Read More Than This for Free Online Page A

came into the kitchen, thudding Owen’s clarinet down on the table. “Would someone mind telling me how this ended up in the guest room?”
    “Ever thought of asking Owen?” Seth said through a mouthful of cereal.
    “Asking me what?” Owen said, coming through the door.
    And here was Owen. His little brother. Hair curled up in a ridiculous, sleep-messed pile that made him look way younger than his nearly twelve years, a red Kool-Aid stain around his lips and crumbs from his breakfast still stuck to his chin, wearing regular jeans but also a Cookie Monster pajama top that he was about five years too old and too big for.
    Owen. As scatterbrained and messy as ever.
    But Seth could see his mother’s posture change into something that almost resembled joy.
    “Nothing, sweetheart,” she said. “Go wash your face and put on a clean shirt. We’re almost ready to go.”
    Owen beamed back at her. “I got to level 82!”
    “That’s brilliant, darling. Now, hurry along. We’re going to be late.”
    “Okay!” Owen said, blazing a smile at Seth and his father as he left the kitchen. Seth’s mother’s gaze greedily followed him out the doorway, as if it was all she could do not to eat him.
    When she turned back into the kitchen, her face was disconcertingly open and warm until she caught Seth and his father staring at her. There was an awkward moment where no one said anything, and she at least had the good grace to look a little embarrassed.
    “Hurry up, Seth,” she said. “We really are going to be late.”
    She left. Seth just stood there with his handful of cereal, until his father, without a word, started sawing slowly on the counter frame again. The familiar yearning to get away rose in Seth’s chest like a physical pressure, so strong he thought he might be able to see it if he looked.
    One more year,
he thought.
One year to go.
    His final year of high school lay ahead of him, and then he would go off to college, (maybe, hopefully) the same one as Gudmund and possibly Monica. The location didn’t matter so much as long as it was as far as possible from this damp little corner of southwest Washington State.
    Far away from these strangers who called themselves his parents.
    But then he remembered there were smaller escapes closer to home.
    An hour of clarinet,
he thought.
And the weekend’s mine.
    He thought it more angrily than he expected.
    And at the same time, he realized he wasn’t very hungry anymore.

Seth wakes up on the larger of the two red settees, and once more, it takes him a moment to re-emerge from the –
    It really can’t have just been a dream.
    He’d been asleep this time, he knew, but like the last one, it had been far too vivid, far too
clear.
None of the shifting vagueness of a dream, none of the changes in scene or inabilities to move or speak properly or lapses in time or logic.
    He had
been
there. Right there. Again. Living it.
    He remembers that morning, as clearly as if he’d just watched it on television. It had been summer, months before the Baby Jesus incident, just after he’d gotten his first part-time job waiting tables at the local steakhouse. Gudmund’s parents had flown to California for business, leaving Gudmund to watch over a house that looked out onto Washington’s cold, tumultuous ocean. H and Monica had come over for a while, too, and they’d all done nothing, really, except drink some of Gudmund’s father’s forgotten beer and shoot the shit and laugh themselves incoherent at the dumbest things you could think of.
    It had been amazing. Just utterly, utterly amazing, like that whole summer before senior year had been, when everything had seemed possible, when everything good felt like it was just within reach for once, when if he could just hang in there, it really would finally all come together –
    Seth feels his chest tighten with a sadness that threatens to rush in like the waves that drowned him.
    It had been amazing.
    But it was gone.
    And was gone even