The Outside Groove Read Online Free PDF Page A

you doing?”
    â€œGoing to college.”
    â€œState?”
    I shrugged. “Depends.”
    â€œOn...?”
    â€œMoney. I just got into Cray College. Ever hear of it?”
    Uncle Harvey looked toward the river again, and as his eyes drifted along the horizon, following the river’s flow, he nodded. “Oh, I’ve heard of it,” he said quietly. “Yes I have. That’s a fine institution, Cray. A top-notch institution.” He turned back to me. “Your parents must be proud.”
    For no particular reason—maybe because I’d been raised to more or less exclude Uncle Harvey from my notion of who my family was—I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t broken the news to Big Daddy, Mom, and Wade yet. I shrugged again.
    â€œYou’re not just going to college,” Uncle Harvey said and looked downriver. The way he said it made me look away, too, and I felt like I could predict what he was going to say next: “Casey, your whole life’s about to begin.”
    A shiver ran down my arms. “I hope so,” I said. The feeling I’d had by the river’s edge, that lonely feeling, welled up a little. Uncle Harvey and I sighed at the exact same time, then we looked at each other and laughed.
    â€œWell, this was a pleasant surprise,” he said and smiled, his eyes catching the last flickers of sun.
    â€œIt was good to see you too.”
    I wanted to hug him, but I didn’t do it. We were family, but, in a way, we weren’t. At least that’s how I understood things.
    As Uncle Harvey got into his car, I began wondering, as I hadn’t done in a while, why I’d never really pressed my parents about why he’d never been involved in my or Wade’s lives. Maybe it was because, from the time I was a little kid, I was never interested in those kinds of questions
—indoor
questions, dull things grownups talked about, things involving other grownups. By the time I was in fourth grade, I was more concerned with what was going on out in our back meadow among the crickets, snakes, and birds; and then about summer lightning and why the roads cracked from underneath in the wintertime. When, in junior high, Wade started racing Karts—souped-up versions of the go-carts out at Intervale Fun Park—and my parents dragged me to Kart tracks around the state, I’d wander off in search of a swamp, creek, or field where I could pretend they’d brought me to do the things
I
liked to do. In eighth grade, I tracked a coyote for two miles through a new snowfall and didn’t return home until an hour after my mother had called the police. Chief Congreve was there to greet me. I was bursting with
outdoor
questions—satisfactory answers to which I couldn’t get from my parents, only from teachers, the library, and my computer. Maybe my mother and father had some of the answers, but when Wade’s racing became their obsession, any enthusiasm they showed for my interests seemed fake.
    As I stood back from Uncle Harvey’s car, the time that’d passed since I’d last seen him swirled in the dust he kicked up in the parking lot. He was a sweet man. A person could tell that just by looking at him. And even though we’d chatted only a few minutes, I had a strong feeling that he really understood what Cray College—and getting out of Fliverton—could mean to me. It suddenly seemed ridiculously unfair that I hadn’t been able to get to know him in all those years. What could’ve happened between him and Big Daddy to justify this wall between them—this wall between all of us?
    As I was crossing the lot to my car, another car crunched down the access road: a familiar swamp-green Dodge Dart. I paused at my door, pretending to fiddle with the lock, which wasn’t really locked, hoping to stall for a moment’s conversation. When the car pulled up to the riverbank, though, I glanced over and saw two