Free My Chemical Mountain by Corina Vacco Page B

when I crash my dirt bike. This is something different. This is something better. I standin front of my mirror. I mess with my hair for a second. Then I flex my arm muscles. Working out in Charlie’s garage hasn’t made a huge difference, but my triceps look decent.
    A few days ago, at Quick Mart, I caught my reflection in the glass door of a hot dog oven. I kept lifting up my T-shirt and checking out my abs. Then I stood on the edge of the curb and did three sets of calf lifts. Cornpup seemed to be off in his own world, babbling on and on about uranium sludge and whatnot. I didn’t think he was paying any attention to me, but I was wrong.
    “Why do you care so much about how you look all of a sudden?” he asked me. “You never used to be like that.”
    “I just want to be strong, is all,” I told him. But he wouldn’t understand. He could be the strongest guy in Poxton, and he still wouldn’t get a girl. Not with his face looking like it does.
    It’s windy tonight. I stand under a busted streetlight at the edge of the industrial yards. I have on a black sweatshirt and my best jeans. I can’t stop moving, jumping in place, kicking little chunks of asphalt. I look in the direction of Val’s street, but it’s so dark, she could be ten feet away and I wouldn’t be able to see her. I turn toward the creek. Tonight the water is alien-green, softly glowing—it couldn’t be more perfect. I wish I’d told Val to bring her swimsuit.
    “Hey, you.” Val sneaks up behind me and puts her arms around my shoulders. “I brought sandwiches and a big bag of corn chips. I forgot something to drink, though.”
    The last thing on my mind is food.
    We climb through a torn section of the chain-link fence. Val snags the knee of her pink exercise pants, but she doesn’t make a big deal out of it. We walk to the creek and sit quietly at the water’s edge.
    “The water is so pretty tonight,” she says. “Is this what you wanted to show me?”
    I turn on my flashlight and hand it to her. “Hold this for a second. I’ll be right back.”
    Digging with my hands is not an option. I don’t want Val to think I’m an animal. I find a fat PVC pipe under some cracked sheets of Plexiglas. I use the pipe to scoop away wet earth until I strike solid wood paneling. It’s the doorway to a secret tunnel that leads to more secret tunnels. Charlie and Cornpup would kill me for this.
    Val takes one look at what I’m doing and says, “I’m not going in there.”
    “Why not?”
    “It could collapse on us.”
    “No, wait, look.” I point the flashlight at a row of wood joists. “We reinforced all of this. It’s totally safe.”
    Val smiles mischievously. “You’re sure?”
    “I’ve been through these tunnels a hundred times.”
    Some girls would be too weak for this. Some girls wouldn’t want to get their clothes dirty. Val is breathing fast, and I can tell she’s freaking out, but she climbs into the tunnel with me, and now I like her even more. We crawl through the damp earth for about ten minutes before hitting the jackpot.
    “It’s an old bomb shelter. From the cold war.” I am not totally sure about this, but it
seems
like an old bomb shelter. There’s a nuclear symbol on one of the walls.
    Val walks over to a pile of private stuff me and my friends can’t stash at home. “What’s all this?”
    If it was anyone else, I’d tell them to back off. Val is picking through Charlie’s weapons, tossing saw blades aside, laughing at nunchucks, fake stabbing me with a samurai sword. She shrieks when she uncovers the robot Cornpup built from junkyard scraps.
    “Oh my God. Does this thing actually work?”
    Of course it works. We load small stones into a chamber on the robot’s arm. I tell Val to stand a few feet away. I punch a code intothe remote control. The robot fires stones at Val’s legs. She laughs so hard, she can’t even look at me. When she settles down, she starts picking through our stuff again.
    My