Read How to Disappear for Free Online Page B

one-up Dan Barrons. Not today.
    “It’s condescending.”
    Berger is pacing around like a matador waiting for the bull to charge.
    All I want to do is charge, gore him, and leave town.
    “All the ordinary jerks take the big road with the streetlights. The superior poetic guy we’re supposed to admire takes the cool nonconformist road. Come on, did you ever find one student who thought it was cool to take the more traveled road?”
    Mr. Berger says, “Did you read this poem?”
    After English, Calvin corners me by my locker. “What’s wrong with you?”
    I don’t blurt things I don’t want blurted, even to Calvin, even when we’re plowed and running off at the mouth. But I blurt, “I have to run an errand for Don.”
    “Are you brain-damaged?”
    Don’s my go-to excuse for acting brain-damaged, even I know this. And according to my former girlfriend—and Dan Barron’s current girlfriend—Scarlett, I’m the least insightful guy in Nevada.
    “I have to get out of here. Want to say we’re camping until college?”
    “Riiiiiight.” Calvin doesn’t camp. Boy Scout camp with Calvin was me doing all his camping shit for him and him paying me off with poker winnings taken off guys from other troops who thoughtthey knew how to play cards. “You want to tell me where you’re really going?”
    I shake my head.
    “Cool,” he says. “A mystery errand for a sociopath.”
    “No choice.”
    He waves his arms like a distraught stick figure. “Because free will is an illusion?” Is anyone not pissed at me today? “Maybe you need to think this over.”
    “That’s helpful. Maybe you need to go screw yourself.”
    “Maybe you need me to tutor you on Robert Frost and vocab, asshole.”
    The most ridiculous part of the day is that I like the poem.
    Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
    I took the one less traveled by,
    And that has made all the difference.
    Only some guys don’t get to screw around in the woods in Wherever-the-Hell, New Hampshire, bird-watching or whatever Robert Frost was doing. They get stuck on a third path that leads straight out of the woods.
    “Have fun telling your mom,” Calvin says.
    • • •
    Unfortunately, I’m not doing that well breaking it to my mom that I’m heading out of the endless subdivisions and strip malls of home. She’s the kind of mom who, if you have a condom inyour wallet, will find it and want to know what it’s doing there. You’d think she’d have been happy she had one stand-up kid: she wasn’t. It’s hard to figure, if she notices something that small, how I’m going to slip out of town.
    I love my mom—she went through worse than I did—but I’m going rogue, and there’s nothing she likes about rogue on me. I’m thinking I’ll tell her over dinner, but she slides a platter of pork chops across the kitchen table and clears her throat, generally a preamble to me being in for it.
    “If this is about mouthing off to Mr. Berger, I’m not apologizing for how I interpret a poem.”
    “Jackson, look at me and tell me you didn’t cut class this morning.”
    “I haven’t cut all year! How can you ask me that as if I did it?”
    I don’t ever catch a break from her. When I cut one day after APs last year, she acted like I was headed straight to lockup. She made me paint the garage two coats of Navajo White. By the second coat, it was ninety-five degrees outside, and the garage looked fine without it.
    The way she sat quietly for her whole married life when she had this in her is a testament to my dad’s powers of intimidation.
    “Is this a random check to see if I’m a repeat offender? Does the house need painting? Thanks, Mom.”
    “I’m sorry.” She doesn’t look sorry. “The motion detectors went off this morning, and the dogs were in the yard. If you came home, that would explain it.”
    All of a sudden, I don’t care what she thinks I did. “When didthey go off? Is there security footage? Did the patrol come by?”
    “Calm down!