Read The Vast Fields of Ordinary for Free Online Page B

was racing. It was as if I’d just saved myself from drowning. I bounded off the porch and walked quickly down the shadowed sidewalk, my eyes on my shoes as I passed the row of darkened houses. My mind was a chorus of voices all telling different reasons why I shouldn’t have come.
    “Party this way?”
    He caught me off guard. I looked up from my shoes and saw a boy in a sleeveless black hoodie coming toward me on the sidewalk. I noticed his arms. They were tan and toned. He stopped walking, but I kept moving past him.
    “Back there,” I said.
    “You need anything?” he called two seconds later.
    I stopped and looked back. “What?”
    His hood was up. His face was all shadows.
    “You need anything?” he said again. “You know. Smoke?”
    He lifted his toes and balanced on his heels for a second in a pose that was decidedly aw-shucks, something to match the straight-armed way he had his hands jammed in the pockets of his black skinny jeans.
    “Do you need a cigarette?” I asked, confused.
    “No, no, man,” he said. “Do you need anything?”
    “Do I need a cigarette?”
    He laughed and sauntered over toward me. He pulled his hood back as he came over. He put his hand on my shoulder and leaned in. He had perfect stubble, the kind I could never grow, and huge brown eyes that were wide and a bit wild, like he was up for anything. His hair was a mess of black triangular pieces jutting out in every direction. I couldn’t stop staring at his full upper lip. He looked like the kind of guy who had a banged-up electric guitar and a sticker-coated skateboard and a lucky lighter that he never left home without. He was beautiful.
    “Weed, man,” he said. “Do you want. To buy. Some weed?”
    “Oh.” I stopped to think. There was a stirring in my pelvis, only partially due to the butterflies in my stomach. I didn’t need any pot, but I definitely wanted to keep talking to him. “I think I’m cool.”
    The right side of his mouth stretched out into a sideways grin. It was pure charm, something he probably kept in his back pocket for frequent use.
    “You sure?” he asked.
    I had thirteen dollars on me. It didn’t matter if I wasn’t.
    “I’m sure,” I said.
    We stood there for a few seconds, waves of something awkward and unspoken passing between us. He looked up toward the party, then back at me, and he gave a polite but curt nod good-bye.
    “See you around, man,” he said.
    And he headed on toward the Montanas’, leaving me there on the sidewalk, speechless.

Chapter 5
    My father had already left for work when I woke up the next day. I found my mother mopping the kitchen floor in her housecoat. The air reeked of bleach and Lysol. Jenny Moore’s parents were on the refrigerator television. They were pleading into the camera, describing what their daughter was wearing when last seen—denim shorts, a pink T-shirt with a cartoon giraffe on it, canary-colored flip-flops. They talked about how sweet and special she was, how much she loved school, Jesus, and her new puppy Oscar. Her mother said something about how it was never too late to do the right thing. I thought of what Fessica had told me the previous night about the stoners supposedly spotting her on the golf course. Of course it wasn’t true. People were messed up.
    “Do you need help?” I asked my mom.
    “No,” she said without looking up at me. “I have it under control.”
    I went back upstairs and put on a Vas Deferens album and stretched out on my bed. I reached over to the drawer in my nightstand and pulled out an envelope that Fairmont had sent me the previous day. It was filled with literature about the university. The campus looked idyllic, like something from a movie about college. The dormitories all had stately names like Ford House and Butler Place. I imagined myself in one of their rooms, autumn simmering outside my window while I read Dostoevsky or Pynchon or some other author I was still too scared to touch. I even inserted a