CONTENTS

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

       Chapter 12

       Chapter 13

       Chapter 14

       Chapter 15

       In Gratitude

       Biographical Note

       Chapter 1

      IN THE BEGINNING I had two parents and a sister. The parents weren’t much, but the sister was pretty good. Her name was Ruthanne. She had a weird spine because of the dump next to our house, where there was a big pile of trash we called Trash Mountain.

      Trash Mountain loomed outside Ruthanne’s bedroom window, on the other side of a fence. Trash Mountain was so unstable that the fence was lined with razor wire so kids wouldn’t climb around on it. Trash Mountain didn’t smell like trash, weirdly, but like this spray they sprayed on it that smelled like bowling shoe spray, times a million. Trash Mountain was always changing: a flattened fridge on top one day, pieces of car the next, couch cushions, a dried-up house-plant. Trash Mountain grew and grew until it was literally a mountain, meaning taller than one thousand feet. Ruthanne and I could tell how tall it was because we approached the issue scientifically. What we did was put our eyes in the exact same spot, at the bottom left corner of Ruthanne’s bed, and use an old key to scratch a mark on Ruthanne’s window where the top of Trash Mountain was. Then we measured Trash Mountain with a special technique I learned at school to measure trees using the tree’s shadow and a pencil. It was trigonometry, basically. I was a genius at it. Maybe I could have done it for a living, but instead I had to destroy Trash Mountain.

      One day Carl, who drove us to school, was hanging around our house while he waited for my parents, who hadn’t paid him, and he saw me marking the window with the key. Ruthanne was in the bathroom, maybe hiding. Carl asked what I was doing, and I told him. He laughed, which pissed me off, but then he got serious. He said, “Yeah, man, it’s fucked up y’all live right next to that thing. Could be worse, though. On the other side, in Haislip, they don’t even spray it down. But those Haislip people don’t complain.”

      “Pretty soon they won’t have to complain,” I said, and I laid out for Carl a plan that had been germinating inside me. My plan was to tunnel into the base of Trash Mountain and plant a nuclear bomb inside it, then escape just in time to roll under the porch while the bomb went off and incinerated the whole dump.

      Carl nodded. He knew a good plan when he heard it.

      “And then,” I said, “they won’t put another dump there because they learned their lesson. If we’re lucky it’ll be a super fun site.”

      “Superfund site?”

      “Whatever. There’ll be a playground and stuff. And a football field where the goal posts are also soccer goals so you can play soccer too.”

      Carl said it sounded like a pretty good plan. I asked him where could I get plutonium and he said he didn’t know. Then Ruthanne came out of the bathroom and Carl said he liked her new brace. “Can I sign it?” he asked.

      “It’s not a cast, you idiot,” she said.

      “My bad,” he said. Then Ruthanne went into the kitchen, and Carl whispered to me, “Your sister’s got a nice little body but man is she a bitch.”

      “Don’t call my sister a bitch,” I said. Then my parents came home and scraped together twenty of the fifty dollars they owed Carl and he left.

      That night, after my parents’ light went out, I crept out of my bedroom and down the hall to Ruthanne’s room. She was reading a book under the sheets. I asked her what book it was, and she said it was none of my business. But I saw the cover and it had a picture of a shirtless guy with long hair and shiny boob muscles. I told her about my plan to set off the bomb, since she hadn’t heard it before, and it felt wrong to me that Carl was the first person I told instead of her. She said it was a pretty good plan but maybe too ambitious. She had just turned fifteen and was becoming levelheaded.

      “Better just to light it here and there, strategically,” she said, “and watch the fucker burn. The fumes will be noxious so we’ll probably die, but we’ll have sacrificed ourselves for the greater good. They’ll do a monument about us.”

      Ruthanne was right, I decided, but I didn’t tell her so she wouldn’t get a big head. I started imagining the monument they’d do about us. Ruthanne’s would look like the peaceful version of Jesus where he’s raising two fingers and tilting his head, except the head would be Ruthanne’s head instead of Jesus’s head. Mine would be a worm-dragon shooting out of the ground with a ferocious scowl and a beard-and-mustache combo like flames and also tiny powerful claws tucked under my chin,