Grand & Humble Read Free Page B

couldn’t even count on lying awake, tossing and turning. He knew he’d fall asleep just moments after his head hit the pillow. It wasn’t until he woke up in the middle of the night, pulse pounding and sheets drenched in sweat, that he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep again.
    He sighed. There was no point in trying to delay the inevitable. He stood up, stripped down to his Jockey shorts, and climbed into bed. With that, he braced himself for the worst, and closed his eyes.

HARLAN
    Harlan opened his eyes to a flood of sunlight. He was lying in bed under a single sheet—he hated blankets, even in winter, so at some point during the night he’d kicked the bedspread off. But he’d fallen asleep with his curtains open, and now the clear morning light filled his room like a liquid, cleansing and clarifying every surface.
    It was Saturday, he realized. No school.
    He looked around. He couldn’t get over how different everything looked, how the world almost glowed. It was like he’d woken up in a commercial for laundry detergent.
    He started laughing.
    He couldn’t help it. It wasn’t just the darkness that the daylight had washed away; it was everything—the gloom, the anxiety, the fear. This morning, he actually felt giddy. He couldn’t remember feeling this good in weeks. Oh, he remembered feeling lousy in the days before, and he remembered why: his premonitions of disaster. His last premonition had been the one in the swimming pool, where he’d imagined he would be hit by a van. That had been one situation he could definitely not avoid; after all, it’s not like he could never get into a car again. And so, after the workout, he had—slowly and cautiously—driven home.
    Nothing had happened. He hadn’t even seen a van, much less come close to being hit by one.
    And in the light of this brand-new day, the whole incident just seemed so utterly ridiculous. No one could predict the future. He saw that now. How could he have been so stupid?
    There was an urgent knock on the door. “Harlan? What’s wrong?” His mom.
    “Nothing,” he said.
    The door swung open. “What was that I heard?”
    “Me,” Harlan said. “I was laughing.”
    “Oh.” She stared at him. “Why?” His mom thought something was wrong because he’d burst into spontaneous laughter. Somehow, every problem with their relationship could be found right there in that one little exchange.
    “Because I felt like it,” Harlan said. “Because I felt good.”
    She kept staring at him. The first thing people always said about his mother was that she was beautiful. Harlan supposed that was true. She certainly had the “look”—the hair, the clothes, the makeup ( especially the makeup; it had been so long since he’d seen her without it that he honestly couldn’t remember what she looked like). She definitely didn’t appear to be an ordinary mom; she didn’t feel like an ordinary mom either. To Harlan, she was more like the idea of a mom than a real person. The words and actions had all been there—the unqualified praise for his sixth-grade dried-leaf collection, the obligatory attendance at the most important of his swim meets. But they felt hollow somehow, a little too deliberate, too perfect—like the motions of the animatronic robots inside a ride at Disney World. Especially lately.
    “You should get moving,” she said.
    Moving? he thought. But even as he thought this, he remembered. He had a morning swim workout, then SAT Prep at the community college, a practice session of French Debate, and finally his volunteer work with deaf kids at the YMCA.
    Suddenly he didn’t feel so giddy anymore.
    “Oh, and your father’s invited you to a banquet tonight,” his mom went on. “The Bittle Society.”
    His father: United States Senator Lawrence M. Chesterton, Very Big Cheese. Was it his imagination, or did the morning sunlight just dim? As for the Bittle Society, that was a local organization that—well, Harlan wasn’t exactly