Georgia town he was from. She told the operator all she knew: Wayne’s full name, and another clue—his father owned a casket company. But Wayne wasn’t listed. Maybe he moved. My mom says he had a bad heart, so he might even be dead by now. He never did call her again, even after we started getting splashed all over the news.
    About three months after my dad left, Mom did get re-married—to another man she worked with at the plant. I guess her second husband—his name is Steve Ford—liked her a lot, because she ended up getting a job at Delco that he was supposed to have. Steve is a great big, cheerful guy with a bushy beard. People are always telling him he reminds them of Kenny Rogers—and he does look just like him. It helps that Steve likes country music and dancing the two-step. He’ll drive as far as Louisville, Kentucky, way south of here, to try out a new dance joint he’s heard about.
    The other thing that Steve likes is Mustangs—mostly because of his name. He’s always driven a Mustang, and I never had any trouble talking him into taking me to car shows. He taught Andrea and me to drive, and he even ended up giving Andrea one of his old Mustangs. She has her eye on the one he has now—a convertible!
    Steve lived outside of Kokomo in a little country town called Windfall that makes Kokomo look like New York City. So when Mom and Steve got married, we moved there to live with him. Andrea and I played together a lot because there weren’t many other kids around.
    Indiana’s a windy place, especially in the winter. Windfall gets its name from all the tornados that pass through—even more than you usually get in the rest of the state. Since everything around Windfall is flat, and there aren’t any tall buildings, you can see the sky in every direction. When a tornado’s on the way, you can see its black funnel stretching from the storm clouds on the horizon to the ground below. The tornado’s moving all the time, and usually looks like it’s coming straight at you! It gets very dark out, and it looks like the whole earth and sky is being sucked into the funnel.
    The best thing to do in a tornado is to go down into your basement or your root cellar. In The Wizard of Oz Dorothy didn’t do that, and look at all the trouble she got into! Our house in Windfall didn’t have a cellar, so we just stayed indoors. One time a tornado struck our house. It roared like a freight train coming through, moving all around and under the house—like we were going to be lifted up into the sky! Mom, Andrea, and I lay on the bathroom floor, but there wasn’t room for Steve, he had to stay out in the hall. In the end the tornado pulled the back wall of the house out six inches, and then moved on. We had a pretty close call, I guess. When I was almost sixteen, Andrea, Mom, and I were out in California with my grandparents when there was an earthquake at seven o’clock in the morning. Our hotel swayed for twenty minutes, the power went off, and we could see cracks in the walls of our room! My grandparents wanted to get on the next plane home to Indiana, but I thought the whole thing was pretty exciting. An earthquake that’s 6.5 on the Richter scale with twenty-one aftershocks doesn’t happen in Kokomo.
    I would say that tornado was the most excitement we ever had in Windfall. But Andrea would disagree with me, because while we were living in Windfall, she started roller skating. All thanks to Steve: He liked to skate, and at first he took both of us along with him. I thought skating was okay, but as soon as Andrea laced on her first pair of skates, she was in love. She bugged and bugged Mom for lessons. At first, Mom thought she ought to switch to ice skating, but Andrea said, “There’s no ice rink here, and all my friends