Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

“Now’s fine,” Kit said, taking out his wallet. “I might want to get an early start.”

“Oh. Okay, then. With tax, that’ll be twenty dollars for the night.”

Kit had expected more.

“I don’t ask much,” Mr. Fiester said, as if he’d read Kit’s mind, “but the rooms are pretty basic, you know. All I get around here are fishermen, and all they want’s a place to drink a few beers, watch some ball, and get some sack time. Out at sunup, that gang. Crazy bunch, if you ask me.”

But Kit hadn’t asked him, and by now Mr. Fiester was beginning to get the idea that all Kit wanted was to be pointed in the right direction.

“Up the stairs, second door on your left,” he said, handing Kit a key. “Local calls only. Bathroom’s at the end of the hall. One towel per customer.”

First, Kit took a long, hot shower. Lacking soap (for he had never known a hotel that did not supply it), Kit washed all over with shampoo, which took so long to rinse off that the water began to run cold. Then, wrapped in a skimpy towel, he crept back to his room and climbed straight into bed. Although it was still light out, he had no trouble falling asleep, but when he woke in the middle of the night, in the strange room, he had no idea where he was.

“What?” he shouted out, sitting straight up in bed, clutching the blankets. There wasn’t a sound but his own breathing. Then it came back to him, where he was and why.

He’d had enough sleep, but he was terribly hungry again. It seemed as if he’d embarked on a painful cycle. Half the time he was tired, the other half hungry. In either state, he seemed prone to a great sensitivity. Everything was accentuated. His problems, when he allowed himself to ponder them, seemed acute. And because their edges were so sharp, he could not bear to consider any of them for very long but instead took them in turns, one after the other, through the rest of the long night.

At times Kit felt afraid, for he did not know himself as he thought he should, as he had once thought he had. Too much had happened too quickly, and he found himself wondering if leaving home had been the right thing to do. At other times he felt a vast relief and did not care why he had left, only that he had.

Toward morning, Kit began to consider destinations. None seemed right. He did not want to stay with friends. He did not want to go back to Yale to exchange work for a stifling dorm room and a hundred days of canned food. He did not want to drive endlessly, aimlessly. Already, he was tired of being forever on his way to somewhere else.

I’ll make up my mind today, he promised himself as he gathered up his few belongings. To do what, he didn’t know. But he had a feeling that before the day was done he’d have chosen a course, if not a destination.

After eating a huge breakfast at the first coffee shop he encountered, Kit made his way southwest, occasionally crossing a highway but never leaving the country roads he’d come to prefer. The sight of cows and horses in their meadows soothed him. Old barns made him wish for a grandfather, one who knew something about the land. At one point, an inviting meadow so enticed him that he stopped by the side of the road and spent an hour walking its borders, listening to bird-song, and wishing that he knew the names of wildflowers. He’d never paid any attention to birds or flowers before. Not wild ones.

At noon he stopped again to eat a hot beef sandwich and a dish of coleslaw in a German restaurant where the waitresses all wore white bonnets and the menu boasted four kinds of sausage.

Kit had been back on the road for only a few miles when he reached another of those little towns that slowed him to a crawl and clotted the traffic. It was here that he spotted something that appealed to him in surprising ways, and he smiled for the first time since saying good-bye to his sister.

“I want to make a trade,” Kit said, waving impatiently at his Jaguar. Big Al, of Big Al’s Used Cars and Trucks (WE ON-ER FAIR OFF-ERS), walked over to the Jaguar, ran his hand along its unmarked hide, glanced through the driver’s window, and shook his head.

“For what?” he snorted. “The whole lot?” Behind him, a row of aging cars and pickups slowly surrendered to rust and gravity.

“That one,” Kit said. He pointed at a huge, elderly motor home with a flat face and dusty windowpanes. Above its twin windshields, large, slanted letters spelled out the name ROAD SCHOONER. A long, red-and-white striped awning was furled above the side door, which stood halfway between bow and stern, and the undented white hull was trimmed with narrow bars of silver. The tires were plump. A long bumper sticker read, GONE FISHIN’.

“For a Jag?” As hard as he tried, Big Al just couldn’t manage to hide his excitement.

“For a Jag.” Kit nodded. He knew it was a ridiculous trade, but the Jag was tainted now—it had come from his father and had not quite lost its strings—and the thought of driving the old caravan instead, lounging under its candy-cane awning, perhaps even taking it back to Yale with him in the fall, was tempting.

Seeing the shock on Big Al’s face, Kit decided to check out the Schooner more thoroughly. If anything, the interior only made him more determined to make the trade. Here was a whole new home: two beds, a kitchenette, cupboards, carpets, and a bathroom with shower. He would need propane, gasoline, some linens, groceries, books, not much else. He drove the Schooner around a roomy K mart parking lot across the