Free The Dream Life of Astronauts by Patrick Ryan

told him I knew that already and walked back into the stall.
    Gary sat down on the bench. He was the bona fide orphan around here. He’d come from an actual orphanage, had been brought here by the Beals’ choice, and he’d started calling them Mom and Dad almost from the get-go. He followed them around, those first few days, looking at me over his shoulder like he was trying to figure out who I was. Eventually, he started following me around, too. I would glare at him until he’d pick up a mud clot or an orange and throw it—not at me, but nearby, sometimes at the side of the barn—and then run back into the house.
    In the evenings, after he’d gone to bed, I’d sit in the den and read to the Beals from
National Geographic.
Or we’d watch the news on the black-and-white television Mr. Merrick had sent over. The world’s longest suspension bridge being built somewhere. The war on poverty starting up somewhere else. The stories we saw had nothing to do with us and felt just as exotic as
American Bandstand,
which I watched almost without blinking, I was so taken by the dancing and the way that entire room full of kids seemed to know one another. “Go up and ask Gary if he wants to watch the news with you,” Mrs. Beal had said one night, and I’d told her no way, I didn’t like Gary almost as much as he didn’t like me. “Nonsense,” Mr. Beal had said from his chair. “He’s just sore because you got a head start on him.” What head start was that? I’d asked, and he’d said that, in Gary’s eyes, I’d gotten the jump on his new life and he was coming to terms with that in his own way. I kept it to myself, but I thought that was one of the stupidest things I’d ever heard.
    “Boy’s dad got hit by a train,” Gary said from the bench.
    I told him I already knew that, too. I told him I was busy.
    “Busy doing what?”
    “Whatever it is you’re not doing,” I said, picking up a stack of empty crates. “Why don’t you go play with your pecker?”
    He got up from the bench, but then he just stood there. “Why don’t you go p-play with your cooter?”
    Cooter, for godsake. He scooped up his gloves and walked out of the barn.
    It was July and it was hot. I still felt like a kid around the Beals every now and then, which was okay, but I wanted to feel like a grown-up around Gary and sometimes that was a challenge. I finished clearing the stall and then walked out and stood on the gravel between the barn and the house. Every window I could see was wide open, even the rooms the Beals didn’t use. Mrs. Beal was playing one of her records, some ancient swing music. It filtered out through the windows, sounded further away than it was. I walked over to the oak tree, put my boot against the base, grabbed the lowest branch, and hoisted myself up. The tree was taller than the house. I heard Mrs. Beal’s record fade out and then come back again when I climbed past the second-story windows. I climbed as high as I could, until the branches got thin enough to scare me.
    From that height I could still make out the flattened tracks in the grass from where Mr. Beal and I had driven out to the pond two weeks earlier. There’d been a storm in the middle of the night and a tree had been struck by lightning, the snap-bang of it waking us all up. Mr. Beal had come out of the house and I’d come out of the barn and we’d both squinted into the dark, against the rain, but we couldn’t see anything. So the next day we’d driven out to the pond and had found the tree lying on its side, the trunk going right down into the water. There wasn’t much we could do about it.
    I saw the Nova turn onto the gravel drive from the road. Mr. Beal stopped at the gate, got out to open it, rolled through, and then stopped again to close the gate behind him. Then he stopped in front of one of the cows and honked until it moseyed out of the way. I heard Mrs. Beal’s music cut off as the car reached the house, and I hung on to the