Vigilantes of Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

alien? No.
    Did anyone ask if he wanted to listen to his parents rip on each other non-stop and look to him for agreement? No.
    He knew a thing or two about pressure too, but Grandma and Grandpa didn’t think about that.
    The grey rain beat on the window for over a half hour while Mark lay on his bed, cooling down. The pillow was damp and the room dark when he finally sat up. Apparently Mom wasn’t going to chase up here after him this time. Good. He was sick of, “Please, Mark, just cooperate with me,” and “Things will settle down and get better, I promise.” Things weren’t getting better and they couldn’t get a whole lot worse, he thought bitterly, trying to swallow the heavy lump in his throat. Everything in his life was wrong.
    Mark paced the room, looking again at the old stickers his aunts had left marring the pine paneling of the walls. “ Jellystone Park ” and “Walt Disney World” and mini-maps of states like Arizona to California. The grandparents had taken their kids on plenty of vacations once; he’d never been anywhere.
    Mark slammed his fist against a faded Jellystone Yogi sticker. It resounded with a hollow echo. The eaves were behind this wall, he realized, and looked for the entry. He’d gone into the narrow attic corridor once before, from his mother’s room down the hall. The dusty space was filled with trunks and curling pictures and boxes of forgotten odds and ends that had stacked high in the century his ancestors had owned this house.
    There, behind the bed. The paneling looked whole to the casual glance, but a close examination revealed the grooves of a long unused door.
    Mark slid the bed away from the wall and found the tiny latch, heretofore hidden by the headboard. He pulled it, and the warm draft of stale air and dryrotted wood puffed into the room. He inhaled deeply, savoring the musty smell. The scent of treasure!
    A half dozen open boxes of mouse poison were scattered inside the door, their contents slopped over onto the plywood. A sprung trap lay to the right. No still furry bodies, though. He stepped over the extermination devices, and felt along the wall for a light. A bulb hung near the door in his mother’s room, so there should be one here as well. His hand grew sticky with spiderwebs, which he violently flung away. Then he found and pulled the string for the light. The bare bulb flicked to life, casting a sallow yellow glow across a burial ground of memories. Closing the door behind him, Mark sat in the middle of the narrow open space and looked around.
    One side of the attic ceiling slanted sharply to the floor just a couple feet away on one side, while boxes and lamps and other odd items were stacked against the bedroom wall.
    Eager to explore, he began pulling down boxes, and digging through their contents. Here was one with old dishes, chipped and covered with fine yellow fractures, but packed away nonetheless. Not like the grandparents would actually throw anything away, he thought with a shake of his head. Here was a box of newspapers, cracking with age. They were important headlines, he realized, finding a banner “One Small Step…” across the top of one from 1969, which lay atop another paper with a picture of a black car and headline screaming “Nation Mourns the Death of a President.” Other, older papers showed veterans returning after wars, and one proclaimed a world series victory for the Chicago Cubs. Mark read the whole story in that paper, disregarding the flakes of yellow paper that fell like rust in his lap as he turned the pages.
    In another box he found a strange collection of artifacts – ancient pictures of grim looking people, staring out of the thick paper-backed photos almost in challenge. So you think your life is so bad? Try living in 1910, he could almost hear them saying. Here was a more recent stack, with his grandparents before their hair had thinned and grayed. In the foreground lounged a girl of sixteen or seventeen, with long