Better Nate Than Ever Read Free

looks around, checking for raccoons or stray mental patients on the frighteningly dark back road to my house, and sticks out her index finger at me. I do the same, and we touch them and smile, and she says, “Don’t forget to phone home, yeah?”
    “Definitely. I’m just going to be gone for a day. I’ll be back by this time tomorrow night.”
    “You better be. Your brother and parents will be pulling in at the same time, and you know he’s going to have a pickup truck full of trophies, and they’re gonna be ready to kill each other. And there’s something very, like, specific about arriving home and realizing your thirteen-year-old is missing. Even if they never notice you when you’re—you know— here .”
    “You getting in, or what?” the cab driver calls out from an open window.
    I look at my outfit, like maybe I’m actually dressed as SuperBoy and can just avoid this cab ride altogether.Like maybe I could just fly to New York and avoid getting mugged in the Greyhound bathroom before I even make it out of Pittsburgh.
    “Break a leg,” Libby says, hugging me and giving me a quick kiss on the cheek. “And text constantly, and here”—she thrusts a mysterious manila envelope out at me, pulled from her bag. “Take this, and don’t open it till after your audition. After they fall completely in love with you.”
    “Thank you, Libby. I will.” And they won’t.
    And from just above, a star blasts a trail across the night sky—like a visor of fire on Libby’s head—leaving it glowing a finger-painted smear, something human and touchable and reachable. Like maybe I could make the same kind of mark in New York, somewhere that might actually understand me.
    Maybe Libby wasn’t lying about the meteor shower after all, or can sense things about the future that even I can’t.
    “Get right back on the bus, after the audition,” she says. “Don’t go to the wax museum in Times Square or anything. Buy me an ‘I Heart New York’ T-shirt and then just get here. Just get back here.”
    I shut the door and roll down the window. The cab smells like a dead person, what a dead person might smell like if ever I’d smelled one. I’m sure I will on this trip, if I don’t end up one myself.
    “Libby?”
    “Yes, Nate?”
    “If anything happens, you were always my favorite Elphaba.”
    The cab skids away, and I hold my bag close and shut my eyes and say a frantic prayer that it all goes off okay. And when I turn around to wave to Libby, she isn’t there—just that streak across the sky, still glowing.
    Burnt into the Big Dipper like a dare.

Theories on Everything
    F or the record, I now know why they’re called Greyhound Bus Stations, and it’s not what you think.
    They lure you in with the promise of a sweet, fast dog with a cartoon rib cage, but you should just drop the “hound” part of the Greyhound Bus equation. It’s all about “grey.” Everything here is a different color of grey. The hair of the homeless people, even the young ones: grey. The lighting: grey. The hot dogs: grey (but actually pretty tasty). Everything is the color of death, of a foggy day that promises another D-minus on your History homework.
    Everything is the color of a wilted flower from my mom’s shop.
    God, she’d kill me if she knew I was here.
    “And how much is a round-trip ticket to New York City, please?” I say at the counter. I am up on my tiptoes, trying to appear a mildly short boy and not a medically tiny alien child.
    “Round-trip,” the guy says, looking half-asleep or perhaps dead; looking grey, “is a hundred dollars.”
    “A hundred dollars?” I say, losing my balance and knocking a bunch of Greyhound pamphlets to the floor.
    “Yes, a hundred dollars. Or fifty-five one way. But your mom or dad don’t have to pay in cash. We accept credit cards.”
    “Funny you should ask about my mom, sir,” I shout. “I figured you might do that, figured this might be the first thing you bring up when somebody