Fireside Susan Wiggs (best free ebook reader for android .txt) 📖

what. Once he gets past the initial awkwardness, he’ll be all right.”

“Yeah, but—”

She put her hand on his arm. It was the first time she’d touched him on purpose, and it had an amazing effect on him. A warm, alive connection that made him feel, right or wrong, that he wasn’t so completely alone with his troubles. He hoped she didn’t notice, though. She’d probably think it was weird.

“Quit worrying,” she said. “He’ll be just fine.”

Heading down the lane for the bus stop, AJ sneaked a look back over his shoulder at the big, colorful house behind him. Bo had moved away from the door, probably with a huge sigh of relief. AJ knew Bo couldn’t wait to get rid of him.

A few kids were gathered at the bus stop, which was basically a bench with a roof overhead. He could hear them talking, two guys and a girl, their chatter punctuated by the occasional laugh. Their breath frosted the air like speech bubbles out of the mouths of cartoon characters.

They hadn’t spotted him yet. In the early morning gloom, he was all but invisible. He felt like a foreign spy, slipping in and out of shadows, camouflaged by the trunks of trees lining the sidewalks.

The deep thunder of a diesel motor sounded as the bus turned onto King Street. It was coming for him. Its owlish headlamps swept the area like a searchlight. Without even thinking, AJ plastered himself against a tree trunk twice as big around as he was. He held himself perfectly still, not even breathing lest the frozen vapors give him away. If he was going to catch the school bus, he’d need to hurry.

Still, he didn’t move, not even when he heard the shush of the bus’s air brakes and the cranking of the door. Then, a few minutes later, the door clanked shut and the bus drove off in a noxious cloud. Snowy silence descended again, and AJ slowly let out the breath he forgot he’d been holding. Oh, man. What had he done? Was he skipping school? When had he decided that? He’d never skipped school in his life—ever. Not that he loved school all that much, but he hated trouble more. And skipping school was trouble.

That was how he used to see it, anyway. Now, however, he tended to see things in a different light. Once your mom got detained by the authorities, stuff like skipping school didn’t seem like such a big deal.

A cold wind was blowing, and the snow flurries flew at him, stinging his face with tiny needles. AJ had no plan. He had acted totally on impulse. One thing he knew for sure—he couldn’t just stay here until he turned into a human Popsicle, waiting for the sun to come out.

He couldn’t go back home, either. Not that Fairfield House was any kind of home. If he headed back there, Bo would put him in the car and drive him to school. Being driven to school like a kindergartner, and arriving late, would make a bad situation even worse.

His hand stole to a pocket of his backpack. Last night, he’d printed off some maps and information from the Internet and stashed them away. So maybe the plan had been forming even then.

Lowering his head into the wind, AJ started walking. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, so people said, anyway.

The whole town was strange to him, but he knew in a vague sense that if he headed down the hill toward the lake, eventually he would find the main part of Avalon. There was an area of shops and restaurants, the city hall and the public library.

And the train station.

According to Bo, there were daily trains to New York City.

AJ’s heart sped up, and so did his footsteps. He still had no plan. He knew this was crazy, that he was totally unprepared. All he had was his backpack full of school supplies, the maps and directions and forty dollars in his pocket.

Which was probably more than his mom had when they deported her.

It wasn’t hard to find his way around the small town, what with the big, flat, white lake in the distance, its surface tinged pink with the rising sun. If Bo hadn’t pointed it out to him, AJ wasn’t sure he’d even recognize it as a lake, since it was completely frozen over, the snow forming a perfect covering, so cold and beautiful it made his eyes hurt. On closer inspection, he saw hints of the Willow Lake of summer. There were houses with docks projecting out into the flat whiteness. Passing a deserted park, he could see a chair on a scaffold with a sign: No Life Guard on Duty.

He made his way to the main part of town. The street-lights were just winking out, yielding to the day. A couple of restaurants were open, and the Sky River Bakery was jammed with people, its glowing windows misted with fog. Despite the delicious aromas emanating from the bakery, AJ kept walking. He spotted a railroad crossing and followed the tracks a short way to the train station.

Okay, he thought, joining the stream of commuters heading into the old-fashioned terminal building. Here we go.

He immediately lost confidence, however, when he looked up at the schedule board with its flashing lights and bewildering array of place names. How was he going to figure out which train would take him to the city? And once he got to New York, then what?

He stood in the terminal building, grateful for the big blowers on the ceiling generating heat. Behind him was a row of posters advertising Avalon and Willow Lake, showing happy families paddling canoes, watching fireworks, skiing and looking at autumn leaves. Studying the pictures, AJ could only shake his head. When he was younger, he used to believe families like this were real, but now he knew better. The people in the pictures were hired models. They probably didn’t even know