Flagged Victor Read Free Page A

the surface and hide the rest of the contents.
    As he started to look back around to the police officer, he felt the muzzle of a handgun against the little hairs of his temple. This forced his gaze forward, his skin sparking under the electric touch of metal. He could not see the man’s face, but the burst of blue and red lights behind him, the number of police cars such brilliance indicated, was a gauge of how heavy everything had become.
    Heavy wins out over light, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But for every someone who insists on living lightly, there’s always another someone who tags along, living lightly too for atime, not out of natural inclination but because they have been momentarily convinced by the sheer certainty of a person who refuses to see the world any other way.
    I suppose it’s telling that when I think about me and Chris, I think about Butch and Sundance. And I also think about Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
    You’re probably starting to see a pattern.
    Actually, it’s not the force of certainty or the lure of adventure that convinces a Sundance to share the delusions of a Butch Cassidy, or a Sancho Panza to follow a Don Quixote.
    It’s love.

2
    Like many memorable duos, our friendship started with a fight.
    When I was twelve, I broke my arm. It happened my last year in elementary school, right before summer. I was new to the school, new to the neighbourhood. My family had moved from somewhere else. My parents wanted me to attend the new school, even though there was only a month left and I would be going to a different school in the fall, because they felt it would give me an opportunity to make some new friends. Nobody at the school thought that was a good idea—not the principal, not my teacher—but my parents forced the issue, knowing what was best. Then, a week in, I broke the arm, and it was a bad fracture, and it took another week for the swelling to go down, and by that time it seemed pointless and possibly hazardous to send me back for ten measly days. (I’d have to struggle with the cast and avoid falling or jostling my arm in the playground, impossible for a boy.) So they let me stay home instead. The weather was unseasonably hot that week. I suffered in my jean shorts and tank top, lying awkwardly on the couch in front of the TV,never comfortable. The cast was solid plaster and dry to the touch but so heavy it seemed soaked with bad luck and humiliation. It hooked around my right thumb like a belt loop and came to a crusted and crumbly end at my shoulder. I felt like a fallen gladiator permanently braced with a shield.
    I was happy to skip school. It was a source of great relief. But I was also bored to be at home with nothing to do and no one to play with. My father didn’t like my lying around. Whenever he walked past, his stern eyes were averted and he moved faster than usual, as though making up for my self-indulgent immobilization with his own vigour. But, at some level, he must have felt guilty about my plight because he bought a few comic books to keep me company. Batman, Superman, Justice League. They were ordinary classics, brilliantly coloured with fantastic storylines, but they lacked the intensity and intrigue of the weirder stuff I preferred. Nevertheless, since comic books had been forbidden in our house until then, the gesture conceded the seriousness of my condition, a nearly lethal combination of injury, loneliness, and boredom.
    Sometimes, when I was sick of being inside, I went out into the backyard and lay on the newly sodded lawn and read. Midday with everyone at work or at school, the neighbourhood was so quiet and still that once a little blue bird hopped up close to my propped-up comic, as though curious about the world behind the cover. I was in awe of its lightness, the way it flicked with each hop and flutter. For a brief second, that bird was my closest friend, and I was filled with hope for a new beginning, one in