Read Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands for Free Online

across her chest, leaning against this stainless steel refrigerator big enough for a moose.
    “I don’t think I have any left,” I mumbled. I had brought money, of course, but I’d spent it already. I had maybe a crumpled-up dollar bill on me somewhere. So, you can see how awkward this was. But I can deal with awkward. What I can’t deal with is getting hissed at for being “inconsiderate” and trying “to take advantage” of her son. Her precious Philip. I was embarrassed and I didn’t getwhy. And I was royally pissed—way more PO’ed by the time we left than Philip’s mom.
    Now, a normal girl would probably have just gotten in Philip’s car and gone home. A normal girl would probably have just steered clear of that whole whack-job family. Not yours truly. As part of the celebration a few weeks earlier when I had gotten my learner’s permit, my dad had made me a set of keys to our car. So, I had them on me. As we walked past his mom’s robin’s-egg blue Beemer SUV, I stopped and said to Philip, “I think I’m going to owe your mom for a little more than gas.” Then, right there in their driveway, I took my car key and keyed in the letters FU on the passenger door and scratched away as much of the paint as I could before Philip stopped me.
    I think I’d made my point. But my parents took away my keys for a while and my phone for a week, and I was grounded for almost the rest of the summer. And Philip and I never went on a second date, and we totally avoided each other when school started again in September.
    Still, see what I mean about extenuating circumstances? I was a jerk, but so was Philip’s mom.

    I knew the school buses were driving southwest. I knew we were on Route 100. I wondered how far away they were going to take us. Some of the kids were stunned and super quiet, and some of the kids were going on and on about what they were reading about the disaster on their phones. I was seated against a window, which was filthy because of the rain, and I was glad Ethan was on the aisle between me and the next kid. Still, I had a girl named Sara from my history class in the seat behind me, and she knew my dad worked at the plant. She knew my mom and my dad both worked at the plant. It was why we had moved to Reddington when I was four. And she kept pestering me, asking me questions, and was even getting a little hysterical.
    “How bad is it?” she kept asking me. Or, “Did your dad say anything this morning?”
    “I didn’t see my dad this morning.”
    “Did he say anything last night?”
    “No.”
    “Did—”
    Finally Ethan turned around and asked her to chill.
    I held my phone in my lap, but I didn’t open the browser to check the news. I just kept waiting and waiting for a text or a call from my mom or dad, which, of course, never came.

    They brought us to Johnson State College and put us in the school’s dining hall. By then we all knew that the crisis was bad and getting worse, because we had been on the bus for, like, forty-five minutes. All the news reports about the power outage and the batteries couldn’t be wrong. People kept saying to me, “They’ll fix it before it melts down, right?” I tried not to lash out, but a few times I did. I mean, how was I supposed to know?
    We also knew from our texting that kids from other schools had been evacuated, too, and had gone to places like St. Johnsbury and Hyde Park and Stowe. At the college dining hall with us were kids from an elementary school in Barton. Most of them, especially a lot of the kindergarteners and first and second graders, didn’t know enough to be really scared, and it seemed to me that their teachers were doing a pretty good job of keeping them from freaking out. There were a few girls who were crying, but they were clearly drama queen ten-year-olds—like the sixteen-year-old drama queen I had riding on the seat behind me on the bus.
    I have no idea how they decided which kids would go where and why they put a high