The Waking Dreamer Read Online Free PDF Page A

his morning hot chocolate—his signature drink no matter how many kids mocked him for it—released a tired yawn, and willed his half-lidded eyes to respond to the sugar.
    Emmett turned his volume back up as he yawned again. Her maternal instinct overrode her sermon on the dangers young people, apparently, weren’t prepared for out in the wide world. “I heard that yawn. Did you even get enough sleep to do this?”
    “‘When you have insomnia, you’re never really asleep,’” Emmett quoted, “‘and you’re never really awake.’ Fight Club . So much truth. But yes, Nancy, you needn’t fear. By sugar and courage I drive forth into a new sunrise, with enough lens flare to make J. J. Abrams jealous.”
    “I have no idea what that means,” she said.
    “It means I’m wide-awake and so excited I could run to Florida,” Emmett answered. “And YouTube the lens flare bit after I’m gone. Totally worth it. Just have sunglasses on so you aren’t blinded.”
    “Em, that car won’t make it to Florida.”
    He hated “Em.” She knew it, and she said it when she had use for it. Nancy’s older-sister role-playing usually meant he had to tolerate her sometimes-condescending comments. She cared; it was her way of caring. Though it grated on him, it was the closest thing an orphan who’d grown up in a dozen different foster homes had ever known.
    The sea of red lights ahead winked out and traffic resumed forward en masse.
    “A broken-down car is a road-trip movie staple, Nancy. And it’s exactly what I need. Get thrown headfirst into adventure. Find allies in my quest. Learn something about myself and grow. I’m not going to get my hero’s journey started in that condo of yours. So, Act One begins out here on the open road, Ridley Scott style.”
    “Let me see if I understand you. Because that’s what you want from me, isn’t it? To understand?” Emmett could picture her on the phone: arms crossed, nearly a foot shorter than him, pacing the hallway in front of Gerry’s trophy case. It was the posture she took just before making what she felt was a logical and eloquent argument.
    “Sure. Shoot away.”
    “You’re leaving Houston, just getting into your car—a car so old it probably wouldn’t make the drive—without a job or any money, and driving to Florida—a state you’ve never been to—with little money and no job or ability to get a job other than your high school diploma that isn’t worth much, to find a birth mother you’ve never known and who’s dead now, anyway, all because of Ridley Scott?”
    This was the part when she raised an eyebrow, expectant of the imminent triumph. Too bad her logic always fell on deaf ears. Goes-with-his-gut ears.
    “Hey! Ridley Scott can do no wrong. Well, maybe one recent wrong, but that wasn’t his fault. He didn’t write the screenplay.”
    Signs indicated the interstate was two miles ahead. Emmett checked over his shoulder and moved into the far-right lane as he heard Nancy’s resigned sigh over the phone.
    “I give up. You go ahead and leave because of a chick flick. And then you wonder why people gossiped about you in school.”
    Emmett rolled his eyes, irritated more that she’d call Thelma & Louise a chick flick than the fact that she was making a dig on his masculinity.
    “Some guys want the damsel. I’ll take Ellen Ripley. That Power Loader mech suit is so much sex.”
    “I’ll buy you one then if you’ll just stay through your eighteenth birthday. After New Year’s you can head out. It can’t be that bad here.”
    Traffic was thinning, Emmett increasing speed expectantly. He was close, and soon it would be an ending and beginning at the same time.
    “Didn’t you ever know that you didn’t belong somewhere, Nancy? That you just needed to get away and try something different? Even if just to prove to yourself that you were fine right where you were in the first place?”
    She went silent. Expecting she was preparing another counter-argument,