Free Another Kind of Hurricane by Tamara Ellis Smith

Papa now.
    “Speaking of the world telling you to do something new—” he began.
    “Yes?” said Papa, placing the red spruce tree down again and picking up his paintbrush.
    Zavion picked up his own dry paintbrush and pushed it along the wooden table, tracing the shape of a mountain, as if a picture would speak to Papa better than words.
    “We need to go to Mama’s mountain.”
    “We’ve had this discussion.”
    That didn’t sound like a promising beginning. Maybe a picture really would be better. Zavion was going to have to be clearer.
    “No, we haven’t had a discussion about this. We’ve had a mention of it.”
    “A mention?”
    “Yes, I mentioned it and you made fun of me, and then you left the kitchen.”
    Papa dipped his paintbrush in water and wiped it dry with a rag. He squeezed a dot of orange paint onto the corner of the slate. “Why don’t you go for a run, Zavion? Wouldn’t that feel good?”
    Zavion couldn’t imagine running. He was exhausted. Trying not to think about…before…was exhausting.
    “Let’s go to Mama’s mountain,” he tried again.
    “I don’t know why you are so obsessed with this mountain idea.”
    Zavion stuck his paintbrush in the orange paint on Papa’s slate and grabbed a slate of his own. “Ask me.” He painted the top.
    Papa opened the pink paint and squeezed it next to the orange. “Why do you want to go to that mountain, then?”
    Zavion dipped his paintbrush in the pink and added it to the edge of the orange. He unscrewed the red paint and stuckthe tip of his paintbrush in the top. He blurred it into the edge of the pink. He tried to remember the shape of the mural in his room and drew the jagged edge of a mountain and filled around it with red paint.
    Before
came flooding in.
    Except for Papa, everything he had known his whole life was gone. The big oak tree and its shade and the brick walkway leading up to his house. Gone. The house. Gone. Everything inside the house. Gone. And the one last thing that had reminded him of Mama. Gone.
    All of them swept away in the hurricane.
    And before that—Mama herself. She was gone too.
    After Mama died, Zavion spent every waking moment searching for a way to feel like he wouldn’t just float away. And after the moments turned to days, and the days turned to weeks, and the weeks to months—seven months, to be exact—he had found it. It was in the pathway from the bathroom through the art studio across the hall and into his bedroom, the long way to his room after he brushed his teeth, but he walked it the same way each night. It was on the slices of bread he laid out every morning, between the peanut butter and the honey, tucked tight into the wax paper bag he placed in the backpack he took to school. It was tied in the laces of his lucky running sneakers. It was on the thin rim of themolding over the archway between the kitchen and the living room he jumped to touch every time he passed through. And it was embedded in the gray rocks that sat across the edge of his windowsill, each of them with a white crystal line running through the middle—rocks he had found by the river, made wishes on, and placed on his sill to come true—all these routines and rituals designed and practiced and perfected in order to feel like his feet were firmly on the ground.
    And always, always, Grandmother Mountain standing guard over Zavion as he slept each night and woke each morning to begin his maze of a day once again.
    That mountain—Mama’s mountain—
    And now everything from his room, his home, his life, was—
    maybe—
    maybe not—
    probably—
    surely—
    completely—
    gone.
    Zavion put down his paintbrush and held the white mountain—rising up inside the blazing sunset—in his hand.
    “Because sometimes the world tells you to do something new,” he said.

chapter 20

HENRY
    “Please, Jake.”
    Henry watched Jake close the door to the trailer on the eighteen-wheeler. He was doing a last check of the truck before he