Why Dogs Chase Cars Read Online Free PDF

If you are on the annual staff, Miss Ballard wants to know if someone picked up her pictures by accident.”
    Shirley looked at me wide-eyed and put her right hand over her mouth. She said, “You stole Miss Ballard’s pictures,and she didn’t come in today, I bet, ’cause she’s having a nervous breakdown at home.”
    Mr. Botts said, “The Forty-Five High Home Ec Club will be selling handmade crocheted doilies so money can go to the football team’s new jerseys,” and then he went on and on. No one seemed to notice that he pronounced it “crotch-it-ed.”
    I said to Shirley, “Just tell me where the graveyard is. I can go by myself.”
    â€œYou can if you want to get killed by the spirits there,” she said.
    The bell rang and Miss Ballard’s homeroom class ventured off to whatever home ec, shop, or vocational class they needed to attend next. Shirley walked back to her desk and picked up her books. I said, “You want to meet me after school or something?”
    She shook her head no. “You leaving Forty-Five for good, ain’t you?”
    I said, “Do you mean am I going to college somewhere far from here? Uh-huh.”
    â€œI can’t take you to the slave graveyard until I know that you won’t be coming back. My daddy says I shouldn’t take no one back there in the first place. And I don’t want to make any judgment or nothing, but I don’t think you’ll be able to take what you’re going to see there, Mendal Dawes. I got family back there and it’s tough enough. But what you got back there’s going to drive you over the edge, boy.”
    She swished out of the room. I gathered up all of the Before photographs, put them in the envelope, and waited for the hallway to clear. Then I snuck inside the girls’ restroom and set the envelope on top of the Kotex dispenser. I went to Spanish class on time and said “
Presente
” like any native of Madrid. Later in the period Senora Schulze came over to me and put her hand on my forehead. She said, “
Calliente,
Mendal. Are you sick, or have you been thinking too hard?”
    I MISSED MY final three weeks of high school. Fortunately the Forty-Five school system worked on a weighted absentee basis, and seeing as I’d not officially missed but a couple days between first and twelfth grade—we were allowed five absences per semester—I had built up something like a hundred permitted unexcused absences. If I’d’ve known any of this—like if I had had a sixth-grade mathematics teacher worth a simple equation—I wouldn’t have shown up most of my final semester, or at least not after I’d gotten accepted by a college. I didn’t go to my own graduation. I wasn’t present to pick up my Spanish, English, or history awards. I wasn’t the valedictorian, seeing as I’d made a B in calculus. Libby Belcher chose to skip a second course in math and made an A in chorus.
    I sat at home, then took to realizing how I wasn’t sick, then went with my father wherever he thought it necessary to go. We went fishing. We drove up past the South Carolina–North Carolina border and looked at tracts of land hethought might be worthy of buying. We stopped at Stuckey’s and ate pecan logs. I tried not to think about how when I went off to college he’d either be horrendously alone or show up often at my dormitory unexpected.
    On the day that I finally got brave I said, “Do you know anything about a slave graveyard somewhere in Forty-Five, maybe over by the Ebos’ land?” We were on our way to a place called Hickory Tavern, where my father felt sure a superhighway would intersect one day.
    My father let up on the accelerator. He said, “I’m sure there are slave graveyards all over the state, Mendal. Why do you ask?”
    I thought to myself, You know why I’m asking. “Shirley said something