Supervolcano: Eruption Read Online Free PDF Page A

happier if he’d taken Mom more seriously. Getting in touch with her inner self eventually meant walking out on Dad. Marshall might have rolled with it more easily had she acted happier afterwards. But she just seemed confused—more confused than usual, even.
    Rob said, “You help us make videos for the band, you’ll get your fair cut.” The way Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles were doing then, that would have been a fair cut of nothing. He didn’t need calculus to understand how much a fair cut of nothing was.
    Dad was the one who worried Marshall, though. For one thing, he was hard to snow. For another, he wrote the checks. He eyed Marshall the way he would have looked at someone he’d busted for running a Ponzi scheme. “I told you I’d support you till you got your bachelor’s,” he said.
    “Uh-huh.” Marshall had just nodded. Sometimes the less you said, the better off you ended uWith Dad, anything that came out of your mouth could be used against you.
    “I didn’t figure the sheepskin would take twelve or fifteen years,” Dad went on, an ominous mumble in his voice.
    “Yeah, well—” Marshall spread his hands. But that wasn’t good enough. Dad kept staring at him, willing words out of him. He had to be a hell of an interrogator. Marshall found himself saying, “I didn’t exactly expect it would work out like this, either.” That held . . . some truth, anyway.
    Dad grunted. “I don’t like to go back on my word. I’ll keep footing the bills—for a while. But I don’t like getting taken for a ride, either. I’m getting tired of these new majors. You hear me?”
    “Sure, Dad,” Marshall said. Arguing with his father was a losing proposition, and not just because Dad wrote the checks. Colin Ferguson had never smoked, but owned a deep, raspy voice that suggested two packs a day for thirty years. Marshall had a tenor—nothing even close to a baritone. His mom’s voice was high and thin, and so was his. Hard to sound serious about stuff when you squeaked.
    It wasn’t that Marshall didn’t or wouldn’t work. He’d glommed on to the usual part-time jobs at groceries and fast-food places and retail outlets. Those were great for pocket money and gas money and the like. They didn’t come within miles of making him self-supporting, not in Santa Barbara. It had some of the highest real-estate prices in the country, which made apartments similarly scream-worthy.
    He had no idea how he would make his living once he did get that sheepskin. Did anybody hire people with film degrees? Or would he still be going Do you want to supersize that, ma’am? when he hit fifty? That wasn’t what he thought of as the American dream.
    And so he tried to finish as slowly as he could. UCSB was a good school for that, and Goleta an even better town. If it wasn’t the party capital of the USA, he didn’t know what would be. The student newspaper listed a cocktail of the week—for people over twenty-one only, the pious disclaimer always said. One of the spring rituals was couch burning: getting publicly rid of furniture too beat up for even students to stand. The Goleta Fire Department did not approve, which probably worried nobody who didn’t work for the Goleta FD.
    Another ritual was going home for summer, or at least part of summer. Going home, for Marshall, meant the house where he’d grown up, the house where Dad still lived. He’d see Mom, sure, but he couldn’t stay with her. The condo she shared with Teo Acosta didn’t have room for guests, and they’d made it plain they wouldn’t have wanted any anyhow.
    Marshall didn’t know what to make of his folks’ breakup. What kid ever does? His father said as little about it as he possibly could. When he had to say something, his jaw clenched even tighter than usual. Mom would talk at the drop of a hat, or without one. But Marshall had seen long before she left Dad that you couldn’t count on everything she said.
    When he came home after finals this