A Really Awesome Mess Read Free Page A

line for The Racer, and then she was like, oh crap, I don’t have a ride home, and I was like, oh well, I’ve got my car here (it was, of course, my aunt Meg’s car, but when you’re sixteen and rollin’ in an Infiniti, even an ’04, you do not volunteer that it’s not yours), let me give you a ride home.
    And oh yeah, let me just stop by my dad’s Rich Divorced Guy condo, and while we’re here, you wanna make out? She did, and the next thing I knew, she was introducing me to the art of oral gratification. The next thing I knew after that, well before the event came to what should have been its rightful conclusion, my dad came home from work two hours early, which he’d never done before in his life, walked in and saw us on the couch, and shouted, “I’m not running a bordello here!”
    A bordello. I had to look it up. The first definition I found said, “a house of ill repute,” which wasn’t much help. Basically he was calling Caitlin or Kristin a whore, which was a crappy thing to do because believe me, it wasn’t like I had girls liningup to blow me, and she certainly wasn’t demanding any payment. I would have liked to maybe see her again even though I only had a day left at Dad’s house, but I guess him walking in pretty well killed the mood forever with Kitten or whatever the hell her name was. (Aside—if you’re ever asked to go to the board in math class and you’re stuck with one of those stubborn boners that won’t go away, picturing your dad walking in on you is enough to make you go limp for hours. I had to take the equipment for a test-drive later that evening just to make sure everything had recovered from the shock. Also to relieve the horrible, nut-busting ache of blue balls that arises when your dad walks in before you get to finish your first blow job ever in proper fashion. Not that I’m bitter.)
    That was Memorial Day weekend. Now it was just past the Fourth of July and I was being shipped off to a “therapeutic setting.” Dad said he would pay for it and kind of insisted, after threatening to take Mom and Patrick to court for custody, which they couldn’t afford. He’d decided they weren’t doing enough to ensure my mental health, so he sent two registered letters to Mom and Patrick. Which was two more letters than I could ever remember him sending me.
    And yeah, I was sure Mom and Patrick were happy to get rid of me anyway. They could focus on the twins, not have to bother with me, the Troubled One. Great. Dad’s money solved another problem.
    This was all the stuff I was thinking as we drove through miles and miles of nothing. Well, not nothing. There was a lot of corn, which I recognized, and some other shorter green stuff, which I didn’t recognize.
    There was a truck stop. And then some more corn. And a little more corn. And then, between two cornfields, a small road and a wooden sign that said, “Heartland Academy. A Caring Place.”
    We drove for at least two minutes on this little road before I saw Heartland Academy looming in the distance. It was an old, creepy-looking building. The windows were arched, the walls were stone, and there were acres and acres of short grass lawns surrounding it.
    I guess it was pretty good proof against escape: Even if you got out of the building, you had to walk for several minutes across lawns with no cover. And once you did that, there was nothing but corn for miles and miles.
    Slayer was in my earbuds screaming about the angel of death. I wasn’t a huge metalhead or anything, but it just seemed kind of appropriate as we approached the place I was going to be spending the next … well, Mom and Patrick were a little unclear about the length of time. “We’ll check in regularly and see how you’re doing,” was all that Mom would give me.
    Patrick stopped the rental car, but I didn’t open my door. I wasn’t going to make them drag me in, but I was damn sure not gonna make this easy for them. Patrick popped the trunk