Salvation City - By Sigrid Nunez Page 0,21

the Emergency Home Preparedness must-have list, so of course they didn’t have one of those, either. Nor could all the money in the world buy them one now.

“Let’s face it,” his mother said with her look of a punished child. “I just wasn’t thinking. But with the move and all ...”

Cole looked away from her. He was not going to feel sorry for her this time. He knew what had really been distracting her. And now what would happen when his father got well again? Would she stay or go?

It was fine with him if she didn’t want the TV on, but it wasn’t fine with him that she also didn’t want him to listen to his iPod. If he was listening to his iPod or playing a video game or, when he was able to connect, browsing online, it was—to her—as if he wasn’t really there. He wasn’t with her the way she needed him to be. For her to be happy they had to be doing the same thing.

Meaning, if she was reading he had to be reading, too.

Why two people reading or watching TV together was okay, but one person reading and the other one listening to music was not okay—even she couldn’t explain it.

Besides, he didn’t want to read and she knew that. He wasn’t into reading, and, boy, did she know that.

It was a major family drama, how Cole’s life was going to be ruined because he didn’t like to read. In fact, he’d never read a whole book all the way through, not even when he was supposed to for school. He would read only as much as he had to in order to do the assignment. Depending on the book, he might skim all the pages or he’d read a chapter or two from the beginning, middle, and end. Sometimes he’d just Google or SparkNote the book. He’d never once got into trouble for not reading a whole book—proof that reading every page could not be all that important.

He wasn’t making any kind of statement. He was truly bored by most of the reading assigned at school—and he wasn’t the only one. Besides, he thought his parents were wrong. The kind of reading they did was something almost no one did anymore. Lots of successful people didn’t read books and the smartest kids at school weren’t necessarily the biggest readers, either. Things had changed, and Cole knew you didn’t have to feel bad anymore for not reading novels or poetry. Even his parents didn’t read poetry. And no, he didn’t feel proud that his parents had tried writing novels themselves (his mother had finished hers but couldn’t get it published; his father had quit before finishing his but was planning to get back to it that summer); he felt embarrassed.

Whenever he tried to read a book recommended by one of his parents, it could keep his attention for only so long. He’d put it down one day and then never pick it up again. And just because so many other kids thought Harry Potter was dope didn’t mean he had to think so, too.

All those hours Cole spent on the Internet apparently didn’t count. That wasn’t reading, that was viewing, his father said.

To his parents, Cole’s failing—weakness, whatever—was so bizarre, so unlikely (“It’s in your genes!”), that they’d had him tested.

But: “I’m afraid there’s no excuse, m’ boy,” said his father. Cole didn’t have dyslexia or any other learning disability. He was just intellectually lazy.

And: “If you don’t start reading more—if you don’t develop a love of literature while you’re young—you’ll probably always be an underachiever.” Which was what everyone seemed to agree he was now.

But there was one kind of literature he already had a love for, and that was comic books. He’d always loved comics, a love his father shared—it was his father who’d given him his first Marvel comics. But unlike his father Cole also liked sketching and doodling. He’d always wanted to create his own comic book, and once he’d even tried.

They didn’t know it, but it was his parents who’d given him the idea. It began with his mother talking about how many women these days—even very young women—had thinning hair.

“At first I thought I was imagining it, but Shireen” (her friend who also happened to be a dermatologist) “confirmed it. There’s an epidemic of hair loss among women of all ages. No one knows exactly why, but it must be something in the environment—they think maybe plastics.”

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