Gemini Summer Read Free Page A

bottle—now a hand grenade—high and far. It twinkled in the sunlight as it spun end over end, then exploded on the road into a million white shards that skittered across the pavement. “Kaboom!” cried Danny.
    They righted the cart. The front had dented inward, and they tried to bend it out again. Then Danny looked up and said, “Uh-oh.”
    Beau swallowed. “Creepy Colvig.”
    The man came across the road in his shorts and sleeveless undershirt. His arms and legs were covered with black hair, and his muscles—and his stomach—bulged. He was carrying a shovel on his shoulder.
    Danny had never been so close to Creepy Colvig before. He could smell the man’s sweat and see how his hairs sprouted right through his undershirt in places.
    “Who busted that bottle?” said Creepy Colvig.
    “I guess I did,” said Danny.
    “Then guess who’ll clean it up.”
    Creepy Colvig threw down the shovel. He made sure that Danny found every speck of the million shards. “Sweep them up!” he ordered. “Put them in the shovel.”
    Danny was crying before he was halfway finished. He had to get down on his knees and gather the glass with his bare hands. He could feel it digging into his skin, and as he crawled back and forth his jawbreakers and caramels dribbled from his pockets. His eyes were blurred with tears, but wherever he turned he saw Creepy’s feet in front of him, in sandals with straps, in white socks that had fallen in rolls round his ankles. Beau was just standing there, not saying anything.
    When at last he stood up, when Creepy went off with the shovel full of glass, Danny’s knees were scraped and white. Like his hands, they were bleeding.
    He didn’t say a word to Beau all the way home. They didn’t even bother with the cart; they just left it in the grass. Beau put his arm on Danny’s shoulder.
    They found the Old Man digging. It was after five o’clock and he was home. Almost knee deep in the ground, he looked up. “Danny boy, what have you been doing?” he asked.
    “It was Creepy Colvig,” said Danny. His eyes started blinking; he couldn’t help it. Then suddenly he was blubbering, with his nose running and his face feeling hot as fire. “Creepy Colvig made me—”
    “
Mister
Colvig,” said the Old Man. He didn’t care for Mr. Colvig any more than anyone else in the Hollow, but he hated that nickname.
    “Yeah,” said Danny. “He made me pick up broken glass, ’cause I smashed a bottle, Dad. He made me pick up all the pieces.”
    “He did, did he?” The Old Man let his shovel fall. He came and knelt in front of Danny, then grabbed Danny’s hands and looked at the palms. “Were you there, Beau?”
    “Yes,” said Beau.
    “What did you do?”
    Beau’s answer was so quiet that he had to say it twice, and then his voice was still tiny. “Nothing,” he said, looking down at the dirt.
    “Why not?” said the Old Man.
    “I was scared of him, Dad.” It looked as though Beau, too, might start to cry. “I wanted to, but…” He shrugged.
    “That’s all right, son.” The Old Man stood up. He gave his cap a twist, then climbed from the hole. “You two go inside,” he said. “Get your mother to look at those hands, Danny.”
    He turned his back, and off he went in his jangling walk, with a streak of black sweat down his spine. Danny wiped his eyes and his nose. “He’ll fix him, won’t he, Beau? He’ll teach him a thing or two.”
    “Yeah,” said Beau. He looked up at the sky.
    “Creepy won’t bother us anymore, will he?”
    “He better not,” said Beau. “’Cause if he does, I won’t just stand there like a rat fink, Danny. I won’t let him do that again. Not him, or Dopey neither. If they try to hurt you, I’ll fight back.”
    “Yeah, I know,” said Danny.
    They went together into the house, and when Danny shouted for his mother she came thundering from the basement, plucked by the noise from her novel and the plantations of Georgia. She looked at Danny and, in her