Somewhere Over the Freaking Rainbow - By L.L. Muir Page 0,17

what had happened, why she suddenly hated her dad. He hadn't wanted to hear anything negative about the closest thing to a father he'd ever had. Kenneth Jamison was a great man and his grandson, at the age of eleven, had decided to pretend his mom hated someone else in Flat Springs.

Little did he know it would be the first of many things he would pretend in his life.

Jamison worked his shoulders through the drop door and pulled his legs up into the clubhouse. Magazines littered the floor, their pages warped and yellowed with time and whatever weather made it through the big picture window. He'd climbed up three days before, on the day they'd arrived, more interested in the memories he'd find there than in the ones he'd find in the house. But his mom had called him down, in no mood to unload the car alone. He'd been dying to get back up that ladder ever since.

Of course there was nothing there. He'd left nothing behind three days before. Only looking out that window, over the dry-edged stalks of corn, he felt very close to whatever it was he was forgetting.

“Gimme a break,” he muttered.

As he was about to turn away his eye was caught by something waving at him from the field, just on the other side of the fence, wedged high on one of thousands of cornstalks. It was a paper airplane, made from the page of a weather-warped magazine about the same shade as the drying tassels.

For a second he imagined it was one of the airplanes he and Ray, his boyhood friend, had launched out of that window over five years before, but the second passed and he considered how many times the field had been plowed, planted and plowed under again since the last time they'd ripped and folded those pages.

Someone had been up here, recently. Maybe Ray? Had his friend heard he was returning? Had he come up for old time's sake? Who else would remember about the airplanes?

The neighboring property was now owned by a group of Somerleds, not the Parkers who’d grumbled for years over how many magazines had cluttered their field.

One year they'd spent days getting paper cuts and covering the young corn with a blanket of brightly colored planes, only to be grounded from the tree house for a month, after they'd cleaned up the mess.

Mom honked the car horn and Jamison shook off the memory and the odd feeling of forgetfulness as he scurried down the tree.

What he couldn't forget was to go see his granddad. The old man was more important than the moving van and the things in it, including his ancient Honda.

***

“James! I mean Jamison!” The kid from English waved him down before he made it to the main doors. “Hold up, man. We need to talk before we go in.”

Two other classmates joined them.

“’S up?”

“’S up?” The second kid tried to casually lift his droopy jeans with his wrists. What a dork.

Jamison gave them a quick chin lift.

“Hey, uh, you know how Mr. Evans enjoyed your conversation yesterday?”

Jamison frowned. Enjoyed? He doubted it.

“We were thinking, that if you got the old man talking, he might just forget about giving that test, you know?”

“I don't think a teacher would just forget about a test.” Jamison started to walk around the kid.

“No, dude, he totally would.” One of the others, a Latino, moved to cut him off. “He does it all the time. Mr. Evans likes to talk. If you get him going it will buy us another day.”

Jamison doubted these guys would get any more studying done with another day, but said nothing.

“Fine. I'll try, if I get a chance.”

Satisfied, the three hurried into the building ahead of him.

He hated that; people coming to him for help, probably because he was taller than most. He couldn't complain that he was built like his granddad, but that didn't mean he wanted to be a leader. What he did want was to be left alone—for him and his mom to just be left alone.

Jamison wasn't the only one holding his ears when Announcements came over the PA. Perky voices, from overly dramatic cheerleaders standing too close to the microphone, made everyone wince.

Mr. Evans didn't seem to notice; he was texting. When the bombardment stopped, and hands came away from ears, he looked over his bifocals and jumped, as if he'd been caught doing something wrong. Jamison wondered if anyone ever thought to snag his cell to