Read Marrying Daisy Bellamy for Free Online Page B

face and asked, “Hey, did you finally get laid, Jughead?”
    Julian simply laughed and grabbed a bottle of Gatorade from the fridge.
    â€œYou must have finished your presentation, then,” said Davenport.
    â€œBarely started it.”
    â€œWhat’s the topic again?”
    â€œSurvivable Acts in Combat.”
    â€œWhich means it’ll be a very short list, eh? No wonder you’re not worrying.”
    â€œYou’d be surprised what disasters a person can survive,” Julian said.
    â€œFine. Surprise me.” Davenport swiveled away from his computer screen and waited.
    â€œParachute mishap, if you can find a soft place to fall,” Julian said, rotating his sore shoulder.
    â€œHa-ha. Give me a rocket-propelled grenade over that, any day.”
    â€œA grenade can be survivable.”
    â€œNot to the guy who throws himself on top of it to save his buddies.”
    â€œYou want to throw the thing back where it came from, ideally.”
    â€œGood to know,” said Davenport.
    Julian wasn’t worried about the topic. The hard part of life did not involve physical tasks and academic achievement. He could do school, no worries. He could run a marathon, swim a mile, do chin-ups one-handed. None of that was a problem.
    He was challenged by things that came easily to most other people, like figuring out life’s biggest mystery—how love worked.
    That was about to change.
    There was no textbook or course of study to show him the way, though. Maybe it was like getting caught in a wind shear. You had to hang on, navigate as best you could and hope to land in one piece. That was kind of what he’d always done.
    February 2007
    Julian stared at the cover letter from the United States Secretary of the Air Force. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Three different ROTC detachments had admitted him, and now he had confirmation of his scholarship. Crushing the formally worded notice against his chest, he stood in the middle of a nondescript parking lot and looked up at the colorless sky over Chino, California. He was going to college. And he was going to fly.
    Although bursting with the news, he couldn’t find anyone to tell. He tried to explain it in rapid-fire street Spanish to his neighbor, Rojelio, but Rojelio was late for work and couldn’t hang out with him. After that, Julian ran all the way to the library on Central Ave., barely sensing the pavement beneath his feet. He didn’t have a home computer, and he had to get his reply in right away.
    The author John Steinbeck referred to winter in California as the bleak season, and Julian totally got that. It was the doldrums of the year. Chino, a highway town east of L.A., was hemmed in by smog to the west and mountain inversions to the east, often trapping the sharp, ripe smell of the stockyards, which tainted every breath he took. He tended to hole up in the library, doing homework, reading…and dreaming. The summer he’d spent at Willow Lake felt like a distant dream, misty and surreal. It was another world, like the world inside a book.
    To make sure the other kids didn’t torture him at his high school, Julian had to pretend he didn’t like books. Among his friends, being good at reading and school made you uncool in the extreme, so he kept his appetite for stories to himself. To him, books were friends and teachers. They kept him from getting lonely, and he learned all kinds of stuff from them. Like what a half orphan was. Reading a novel by Charles Dickens, Julian learned that a half orphan was a kid who had lost one parent. This was something he could relate to. Having lost his dad, Julian now belonged to the ranks of kids with single moms.
    His mom had never planned on being a mom. She’d told him so herself and, in a moment of over-sharing, explained that he’d been conceived at an aerospace engineering conference in Niagara Falls, the result of a one-night stand. His father had been