The Lottery Read Online Free PDF Page A

basket for stuff after stuff until he’d dropped, gasping, to the pavement, but he’d never tried out for school teams, had dropped phys ed as soon as it was no longer a required course.
    He could still swish jump shots from incredible angles up and down the alley, but right now he was splayed in bed, Snoresville. Second year university, and Dusty never got up before nine, regardless of his class schedule. Sal thought university sounded like a great improvement on high school — no one taking class attendance, responsibility that could be abused in an endless variety of ways. She could hardly wait.
    Mounting her bike, she rode the clean wet streets toward Wilson Park, a route she often used as a short cut to school. Her hair lifted easily into the breeze and she raised her chin so she couldn’t see the ground, even her handlebars — an old game where she pretended she flew above the earth like the wind. This morning she wasn’t going to think about scrolls, tasteless jokes, or the jerks who played them. From what Lizard had said, it couldn’t have been Shadow Council who’d sent her the two scrolls, and anyone else was relatively irrelevant. Reaching the park, she jumped the curb, then veered through an opening in the hedge that ran around the perimeter, getting a soaker when her knee brushed the foliage. The grass was a sparklingfilm of droplets, broken by footprints and one double set of wheel tracks that curved in a long sinewy wave pattern. Looking up, she spotted Brydan cruising across the park. The sine wave pattern was his signature. He said he was practicing logarithms.
    “Hey, brown-noser,” Sal hollered. “Getting your Trig done early?”
    Brydan spun a one-eighty and waited for her to catch up. As usual he was smoking, jigging his shoulders as he listened to his diskman. Brydan was a big jazz fan — Keith Jarrett, Oscar Peterson, Cecil Taylor. He used a manual wheelchair and wore gloves most of the time, his upper body taut with muscle from working out in the small gym his parents had set up for him in their rec room. When he’d told Sal about the car crash, there were things he didn’t have to describe — she was already there, spinning into the darkness with him. His older sister Cheryl had been driving, fourteen-year-old Brydan beside her in the front seat, both of them wearing seat belts, both high on acid. The icy patch had surfaced just before the railway crossing; they’d slid screaming through the barrier and struck the passing train. It had been an old car with a long front end. The train had crumpled the engine like Kleenex, right to the windshield, then carried the car for two hundred meters before dropping it and roaring off into the night. Brydan had lost both legs below the knees. Cheryl had survived with black eyes, a few scrapes, and recurring migraines that had her begging for the world to end.
    Sal’s father had hit the windshield with such force, his brains had been smeared from one end of the glass to the other. She’d been sitting next to him in the front seat, buckled firmly into her seat belt, and that moment ofimpact had ingrained itself deep into her consciousness where it lurked, hidden and waiting. If she tried to think about the accident, she couldn’t remember a thing. Then, suddenly, memory would surface while she was staring out a window, fly right past her and disappear before she realized what had hit her. Sometimes it happened when she ran into Brydan unexpectedly — her brain would open, there’d be the mad screaming rush of memory, then a thud like a door slamming, and darkness. She’d learned to squeeze these moments thin and tiny, like the ticks of a clock, and let them pass into the deep dark nothingness of her mind.
    “No way!” Putting on a loud smile, she skidded to a stop in the wet grass beside Brydan. “You took your clarinet home already?”
    Clarinet case #12 poked out of the large pocket attached to the back of Brydan’s chair. “My little