The Year of My Miraculous Reappearance Read Online Free PDF

thirteen-year-old to say.”
    I said, “Well, I'm thirteen. And I just said it.”
    He laughed the way grown-ups do when they say they're laughing with you. Only I'm never laughing.
    Then he pulled a flask out of his jacket pocket and took a snort of something.
    “I'd take some of that,” I said. I'm not exactly sure what “that” was. But on him it looked like a good idea, and I wanted to give it a try.
    “Bad enough I gave you the cigarette.”
    I opened my mouth to try the old wheedle and whine, but he didn't even give me that much time.
    “This one's not negotiable,” he said.
    That pissed me off a little, so I turned my back on him. Like only rocks existed in the universe.
    “You know what it reminds me of,” he said, “when I see you up in that tree?” I shrugged and braced for the worst. “It reminds me of a story I wrote in high school. Haven't thought about it for years, but I think about it all the time now. It was about these hordes of little kids who just sort of … packed up and split. The girls launched out to sea on boats, and the boys climbed up in trees. The Coast Guard went out looking for the girls but they were gone. And the fire department put ladders up in the trees but they were empty.”
    I dropped my cigarette and completely forgot to look cool. “Gone? Like, for good?” It seemed almost too good to be true, even in somebody's imagination.
    “Yup. Forever. Teacher didn't like it, though.”
    “Figures.”
    “She said she didn't understand it. Where did I think these thousands of kids had gone? I said, ‘Well, someplace that's really a whole different world. They just went somewhere different.’ Know what she said?”
    I shook my head in a way that must've looked stupid.
    “ ‘What's wrong with this world?’”
    “But she was kidding, though. Right?”
    “Don't know. To this very day I haven't figured that out.”
    “She must have been kidding.”
    “She only gave me a C-plus.”
    I shrugged and skipped another stone, the spell broken. “Grown-ups,” I said.
    “Yeah. Grown-ups.”
    I held on to Zack on the way home.
    Later that night I was sitting up in my tree house, to get away from the fighting. Mom had locked Zack out of the bedroom and he was pounding on the door and shouting. That went on for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then beautiful silence for an hour or so.
    I saw Zack come out and sit on the back stoop. He looked up like he was trying to see if I was up there watching or not, but it was too dark to really see. All of a sudden I knew I'd been waiting and watching for exactly this, but I didn't know it until it happened. Isn't it weird that you can be thinking things and feeling things and not even know it?
    I climbed down.
    “Hey,” Zack said when I sat on the porch next to him. He was acting like he wasn't still upset but I could tell he was. I could hear it in his voice, even just that one word.
    I said, “Hey.”
    Then we sat like that in the dark for a while, and I knew I wanted to say something to him, but I couldn't figure what itwas supposed to be. Once I even opened my mouth, thinking it would say itself as I went along, but nothing came out.
    Zack was drinking a beer out of the bottle, a longneck. When he took out a cigarette I reached my hand out and he gave me one. And neither one of us even had to say a word.
    The smoke felt hot and burny going down into my lungs, but I didn't mind.
    “Do you still have that story somewhere?” I asked, and my voice sounded really jarring to me after all that quiet.
    “What story?”
    “The one about the kids who disappeared.”
    “Oh. That one. Oh, hell, that was so long ago. I've moved probably thirty times since then. And once when I was in jail my roommate threw out all my stuff.” His words sounded squishy, not hard at the edges. Like my mom when she drinks too much.
    I reached for his beer bottle and pulled it out of his hand. My hand brushed his just a little bit while I did it, but I didn't do that on