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was wound where, it was better that I stay at home. As I was brushing Green's
hair (I loved doing that it was like playing with raw satin) Bracken stuck his
head in the room and asked if I wanted to come with him to the Camp Far West
property, where he was going to help the Avians with some big cave-man
house-fixing ritual. They also needed a little bit of everyday magic, and I
could help as well. After only the slightest hesitation, I said yes.
I actually liked traveling the back roads of the lower foothills this time of
year. It had been raining pretty steadily for the last month, and now, nearing
March, the small farm patches in Ophir were green with long grasses that would
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be weed-whacker fodder come fire season but were the closest thing many folks
had to a lawn right now. I liked the smell of the usually dry earth, wet and
happy, and the peeping wild-flowers in their too short season. Around the
middle of March the whole drive would be crazy with lupins and poppies and
those purple flowered things that turned into spiral sticker-burrs in the
summer but were really pretty now. In the summer the place would be brown and
lonely-feeling, in spite of the closeness of the properties and the oak trees
that huddled the area together, but now, in the rain, it felt vast and social.
It's too bad that spring time in the foothills is usually the week between
when the rains stop and the thermometer climbs to the nineties as a prelude to
settling into its nice comfortable niche around 102.
But the Avian property isn't in Ophir it's out by Sheraton if you skip over
the freeway to Luther, you can cross Hwy. 49 and travel the back roads to Hwy.
193. From there it's a right turn on McCourtney, which winds peculiarly among
big farmsteads before it starts doing some really stomach-turning things.
First it snakes through this wildlife preservation place that nobody knows
about, where Green just bought some mine-shaft riddled property for the cave
trolls. Beyond that is a levee, with the man-made lake on one side and a pit
of rocks on the other that has always terrified me because there's not even a
faint guard rail on either side, and the bridge is one way. Between the
kinky-snake things that the road did around the wildlife preserve and the
rip-your-guts-open-on-the-rocks thing, the second half of the trip was not
nearly as pleasant as the first part.
Bracken knew this, and made an effort to fill the moments between
motion-nausea by the wildlife preserve and stark terror by the levee with easy
conversation. Except conversation with Bracken was never as easy as it should
be.
"How in the name of the three-headed one did you pass that test? he asked for
the umpteenth time.
"I told you." I was glaring straight ahead on this part of the road. If I
wasn't careful, I'd get (surprise!) sick. "I just explained how I'd solve the
problem as a moron who can't do math.
He pulled his lead-foot up a notch as we came out of the turn but the
centrifugal force still pushed me to the side of the car. "Give me an example,
Cory for sweet Goddess' sake, I've been trying to talk you through this for
two months, give me a clue so I know how to help you for the rest of the
semester.
My stomach rebelled and I tried desperately to hold on to the lunch he'd
forced me to eat before we left the hill. It wasn't going to happen, but I
tried by concentrating on physics anyway. "You want a clue? Fine. There's a
goddamned car traveling on a goddamned curve. The car's initial vector is its
weight times its speed going fucking forward. The idiot behind the& (oomph)
fucking wheel took the goddamned curve at sixty-fucking-miles an hour which is
a vector going thirty or so miles to the (bleagh) right and another vector
going thirty or so miles forward so that if the goddamned wheels break loose
and we go speeding off the damned hill we will have so much momentum taking us
good and forward so we will jump off the twenty foot drop and so much momentum
taking us to the side so we can slam into the trees before we have the gravity
vector slamming us down off of that drop and into the ground when we die." I
took a breath. It didn't help. "Pull over asshole, I have to hurl.
He held my hair back as I lost my dinner on the non-existent shoulder, but
when I was done and ready to get back in the car, I could sense his suppressed
laughter. I couldn't blame him, really.
"I don't think I used to do this quite so much," I mumbled after I'd rinsed
and spat from a bottle of water we kept in the SUV.
"Define 'quite so much'." He put both hands under my arms and lifted me up
like a rag doll, then kept his arm around my shoulders.
I scrubbed my face with my hand. "I mean, before last summer the last time I'd
gotten sick to my stomach was probably when I fell off my friend's horse in
the sixth grade and broke my wrist. I meet you and I can't seem to keep
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anything down.
"As flattering as that is to my ego, I could point out that you met Adrian and
Green first, he said, stowing me securely in the car and closing the door.
"Yes, but I only seem to throw up around you," I pointed out sourly as he got
in and started the engine.
Bracken turned to me and grinned so brightly that the dimples I hardly ever
see popped in and I started to feel marginally better. "Maybe it's the price I
pay for bringing out the best in you as well.
I laughed in spite of myself. "Shut up and drive the fucking car, I said, but
my foul mood was ebbing and so was my nausea, and the humor might be enough
for me to cope with the terror of the one-lane bridge.
"Car's not getting any action tonight, baby. Green's SUV is in the city and
unlike Green, that monster doesn't share.
I laughed a little more. "I'm serious, Bracken. I mean, I've always gotten car
sick, but it wasn't always a guaranteed upchuck. Everybody gets queasy when
they get hurt but it's getting to the point where if I'm not throwing up, you
guys know I'm fine.
Bracken nodded. "Yeah, I know Green and I were talking about it the other
night.
"You guys talk about me?" The idea was foreign, but it shouldn't have been. As
much as I tried not to discuss either of them in front of the other one,
sometimes it was just a by-product of shared acquaintanceship it should have
occurred to me that they would discuss me when I wasn't there. I just didn't
think I was that interesting.
Another nod, this one exaggerated. "Yes, Cory. We discuss the care and feeding
of Corinne Carol-Anne so that one of us might not step where the other of us
just shit. Is that okay with you?
I shrugged. "I guess I didn't think I was that high maintenance." Before he [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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