Free The Mountain Story by Lori Lansens

of Santa Sophia now. But if anyone ever does offer you red weed you don’t accept, right?”
    “Okay.”
    When Miss Kittle shifted in her chair her dress rose up even higher and I was shocked to see her bare right flank. My baseball cards fell from my hands, scattering at her feet. She smiled at me as she swept them into a little pile with her bare toes, accidentally flashing me each time she moved her legs. How could a grown woman forget to wear underwear?
    “Maybe I’ll come see you and Frankie when I go back to visit my father in late August,” she said, seemingly unaware of her wardrobe gaffe.
    “Cool,” I said, looking away when the button on her sundress threatened to bust open at her chest.
    “So it’s a date,” she said, leaning closer.
    I was sweating profusely. I looked at my baseball cards in the pile she’d made with her toes. Detroit catcher John Wockenfuss was on top. I distracted myself thinking of Wockenfuss and his unusual batting stance, how he’d turn his back on the pitcher and twist his head all the way over his shoulder. John Wockenfuss .
    “Wolf,” Miss Kittle said, drawing even closer.
    Peering out of the corner of my eye I saw that not only had Miss Kittle’s ill-fitting dress slid up even higher on herthigh, but the button had busted open at her chest and one of her pink nipples was exposed now too. Wockenfuss. Wockenfuss. Wockenfuss .
    “Wolf?”
    The door opened, and my father appeared. Miss Kittle fixed her dress. I bolted for my room and hid my head beneath my pillow, grateful when some time later I heard the front door slam, which meant Frankie and his Kitten had gone out to get drunk instead of staying in to get drunk. Small mercies.
    It wasn’t until some days later it hit me that Miss Kittle’s revealing situation had been an invitation, not a mishap. It took me even longer to realize that Frankie had orchestrated the whole thing. When I confronted him about it later, he said, “Some fathers throw bar mitzvahs for their sons when they’re thirteen.”
    “I asked for a bike.”
    Soon Miss Kittle stopped coming by. I never heard the details of their break-up. Maybe he cheated on her, maybe he stole from her, or maybe he lied to her. Sadly, she banned us—well, me—from the Mercury library. The bonus was that Frankie had more free time, even if we did spend most of it packing up the blue house.
    My father said I should keep the library books about Palm Springs and the mountain, and the stack of overdue novels. I did, even though I knew I shouldn’t. I still have them.
    On the drive to California I looked through the book about the desert hot springs, mildly interested in the thought that millennia earlier prehistoric animals had set foot in the same agua caliente that still burbled up from the middle of the earth. Didn’t even open the book about the history of golf in the area.I was undereducated in the matter of celebrities current or past so the books about the Hollywood history of Palm Springs didn’t interest me much either. But I pored over the one about rattlesnakes, memorized their detailed markings, and lingered over pornographic close-ups of milky dripping fangs.
    The Mountain in the Desert was the book I spent the most time reading though, acquainting myself with the mountain’s changing life zones, from desert scrub to alpine forest. The chapters about the Native Americans who lived in the foothills and believed the mountain held the cure for every ailment, physical or spiritual, intrigued me. What if they were right? There were a number of quotations in the book, from naturalists and hikers, who claimed to have seen God on the mountain. When I read the quotes to Frankie he laughed. “Must be the thin air.”
    The final chapters were about the Swiss-designed tram. I’d never been to a theme park but I couldn’t imagine any roller coaster being more thrilling than that tram ride. To be lifted that high, that fast, catapulted from one climate to