Going Where It's Dark Read Free Page A

words NEWS! r u there? and waited. After the Weinsteins had moved away, Uncle Mel gave Buck his old cell phone, and the boys usually texted at least once a week. Sometimes once a day.
    Buck didn’t like to admit it, but he worried sometimes that David had made a new friend—someone who was taking up time David could have been using to text him. It wasn’t that he wanted David to remain friendless. And he knew that David’s mom was filling his life as full as possible to make up for yanking the boys apart when she got a job transfer. It was just that Buck had had more fun with David than any friend he’d ever had.
    He rarely spoke to him on the phone, though. Never spoke to anyone by phone if he could help it. The minute he tried to speak, his vocal cords went into spasms of paralysis, and every word was a struggle. When Buck had to carry on a phone conversation, he could sense his jaws tightening, his teeth clenching, his lips quivering. Sometimes at school, especially if he had to speak in front of the class, he could feel his face and neck burn. He would blink repeatedly, and his mouth and lips felt as though they were cast in concrete.
    “Stupid freak,” Ethan had called him once.
    But now, sitting on the floor of his room, his back against the bed, Buck could punch in the letters faster than he could talk, and tonight Buck willed his cell phone to buzz. Tonight, he’d even try talking if he had to.
    David always had the most to say, even with thumbs. How he hated his new school but liked their apartment; that they were buying a dog; that he’d just seen
The Man Without a Face;
that his mom’s boss was a dork.
    Even when they’d been together, it was David who talked the most, and when Buck stuttered a reply, David waited him out. Sometimes, if he asked a question and it was taking Buck more time than usual to answer, David would say, “One…one thousand, two…one thousand…,” and they’d both laugh. That was as far as it went. In the two years they’d been friends, David had never once asked Buck about his stuttering. David jiggled one knee when he talked; Buck stuttered. That was just the way they were.
    His cell phone buzzed and Buck texted in seconds: yo!
    hey dude u must have been sitting on it whuzzup?
    u won’t believe
    what? WHAT????
    i found something. a hole. and i went in
    alone? how far?
    And then…slowly…sentence by sentence, Buck told him about the Hole. About sticking his head in as far as it would go and shining the flashlight, climbing down about eight feet, then crawling, sliding, following the draft, and wriggling to where the passage made the first turn.
    And every so often David interrupted with a u got to b kidding!
    When Buck finished at last and gave his thumbs a rest, there was no reply for some time. Then David’s words on the screen,
    is this 4 real?
    And Buck answered, it’s real.
    •••
    The question they kept coming back to was whether Buck should be going in there alone. Discussion was pointless because they both knew that, number one, he shouldn’t, and number two, he would.
    He
had
to. Someone else might discover the Hole if he didn’t explore it first. What if that dip in the earth he’d come to meant that water erosion was the beginning of a sinkhole? What if the ground just collapsed someday, and when the Wilmer place was sold and the property surveyed, the new owners could walk right into a cave, no exploring necessary?
    Or what about “the Pit,” an underground chamber out near an old quarry? The police had found some college kids partying in it a month or two ago. Before anyone could explore it, the county declared it unsafe and boarded it up, with a space for bats to go in and out, Buck had heard, until they could put a metal grill over it. They might do the same to the Hole if they found it.
    Was it too much to want to discover
something
? Buck wondered, keeping this particular thought to himself. They didn’t have to name a cave after him. It