100 Sideways Miles by Andrew Smith Page A

confines of his leather turtle cap.
    â€œCade, go stand outside!” he said.
    And Cade said, “I know I would have masturbated at least once or twice if I was all alone in an airplane for thirty-fourhours. And, Mr. Nossik, did you know NASA told the astronauts on the Skylab mission in the 1970s that they were required to masturbate up there in space, every day, just to stay healthy? Imagine that—a government agency actually ordering a guy to masturbate. What’s wrong with this picture? What guy honestly needs to be ordered to masturbate? Astronauts, and maybe Charles Lindbergh, need to be told, I guess.”
    â€œGet! Out!” Mr. Nossik demanded.
    â€œWell, it is true about Skylab ,” Cade said. He went on, and I could almost hear the little bird bones crunching in the toothy jaws of the cat. “And I saw how Charles Lindbergh had made himself a special little tube to pee in from his pilot’s seat. Did you know that? It was really small, too. I don’t think there’s any way a normal guy’s penis would ever fit into that thing.”
    Cade Hernandez raised his right hand in front of his chin, nodding confidently and gapping his thumb and index finger about three-fourths of an inch.
    You have to admit: That’s small enough to believe your family line is cursed.
    Our teacher fumbled urgently with the neck fasteners on his aviator helmet. He moved like he was on fire and his head was about to pop. Mr. Nossik went over to his chair and sat heavily.
    Then Mr. Nossik turned red and slumped across his desk.
    Mr. Nossik died the next day from a brain aneurysm.
    That’s the absolute truth.
    Mr. Nossik reentered the great knackery of the universe. His atoms decided they could not bear holding on to one another as long as Cade Hernandez’s atoms were determined to do likewise.
    The kids in our history class at Burnt Mill Creek High Schoolall believed Cade was some sort of superhero who could inflict brain aneurysms at will. Of course this was not the case. Still, nobody ever messed with Cade Hernandez after that, not even Blake Grunwald, our German-dancer backup catcher who had a definite score to settle with my friend.
    Who wants an aneurysm?
    Cade Hernandez never felt guilty or strange about the death of Mr. Nossik. Although it was easy enough to consider Mr. Nossik’s aneurysm a fateful coincidence, it was also a certainty that Cade Hernandez would have eventually pushed that old man so far that our history teacher would have ended up bringing a gun to school and shooting one of the state’s best left-handed pitchers. Nobody would have wanted to see that.
    Cade Hernandez was the kind of kid you’d dedicate hundred-foot-high monuments to, just so he wouldn’t kill you with his lethal powers of annoyance.
    Good thing he was my best friend.
    One time later that summer, I sincerely asked Cade to do me a favor and please not give my father an aneurysm.

I AM NOT A CANNIBAL
    By July sixteenth, which was my birthday, I had fallen wildly in love with Julia Bishop.
    After traveling nearly eleven billion miles in my lifetime, my atoms and I had arrived at a place where we could confidently make such determinations about love.
    Love makes atoms sticky.
    Sticky atoms want to hold on to one another.
    To be truly accurate, I fell in love with Julia Bishop the night of Blake Grunwald’s shitty party, but I was afraid to admit such a thing to myself. I was scared I would ruin it, that things would unravel in the most horrible ways, and that I would have to go on simply pretending—as always—to be fine .

    I knew this about Julia Bishop: She was a miracle—artistic, imaginative, and gifted—and she also liked to mess with me.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    The last day of June, some time after school had been out for summer break, Julia Bishop drove her Mustang up into San Francisquito Canyon. We both wanted to hike around the tumbled ruins of William