My Chemical Mountain Read Free Page B

they’ll hold. I jump a little when Charlie taps on the mudroom window with his crowbar. I open the front door and say, “Be really quiet. My mom just went to bed.”
    “Look what I did to my hand,” Charlie says. His straight blond hair is ratted from the wind.
    Cornpup is here too. He sets a paper bag on my floor. I wonder what’s in it. “You look like a death row inmate,” I tell him.
    “Shut up. I like my hair short.”
    We haven’t been out to the abandoned factories since November, not all three of us, anyway. Charlie is always outside, until his lips crack from the wind, and I can be indoors or out, it doesn’t matter, but as soon as the temperature drops below fifty, Cornpup sits on the floor vent in his living room, cranks the heat up to a million degrees, and reads stacks of books from the library. We barely see him between January and May. His health is bad, that’s why. The skin on his arms is thin, like sausage casing. The nodules on his back have a limited blood supply, and when he’s really cold, they turn a waxy white color that makes me think of navy beans from a can.
    Charlie says, “We found a way into the grain mill. The Mareno Chem trucks are parked inside.”
    They cased the mill without me. No wonder they took so long to get here
.
    “We didn’t go in yet,” Charlie adds. “We came back to get you first.” When he smiles, he raises his hand to cover his teeth. He’ll have to do that for the rest of his life, probably. Last summer, when he was riding on the back of his brother’s motorcycle, they got into an accident on Military Road. Randy had road rash all down his back, but he healed quickly, with no scars. Charlie was the one who had lasting damage. He banged his skull on the pavement and lost two of his teeth. His parents still don’t know because he always covers his mouth when he chews or smiles. After the accident, when the rubber skid marks were still fresh, we rode our bikes out to the scene. Charlie wanted to find his teeth. He was gonna make them into a necklace or something. I found a tiger’s-eye agate, and he found a long piece of dried snakeskin, but we didn’t find the teeth.
    “It stinks bad outside. Worse than when the asphalt plant caught fire,” says Cornpup. Before he closes the door, I catch a glimpse of the gray and orange night sky, summer fog mixed with vomiting smokestacks. Past the Kuperskis’ house, beyond our school and the ball field, I see a seventy-foot wall of black—Chemical Mountain, with its monster slopes, a hundred boarded-up factories in its valleys.
    Charlie’s hand is dripping blood all over the floor. “Can I get a pop?” he asks me. “I’m dying of thirst.” He always uses that word,
dying
.
    “We gotta wrap your hand first,” I tell him. “You’re getting blood everywhere.”
    We clamber into the bathroom. Charlie rummages through our medicine cabinet. He says, “How can you not have Band-Aids? Everyone has Band-Aids.” Then he pours rubbing alcohol onto his cut and hisses at the pain. He wraps his hand in gauze and tape till it looks like the sneakers I just rigged. He has messed everythingup. Cough syrup, dental floss, and lozenges litter the sink. I see one of Dad’s old pill bottles—it’s unbearable, the places in this house where I can still find pieces of him. I stand here, almost two years after his death, with a sick sadness in my gut, an
aching
, and I wonder if I’ll ever feel all right again.
    Cornpup doesn’t want to carry his paper bag all the way to the grain mill. He says, “Hey, do you have a backpack I can borrow?”
    I say no, which isn’t the truth. I have one under my bed, but it’s filled with railroad spikes.
    “Did Charlie tell you he’s going to climb the grain elevator?” Cornpup asks me. “He wants to fall and splatter on the floor like that Joe Farley kid.”
    Charlie makes a face. “The thing about Farley is that he wasn’t strong enough to grab the catwalk. I don’t have that