Free Surviving the Applewhites by Stephanie S. Tolan

and exhausted as Destiny.
    That had been only the beginning. The next day Destiny had painted his hair with green fingerpaint. The day after that he’d used colored markers to give it rainbow stripes. Luckily, they were watercolor ones. Destiny was so prone to coloring things that weren’t meant to be colored that permanent markers had been banned from the Applewhite household altogether.
    Nobody minded the boy spending the day with vividly colored hair, but Sybil insisted the color be washed out before bed. Jake, of course, had to do it. And Destiny had turned it into a game to see how hard he could make it for Jake to get the job done. Very hard! The kid was incorrigible. What theApplewhites ought to do, Jake thought, was shave Destiny’s head!
    Jake stared at his own hair. It was getting too long for this. Besides, the dark brown roots were showing now in a way that was starting to look scruffy instead of intentional. Then there was the problem of his clothes. It was hot out. Sunny and hot and humid. Black clothes made it seem even hotter. And black clothes were the only clothes he owned. He’d worn the spiked collar only twice—it had made his neck sweat and then chafed it raw.
    Jake was beginning to feel he was disappearing altogether. Nobody except E.D. and Destiny noticed when he swore. Destiny giggled and E.D. just sighed and shook her head. Nothing he’d done before to show people who he was and what he stood for worked here.
    He couldn’t even chill out the way he used to. No TV to watch. His Walkman was useless without earphones. If he dared to smoke where he could be seen, somebody was sure to snatch away his cigarette. It wasn’t only Zedediah who did it. Archie had, and Lucille, too. Archie only snatched and stomped, but Lucille had delivered a ten-minute lecture—not on the dangers of cigarette smoking, which he’d heard about a zillion times before, but on the desecration of tobacco, which she said was sacred to American Indian spirituality. By the end of the lecture she’dworked herself into tears about the “wanton destruction of native culture in the Americas.” Lucille Applewhite was such an incredibly cheerful person it was actually painful to see her in tears. It wasn’t the sort of feeling Jake was used to.
    So he’d taken one of his last cigarettes out into the meadow three days ago to find a place to smoke it in peace. There’d been no place to sit in the meadow. He’d found a log by the edge of the pond and settled himself there. Winston had gone along with him, and Jake had no sooner lit his cigarette and taken a nice, long, relaxing drag than the dog got himself stuck in the mud by the cattails and started howling as if he were being murdered. When Jake went to pull him out, he got stuck, too. It was the smelliest, blackest, most disgusting mud he’d ever encountered, and it snatched one of his sneakers right off his foot. By the time he’d managed to crawl out, drag the dog free, and find his sneaker, he was muck from neck to toe.
    Later, he’d found two ticks on the back of his neck, their heads buried in his skin, sucking his blood. Archie had pulled them off with tweezers and assured him that he wasn’t likely to get Rocky Mountain spotted fever, since the ticks hadn’t been on him long enough, but the ordeal had wrecked the whole idea of sneaking off for a relaxing smoke.
    Apart from the pond incident, the dog was getting to be a real nuisance. Where Jake went, Winstonwent. He had abandoned the main house altogether and taken up residence in Wisteria Cottage. More specifically in Jake’s room. Though Jake insisted the dog sleep on the lavender braided rug, when he woke in the morning at the horrible predawn hour when Archie ground his coffee before going out for his morning exercise, Winston was invariably lying alongside him, pinning him beneath the covers, snoring steadily and drooling on his pillow. He had to shove the dog off the bed if he had to get up to go to the