Ride Around Shining (27 page)

Calyph swore exultantly. “You ain't hurt!” he called down, laughing.

He took my shoulder and lowered his voice to a whisper. It seemed a needless intimacy, and once more I was thrilled and terrified. “Clean this up for me, J, for once in your life,” he said softly, and then he turned and went into the house.

I went over to Travis and put my hand awkwardly around his shoulders, pretending to examine him. Sure enough, as soon as Calyph was gone he stopped crying and his eyes took on a sly look.

“Tell on him,” he urged. “Tell them he hurt me.”

“Wasn't that fun?”

“That guy's mean.”

“He's all right,” I said.

“No,” he told me definitely. “They're just for TV. They're cool on TV. In real life they're dicks.”

I nodded at him sagely, for I could see that this, too, was a put-on, that he was after all glad to be hit, and so to be the center of things once more. I think he'd even leaned into the path of the ball a little.

I felt him twisting in my grasp, the young life of him straining to be free.

“I never want to meet another one,” he said fiercely.

“You will,” I said, and when I did, it seemed, for the first time, the voicing of a slightly tired feeling that would soon run its course, and then I would be on to something else, and be new again once more, and then I let my cousin go, and watched him run off through the freezing grass to tell the story to everyone.

Thanks, first and foremost, to Lan Samantha Chang, Chris Parris-Lamb, and Barry Harbaugh, the three people who most changed my life as a writer and made this book possible.

Thanks also to the Michener-Copernicus Society of America and everyone at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, particularly Connie Brothers.

Thanks to all my friends, especially early readers Katie Chase, Matthew Flaming, Tom Macher, Jennifer duBois, Maggie Shipstead, Nimo Johnson, Katie Perry, and Diana Wilson. Thanks to Sarah Karon, Matty Griffin, Jason Lewis, Kevin Gonzalez, Ben Hale, Alex Perez, and Lucas Bernhart for seeing me through good times and bad in Iowa City, and to Rebecca Jean Olson, Matt Tamura, Jay Leary, Jordan Dykstra, and Cooper Cruz for seeing me through better times and worse in Portland.

CHRIS LESLIE-HYNAN
is originally from Wisconsin and received his MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2008. He lives in Portland, Oregon. This is his first book.

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This book is a work of pure fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real.

RIDE AROUND SHINING.
Copyright © 2014 by Chris Leslie-Hynan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-228507-2

EPUB Edition August 2014 ISBN 9780062285102

14 15 16 17 18   
OV/RRD
   10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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