Читать книгу The Punk and the Professor - Billy Lawrence - Страница 5

A stuttering little boy spells out the word butterfly for the first time.

My brother’s smile.

A faded black and white photograph of six smiling friends, a world ahead of them. The Kennedy brothers on each end. Steven and Paul to my left. Gene to my right. Me in the middle.

Wrestling. Guns N’ Roses. Running free on the track.

The beach. The bay. The birds.

Long Island in the shadow of the city.

The nineteen eighties crashing into the nineties.

A girl in a Catholic school dress stands there laughing and talking with her girlfriends. She doesn’t see me, but I see her. She has long straight brown hair, eyes the color of a forest, and a smile that captures me. Something inside feels funny.

$$$

A horn blared and a light flashed——

—My swollen eyes stretched open. My face muscles were numb, and my lips were tight and chapped. A layer of frost covered my hair. The car approached and its window opened. I struggled to roll my window down.

“You gotta go. Can’t stay here. Get on now.”

“No problem. Thanks,” I said.

The security guard couldn’t even let me stay in the empty lot, but I didn’t complain. The guy had saved my life. Another hour or so and I would have frozen to death for sure. I turned the ignition, cranked the heat, and then drove off to the safety of the twenty-four hour diner with twenty dollars in my pocket and several hours to waste before the rest of the world woke.