Total Immunity by Robert Ward Page A

watch Jack had given him for his fourteenth birthday and smiled to himself. It was such a kick to walk away from school. To just go out for lunch, grab a burger at In and Out, and then, instead of walking back to the playground, just keep on strolling away.
    What was weird, he thought, was the way things looked when you were free. Like if you were in a school bus or being driven around by freaking Julie, his dad’s so-called new girlfriend (What the hell was wrong with Mom? He’d never found out an answer to that.) who was always talking to him about spiritual shit . . . “Oh, look at that tree; it’s so spiritual.” What a moron . . . Anyway, if you were in a car with an adult, you just drove by junky old Lincoln Avenue and you didn’t actually look at the cool places that were out there . . . or you kind of looked but you didn’t really see stuff . For example, you might see the Exxon station right here, but you would never notice the guy sleeping on the side of it, with a bag over his head, like some kind of dude waiting to be executed by the chopper . . . And that wouldn’t remind you of the great old AC/DC song, “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”. . . like your brain was exploding with connections right and left when you walked along . . .
away from freaking school,
and away from freaking Julie who would come to pick him up and like have her mind blown when he wasn’t there . . .
    He felt a little shot of guilt when he thought of that.
    Julie would be worried as hell, probably thinking that he was going to end up on a milk carton or something . . .
    last seen in venice, california. If you see, please call 310-876-1167.
    Yeah, she’d be freaked, but so the fuck what? Dad would be able to handle it, and it wasn’t like he was around much anymore, anyway. Since Mom left for Baltimore (which proved she was nuts — who would leave L.A. for freaking Baltimore?), Dad had been out every night chasing down bad guys; Christ, Charlie was more of a dad than Jack was. Charlie picked him up for practice, and Charlie made him dinner and got him home on time . . . so Julie could tell him some spiritual discovery she’d had today . . . “Oh Kevin, I saw a pod, and I knew all life came from pods.” Which was because she was a freaking pod herself. A pod from Podsville!
    She’d never look at the dead cat in the gutter, which was right in front of him, dead-as-a-doornail orange tabby cat with a slightly crushed head, where some truck had run over it, no doubt . . . nor would she look at the sixty-four-year-old bum with a three-foot beard as gray and gnarly as steel wool, who was skateboarding by, turning up the street toward the boardwalk and the beach, where all the free people lived.
    He could already smell and hear the ocean lapping in on the sand, and he saw a kid break dancing to some rap thing . . . Bow Wow, he thought it was . . . yeah . . . and there was a guy with a bright pink Mohawk, and tats all over his arms, and Kevin wished he could get a tat, but his dad would kill him . . .
    But he might just do it anyway . . . not today but soon . . . ’cause walking away from school made you feel free, and once you had a little bite of freedom, you didn’t really want to go back and see things like a freaking slave.
    Okay, slave was a little melodramatic, but it was practically true. Walking around down here in Venice, watching the kids rocking around the boardwalk, people going in and out of Small World Books, stopping at the Wishing Well Tavern, drinking and eating in the middle of the day, laughing, being alive.
    Not wandering around talking about spirit, whatever the fuck that was, or worrying every minute about terrorists blowing the entire world up (and those dreams he’d had for the past three months of all of L.A. blowing into a billion fragments of blood and human flesh and concrete, and palm trees ripped from the ground, and hurtling like guided