Read Like it Matters for Free Online Page A

Bruno after I’d tried to get a job at Helluva Rides.
    I followed the fence round to the back of the plot. On the door to the workshop there was a painted sign that said THE GENIUS IS … and then hanging underneath it, a big card saying IN !. All of a sudden I wished I’d had a beer earlier, or I had a cigarette right then, anything to stop my hands shaking so much
    And I wondered about heading home and coming back the next morning but I knew how that’d go—
    So I just knocked on the door, before I could think myself out of it.
    When it opened a tall guy was standing there, in white takkies and a tracksuit made out of parachute material. Dark blue, with green chevrons on it. Definitely a school tracksuit. He had a square face and short hair with a square fringe, low ears, chipped teeth in a slack mouth, small eyes and they blinked a lot when he talked.
    “Ja, can I help you?” he said.
    “Maybe. I really dig the yard out there.”
    “Oh thanksh, man. I do my besht, you know?”
    “Ja, well, it looks great. Do you run the whole thing by yourself?”
    “Ja, it’sh jusht me. Jusht me here.”
    “Could you use any help?”
    “Like what?”
    “I mean, is there any way I could maybe work here with you?” I said—
    And you should have seen the look on the dude’s face. Uncomprehending joy. Like he’d just won a lounge suite on a game show.
    He said, “Come in, come in,” and he stood to the side and waved me through the door. It was dark in there, the whole place lit by a bare bulb swinging from the ceiling and a desk lamp over in the corner of the room, standing on a trestle table. There was a book lying in the light pooled under the desk lamp.
    He went and sat down at the table and told me to make myself comfortable. I looked around but there wasn’t another chair. I leaned up against a big machine.
    He found an exam pad on the desk and then he scratched around and found a pen as well. “Oh, I’m Duade,” he said, then leaned forward and shook my hand. For some reason, I think he wrote his name down on the pad. “What’sh your name?”
    “Ed,” I told him.
    “Ed …?”
    “Bennett.”
    “How do I shpell that?”
    I told him, and he wrote it down. “What’re you reading there?” I said.
    “No, I’m writing.”
    “But the book there on the table, what is it?”
    It was a Harry Potter.
    Duade asked me a bunch of questions—some normal stuff, like my age and if I had a car and if I was married, but then also some weird ones, like my star sign, my blood type, who I voted for, how many times a week on average I went to church. Then I think he ran out of ideas and there was a long lull and to fill it I said, “Do
you
have a car?”
    He said, “Not anymore, hey. Do you?”
    “Uh, no. I think you asked me that already.”
    He turned back a page on the exam pad and read for a while, then said, “Hey, I did. Good shtuff.”
    Then Duade put the pen down and pushed the exam pad away across the desk. “But that’sh all boring things,” he said. “Tell me about yourshelf.”
    “I’m pretty sure that’d be another boring thing,” I said. He didn’t laugh. He just kept looking at me, that open-mouthed, blinking smile fixed on his face. “What do you want to know?” I said.
    “Tell me about your family.”
    “No ways.”
    “Okay, tell me about your firsht job.”
    “I want
this
to be my first job,” I told him. “And I don’t really care even if you can’t pay me that much. Just get me some paints and let me paint the carousel or something, please.”
    And I knew that’d probably do it, but just to be sure—
    Even though, already, I felt like I didn’t really want the thing I was about to win—
    A reluctant serpent under a sick flower, I stood up and brought my hands in front of me and stared a little down at my shoes and I said, “Duade, this will really help me, please. Please help me.”
    The old train station had scaffolding all over it—it looked caged in and a bit sinister,