Read Where All Light Tends to Go for Free Online

to be, right there in the center of things. Only no one was watching. He turned his head every which way and with eyes held half closed, he waited to catch anyone looking. When a couple folks got to noticing, Blane fell stiff as a board face-first into the couch. The ones who were watching snickered, and old Blane started grunting and mumbling things that didn’t make a lick of sense. He was destined for Hollywood.
    I made my way through a crowded hall where rap music blasted family pictures into angles on the walls. Most of the kids didn’t even notice me passing, but the ones who did lifted Dixie cups filled with warm beer to their lips so that they wouldn’t have to speak. I don’t know what it was about being gone for two years, not spending every waking hour next to those sons of bitches, but they looked at me nowadays like saying hello would throw their whole universe off-kilter.
    Along an island bar in the kitchen the popular guys were throwing beer pong, while the girls with crushes stood near wondering if any of those boys were lit enough to consider putting their panties on the ceiling fan. What they didn’t know was that those types of guys were too worried about impressing one another to concentrate on important shit like pussy. Those guys were too busy chugging beers and trying to memorize rap lyrics to pay attention to what girl had that fuck-me look in her eyes. Still, I knew if Maggie was at the house, she’d be somewhere close by. The guys splashing Ping-Pong balls into Dixie cups of suds had ridden Avery Hooper’s coattails to get to that table, and I was certain she was there somewhere with him.
    Smoke hung heavy on the far side of the room and the brass chandelier overhead set the smoke aglow around a small table. I could see Avery sitting with his back to the window. He said something I was too far away to hear and I caught a glimpse of Maggie. She rocked back in the chair beside him, her head tilted with blond curls trailing, and laughed. Though she smiled as if she were having a good time, it was obvious she didn’t belong. Most of us born here would die here, never having seen anything further away than Pigeon Forge, but not her. When we were nine or ten years old and first learning cursive, she spent hours upon hours memorizing every curve of her name. “All famous people have to sign autographs,” she’d said. I couldn’t even remember the twists and turns of
x
’s and
z
’s. Lot of folks set their eyes on the distance at one point or another, but in time those eyes drew back. Maggie’s never had. The biggest difference between her and other dreamers was that she was determined enough and smart enough to will it into existence. It had always been obvious Maggie was only passing through.
    Part of me was hesitant to even walk over, but the other ninety-eight percent had Xanax pumping any anxiety that ever existed into oblivion. Avery Hooper was the type of guy that every time he looked at you, you just wanted to haul off and hit him in the fucking mouth. He’d grown his hair long, and tufts of that brown hair rolled out over his ears and curled back toward the ceiling. A tight string of thick wooden beads, one of those necklaces from shit-town novelty shops in shit-town places like Gatlinburg, was fitted around his neck. It was that college look, that I-smoke-weed-and-kick-Hacky-Sacks kind of look, that was spread all over that son of a bitch, and I hated him for it.
    I shuffled past the pong game and past the line of girls who had just enough baby fat left to make them vulnerable. When I got to the table, she saw me. Maggie looked up with those silvery blue eyes, and where I’d hoped to find welcome, I thought I spotted some sort of fear. She glanced down at the table and then up to me with eyes getting wider. There was a plate there, one of those floral-pattern plates that parents keep well into silver anniversaries, on the table. And there was powder on that plate, chunky powder