Free Lawn Boy Returns by Gary Paulsen Page B

saw a cowboy movie once and was impressed by how the sheriff always brushed his horse and threw a soft blanket over its back at the end of the day. I know I’m no sheriff and my lawn mower isn’t a horse, but it just felt like the right thing to do. Crazy, I know, but I’d spent a lot of hours in the seat of my lawn mower and it had been good to me. I owed it to the mower to take good care of it.
    I enjoyed five or ten minutes of quiet, just me and my lawn mower. It had started making some weird grinding-buzzing sounds on the drive home last night and I was tinkering with it, trying to recapture the familiar humming growl I’d come to know like the sound of my own breathing.
    “Whatcha doin’?” Kenny Halverson and Allen Grabowksi, my two best friends, came around thecorner of the garage and saw me squatting next to the lawn mower. Kenny was dribbling a basketball and Allen had his head buried in a book. I don’t know how they do it, but Kenny is always bouncing a ball and Allen is always reading and they never trip or walk into anything.
    “Hey!” I stood up. “When did you guys get back?”
    “Last night,” Kenny said, “and my mother has already told me thirty-seven times to make myself useful, stay out of trouble and stop dribbling the ball in the house.”
    He lives across the street and around the corner and he’d been at camp for the past month and a half. I knew from his postcards that he and the guys in his cabin had started a hard-core heavy metal headbanging band they called Infected Wound, had gotten in trouble for collecting leeches and applying them to each other’s butt cheeks to see if they really did have medicinal properties, and as punishment had been forced to play board games with the camp director’s spoiled-rotten seven-year-old grandson. Kenny didn’t say whether they’d been punished for the music or the leeches, but since I’d heard him play bass before and Infected Wound was composedof him, three drummers, and a guy who made beat-box noises with his mouth, my money was on the music.
    I nodded and turned to Allen. “I got here twenty-seven minutes ago,” he said. The thing about Allen is that although he reads a lot, he hardly ever speaks. And when he does, he’s precise.
    Allen was visiting his dad two blocks away. His parents got divorced two years ago and Allen moved three towns over with his mom. Now he spends half of the summer, every other weekend, Tuesday and Thursday nights and some holidays with his dad.
    I was really glad Kenny and Allen were back. But I wondered if I’d have time to hang around with them, since I was working from sunrise until dark. And how would I explain what happened while they were gone? How do you tell your two best buddies that you’re a hundred-thousandaire without sounding like you’ve got a big head about it?
    “Wanna shoot hoops?” Kenny bounced the ball between his legs and behind his back.
    “Sorry. Can’t.” I nodded to the mower. “Got work to do.”
    “Sweet ride,” Kenny said. “Where’d you get it?”
    “Grandma showed up on my birthday six weeksago with Grandpa’s old riding mower. I’ve taken on, oh, a few yard jobs since then.”
    Kenny knelt on the ground next to me, studying the gas tank and bouncing his basketball off the front wheel. Allen thoughtfully tapped the throttle, where the rabbit and the turtle indicated the two speeds. He propped his book on the steering wheel and nodded. “Good fit.”
    “And so, uh, I’ve got this, um, little business now.” I’d ease them into the big picture gradually.
    “Need any help?” Kenny asked. “Allen and I haven’t got anything better to do, and it’ll be fun to make a few bucks. We don’t have riding mowers, but our dads have lawn mowers just sitting there in our garages, and I bet the three of us working together could make some serious coin.”
    Like four hundred and eighty thousand dollars? I asked him silently. I smiled. “Let’s do it. Go get your