The Artist and Me Read Online Free PDF

nothing but green and the occasional road sign. The back road we’d taken was barren, marked only by a single yellow line down the center. We hadn’t passed a car in thirty-eight minutes.
    My fingers tapped uneasily against the dash of the car. I let out a little chuckle. “You aren’t bringing me out here to kill me, are you?” I joked. It was an extravagant question, but one that needed to be asked, even if just in a joking way.
    He grinned over at me. “I probably shouldn’t say, should I?” He was clever, that Mike.
    I rolled my eyes. “Mike, this is ridiculous. We’ve been driving almost two hours.”
    “That isn’t true! We’ve only been driving an hour and a half,” he retorted, but I sensed the car braking slowly. “Calm down, man. We’re here.”
    He pulled up a winding road that led into more trees. I was skeptical. It was practically a hole in the road that seemed to go on to infinity without really going anywhere. We rode in silence for a few minutes, listening only to the sound of steel guitars rumbling through the radio. Then the road bottomed out at a house. The old, rustic kind you see in movies, snuggled into the trees like a quaint hideaway. “What is this place?” I asked as we poured from the car.
    He grinned, opening the trunk of the car and pulling out a bag. “This, my good man, is the Getaway House,” he answered me, trudging forward through the dirt walkway toward the wooden porch.
    “Could you be more vague?” I was still standing at the car, waiting for someone to jump from the shrubbery with a machine gun and take down the only-born son of the Grant family. Maybe that was a bit dramatic, but this all seemed so strange.
    “It’s my grandpa’s old house,” he told me, glancing back with a grim smile. Mike’s granddad died a few months ago. They’d been close and he hadn’t really talked about it since it happened, so the fact that we were here at his house—which, for the record, I’d never been to—surprised me. “He left it to me in his will.” This, on the other hand, wasn’t a surprise. Mike’s dad, Mr. Fisher, and Mike’s granddad hadn’t been on the best terms. “So, I figured we could use it as a kind of a getaway.”
    I nodded, walking to meet him where he was standing on the porch. “Oh.” The word fell flat because I wasn’t sure what to say.
    He grinned, sliding the key in the lock. “Ready for the grand tour?” His mood was back up to par, along with that excited gleam in his eye that gave me the distinct feeling that he was up to something.
    I smiled anyway. “Sure, man.” He grinned, shoving the door open.
    I’m not sure what I was expecting to find on the other side of that thin wooden door, but it definitely wasn’t the huge room we now stood in. It was large and spacious with a big white couch directly across from a flat-screen—Grandpa Fisher did like football—and there were big armchairs on either side. That was just half of the room, though. The other side of the room was some sort of study. The walls were lined with books, and there was a large oak desk in the corner. But the center of the back wall was a massive fireplace directly across from a deep red loveseat. Beside that was a chair of the same hue.
    “Whoa,” I mumbled, looking over at Mike with a lifted eyebrow. “I seriously didn’t expect this.”
    Mike laughed, nodding. “Doesn’t look like an old man, does it?”
    “That’s not what I meant.”
    “You didn’t have to say it. I knew what you were thinking” he answered, striding across the room and down the hall. It was small and full of chipped white paint—the first sign of the house’s age. He pointed to the first door. “That was Grandpa’s room.” He didn’t open the door, just walked past it. I imagined it was like a portal to a different time—probably the only thing in the house that hadn’t been updated through the years. Even if it wasn’t, I was sure that Mike hadn’t changed a thing. He