Turn Left at the Cow by Lisa Bullard Page B

instead of actual talking. I felt my face push against the thickened air to shake my head at her, and then I hauled my body out of my chair and back to my room, where I could close the door and be alone.
    In the room where my father used to sleep.
    After a while I guess my brain rebooted. Random thoughts started to drift around in my head, trying to form some kind of pattern. But it was like an all-black thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle: there were way too many pieces and none of them fit together just right. When I was a kid and I couldn’t get puzzle pieces to fit, eventually I’d just pound one in where it didn’t really belong. But no way I was jigsawing this mess together just by pounding at it.
    I’d come to Minnesota looking for answers, and instead I just had piles of new questions. What I wanted more than anything was to talk it all through with somebody who knew me deep down. I took out my cell and stared at it. Ma? No way. She’d just refuse to talk about my father all over again.
    I really wished it were as easy as texting Jason Kalooky. I could use a whole keyboard full of those little frowny faces to translate all the crappiness across the two thousand miles between us. But at the start of summer he’d shipped off to a wilderness survival camp to fight grizzlies or something—the kind of place where they outlaw cell phones. I had seen him only a couple of times since Christmas anyway, since Ma had hauled me kicking and screaming all the long way to my new stepdaddy’s house. But even though we were in different towns and different schools now, Kalooky and I still texted all the time and also met up online to do some gaming.
    Now that he was offline, I didn’t really have anybody to talk to. It wasn’t as if I’d been able to make a bunch of friends when I showed up at a new school midway through seventh grade. Everybody had already staked out his territory; being friendly to the new guy was too big a risk.
    So with no one to call, I just lay there on an old Minnesota Vikings comforter, looking at the ceiling while Deputy Dude’s words played tag inside my head. They always chased one another back to the point where he’d said I had to stick around so I could have another little chat with him or the FBI. I suddenly realized that the only thing worse than being trapped someplace you suddenly want to escape is knowing that even if you do get out, you have no place better to go.
    That stupid walking catfish, man—does he even stop to think before he trots on out of his pond? What if he never finds water again?
    At some point there was a knock, and I heard Gram’s voice outside my door. “Travis, dinner’s ready.”
    â€œI’m not hungry,” I called back, which was a lie, of course, because even though my stomach still had some of that pro-wrestling action going on, I was pretty much always hungry. But I just couldn’t talk to her right then; this dark suspicion, this thought about Gram, was squirming its way into my brain like one of those hungry parasitic worms, and I needed to face
it
before I faced
her
.
    There was quiet on the other side of my door and then Gram spoke up again. “All right. I know how upsetting this must be for you. I’ll let you have some time to yourself. I’ll put your plate in the refrigerator in case you want it later.”
    And maybe her saying “later” was all it took, because my brain finally hit hibernation mode and I somehow fell asleep.
    Â 
    I woke up feeling like something inside my stomach was clawing for food. I picked up my cell to check the time: 3:23 A.M. I moved through the dark house as quietly as I could, got the plate of dinner out of the fridge, and nuked it in the microwave. Then I grabbed a fork and creaked open the back door, heading outside to the end of the dock to sit where I could swing my bare feet down over the edge. A busy breeze drifted its fingers under my