Free Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez

normal obsession for a boy his age. But evil bookworms ? Here was something they needed to talk about.
    They didn’t say anything else about the comic book, and though Kendall had delivered his praise like a blessing—“You got the gift, dude. Use it wisely”—Cole tore up the panels he’d drawn so far. He refused to discuss the subject with his parents, until finally they dropped it. But of course every math class he still had to face Mr. Gert, who treated him like a budding perv.
    Proving there really was no pleasure grown-ups couldn’t spoil if they put their minds to it.

    But what was wrong with him? With his dad so sick and his mom trying so hard to be brave—couldn’t he at least have some nicer thoughts about them?
    In fact, this sounded just like his mother, who not long before had complained: “It’s like you get colder all the time.”
    That was him. He was like a glass slowly being filled with ice water.
    His mother also accused him of being ashamed of his own emotions.
    Back when they were still in Chicago, his class had started doing something called mindfulness training. Fifteen minutes, three times a week. It was supposed to help improve everyone’s ADD. Dimmed lights, chimes, something called elevator breathing. Close your eyes, drain your head, focus on your breath rising and falling. Lame. Cole breathed normally and let his mind wander. Which was how he found himself back in the summer when he was nine and his parents had gone away for two weeks without him. A friend of theirs had been getting married somewhere in Ireland, and after the wedding they wanted to visit Aunt Addy in Germany. Meanwhile, Cole would go to sleepaway camp, where he’d been wanting to go anyway, having heard from other kids that camp was awesome.
    A perfect plan, but they were all anxious about it. After all, they’d never spent more than a night apart before, and Europe was so far away . . . Cole would always remember their good-byes, the three of them on the verge of tears and at the same time laughing and teasing one another for being such big sillies.
    And it wasn’t that he’d had a bad time. Camp was awesome. The counselors were much better than teachers at breaking up cliques and keeping bullies in line, and in two weeks he’d gone from being a spastic swimmer to an almost smooth one.
    It wasn’t exactly that he was homesick, either. But never having been away from his parents before, he was unprepared for what it would mean to miss them. Even before the end of the first week, he was spending at least part of each day in agony. He kept it secret, of course; he didn’t want to look like a baby, and homesick kids were often teased or avoided.
    It was worse at night, when, lying on his cot in the pitch dark with nothing to distract him, his longing bloomed into a kind of insanity. For the first time in his life he had trouble sleeping. He could not shake the fear that something would stop his parents from coming home. Things happened, didn’t they? Planes got hijacked. Buildings caught fire . . .
    He dreamed that they had returned and had brought a strange boy with them. An ordinary-looking innocent-seeming little boy who wanted to be Cole’s friend. But in the dark world of the dream, Cole knew without a doubt that the boy’s appearance spelled his own doom. But you asked for a brother, his parents kept saying. Perplexed; annoyed.
    And then, at last, their ecstatic reunion, it, too, like something out of a dream—but how could something that makes you so happy also make you feel like you were being beat up?
    This was love, but it was also terror, and Cole didn’t know what to make of it.
    And now, he did not like to remember that time. Because even though it was about something happy, something good, it had become only painful to remember. And that particular day in school it had been too much to bear. Had it happened in the middle of a lesson, he would have had some major explaining to do. But mindfulness