The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen Read Online Free PDF

polite. I just walked past him and took the stairs two at a time to our apartmentbecause I didn’t want to wait for the elevator. I ate my crap lunch while I watched crap daytime TV, and I had a third bag of chips, even though I and my wobblies knew I shouldn’t.
    When I was done my lunch, I snuck into Dad’s bedroom and pulled the shoebox out from under his bed.
    “Dickhead,” I whispered.
    Then I went into my own room and crawled into bed.
    I’m still in bed.
    I’ll stay here till Dad comes home.
    4:15 p.m.
    The phone’s ringing. It’s probably Cecil. I’m supposed to be sitting in his crappy little office at the health center right now.
    4:30 p.m.
    The phone is ringing
again
. Third time in a row. Cecil may not be a good therapist, but I give him marks for persistence.
    5:00 p.m.
    When I was in the boys’ washroom today, I noticed someone had written
School is Hell
on one of the stall doors.
    I pulled out my own pen, put an
X
through the word
School
, and wrote
Life
.

S ATURDAY , F EBRUARY 2
    3:00 a.m.
    I dreamed about my brother again. Not about IT, but about the Other Thing. I could hear Jesse screaming. I tried to run toward him, but it was like I was running through pea soup. Then I heard the sound of duct tape being pulled off a roll.
    Dad woke me up. He said I was yelling in my sleep.
    4:00 a.m.
    Now Dad and I are both in the living room, watching TV. I’m in my pj’s and Dad’s wearing the robe Mom made him a zillion Christmases ago. It’s made of navy blue velour, with a patch on the chest that says
World’s Greatest Dad
.
    It’s a strange TV landscape at 4:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Among the infomercials, we’ve found an old black-and-white movie called
Bringing up Baby
. The baby is a tiger. Seriously. It stars some famous dead actors. Their lines are fast and funny, but I still feel a bit anxious that one of them might get mauled to death by the tiger at any moment. It doesn’t seem like that kind of movie, but sometimes you can be in for a rude surprise.
    6:00 a.m.
    Phew
. Nobody was mauled. I liked that movie.
    Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could write the movie script for your own life? I guess it would have lots of boring bits. But at least you could write yourself a happy ending.
    Later
    After Dad and I got up for real at around eleven, we went shopping for supplies for our earthquake kit. We already have a lot of items, like sleeping bags and flashlights and a good first-aid kit, because of all the camping we’ve done. But today we were after food. We drove to an outdoor store called the Three Vets and stocked up on Meals-Ready-to-Eat (MRE’s as they’re called in the military). You can just cut open the bag and squeeze the food right into your mouth if you want. Dad and I tried a bag of corned beef hash when we got home, and it wasn’t half-bad.
    “We’ll keep the kit in the hall closet,” Dad said as he put the MRE’s into a huge plastic bin along with our other supplies. “They say you should keep it near the front door so you can grab it on your way out.”
    I didn’t have the heart to tell him that if we do have an earthquake, we’ll have bigger things to worry about than trying to grab our kit, like the third and fourth floors collapsing on top of us.
    Dad has been obsessed with building this kit from the moment we moved here. Don’t get me wrong: We
should
have an earthquake kit, living in BC. But we never had a kit in Port Salish. My parents never got around to it.
    I don’t need a degree in psychology to know what Cecil would say:
Your father couldn’t stop the first disaster, so now he’s trying to plan ahead for the next disaster so the outcome won’t be as devastating
.
    See, Dad thinks the first disaster was his fault.
    It was his gun.
    Dad owned an old hunting rifle that had belonged to my grandpa Kaspar Larsen, who died before I was born. (That is what the
K
stands for in my name, but I don’t advertise it.) Once a year, during deer season, Dad