Where the Road Takes Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

that, considering she’d been living there for the past five years.
    “She tried,” a deep voice boomed from behind me. Great.
    I turned toward the voice, arms still crossed. “Colonel.”
    He eyed me up and down and raised his eyebrows. My body went rigid. I balled my hands into fists behind my crossed arms. I knew what his expression meant. It meant that my crossed arms and casual posture were no way to greet a colonel, regardless of whether he was my dad or not.
    “You didn’t come home last night.”
    No hello . No how are you, son ? Nothing.
    I opened my mouth to speak, but he cut me off. He always did. “Midnight curfew,” he said. Then he paused for a beat, his jaw clenched. “I don’t know why you’re still messing around with that shit. Shooting a ball through a hoop won’t help you when the enemy’s pulling the trigger on an AK aimed at your damn head.”
    He spun on his heels and walked away.
    “Fuck you,” I said under my breath but then quickly raised my eyes. His back was still turned. He hadn’t heard. Thank God. I didn’t feel like an ass beating today.

    After such amazingly heartwarming conversations with both my parents, I decided I needed to get out of the house. So I did what I always did. I ran.
    Somehow, I ended up in the bushes where we’d found Abby’s things the night before. I wanted to make sure that she hadn’t left anything behind. It wasn’t like I went out of my way. I was there to run anyway. And it wasn’t like I was hoping to find something just so it gave me a reason to go to her house and give it to her. I was just . . . fuck it. Who was I kidding? I wanted to see her.
    Unfortunately for me, there was nothing around. But that didn’t stop me from stalking her, waiting for a glimpse of her outside her house. There were a bunch of kids playing in the front yard. Mary was there, too, sitting in the same spot that Abby and I had occupied only hours earlier.
    Forty-five minutes, I waited.
    I never saw her.
    I drove out to the half-court I’d been going to since I was a kid and shot baskets until the sun went down. I picked up food on the way home and ate in my room, where I stayed. I didn’t see either of my parents for the rest of the night.
    I went to bed early, hoping to get a full night’s sleep so I could actually focus the next day, but thoughts of Abby infiltrated my mind. I tossed and turned all night until my alarm finally went off. School was the last thing I wanted to deal with.

    You know what the problem with high school is? There is way too much of it. I figured everything I needed to learn could have been compressed into two hours a day. I’d have enjoyed it a lot more if I had to devote only a couple of hours of my life each day to educating myself on the subjects I actually gave a shit about. Two hours. That was all it would take.
    There was absolutely no need for lunch breaks and cafeterias, which were nothing more than a source of social awkwardness and opportunities for people like Hannah to develop and show off her hard-earned social status.
    I started to pick up the apple off my tray, but she took my arm and wrapped it around her shoulders. She was speaking to Sophie, her best friend. Something about a sale on bags. Tuning her out, I decided that leaving the apple would be better than having to deal with the future conversation of how it was important that we show a level of togetherness in public settings. Hannah—on the outside—was every guy’s wet dream. Perfectly straight brown hair, perfect blue eyes, perfect legs, perfect skin, perfect cheerleader body. She may have even been the perfect girlfriend, she just wasn’t perfect for me.
    I looked around the cafeteria and settled my gaze on a girl sitting alone at a table in the corner of the room. Our eyes locked, and I smiled at her.
    She blushed and looked away.
    This was my life. Everyone either had me on a pedestal or was afraid of me. Why? My hot girlfriend and the ability to shoot a