Free Same Sun Here by Silas House Page B

bite her tongue and not say anything, but you know her, she couldn’t stand it, so she up and said that sometimes she didn’t know where he got some of his beliefs, because they sure weren’t from her.
    The mountaintop removal is getting worse over on Town Mountain. Mamaw goes over to the cliffs every day and makes sure the ’dozers are not getting over on our land. The coal companies are real bad to just take whatever they want, she says. It worries me because even though Mamaw is a true firecracker of a person, she is still old, and sometimes her head swims because she has the sugar diabetes. So I worry about her being up on the cliffs.
    I have to stay after school every day because I have basketball practice. I do love basketball. It is one thing that Daddy taught me that has been of use to me. Sometimes, when I get real frustrated, there is nothing that feels as good as running down that basketball court and jumping up to swoosh that ball right through the hoop. It’s like flying, sometimes. Seems like when I let that ball leave my fingertips, it’s like my troubles are floating away with it, too. Not always. But a lot of the time.
    Used to be I liked most of the boys on the team, too, but lately it seems like the only one I can really talk to is my buddy Mark. I’ve been knowing Mark Combs since the first grade, and we have always been good friends. (He’s my best friend here, but you are my best friend period.) He likes to read, too. He’s a real brain, although you wouldn’t know it to talk to him because he only talks about playing Wii and basketball, but when you go over to his house he has shelf after shelf full of books. He loves all those Narnia books and he’s crazy over Harry Potter and he’s dying for me to read The Hunger Games, which is his favorite book, but right now he’s hooked on the Twilight books. He says he only reads them so he’ll have something to talk to the girls about, so he can get them to go out with him, but I think it’s because he really loves them.
    Mark’s mom picks us up every day after practice and then they drop me off. Mom can’t come get me because her headaches are getting worse. And Mamaw has started working at this office downtown where they are organizing stuff to fight mountaintop removal.
    I always have Mark’s mom drop me off at the end of the driveway (which always bothers her because she feels like she should drive me all the way up to the house) so I can walk through the woods along Lost Creek. Well, yesterday as I was walking through there I saw that the creek was muddied up really bad, the way it gets after a big storm, when all the leaves and branches and sand along the banks have been washed in. But it hadn’t rained. And as the creek ran on I saw that it wasn’t just muddy, but there was some kind of orange gunk in it, too. Our creek has always been as clean as a whistle, so clean that I used to drop down onto my knee and scoop up a handful of it on a really hot day. I told Mamaw and she called some people to come test it.
    A couple evenings ago Mamaw and I were out taking our walk in the cool of the day. Rufus was trotting alongside us. Usually he likes to take off occasionally, then come back to check on us, but this time he stayed with us the whole time, like he was afraid to leave us alone. Every once in a while he would look up at me and smile, his tongue lolling out. He’s the best dog. It was so warm that some crickets were even still hollering, and it almost sounded like springtime in the woods. The best thing about Mamaw is that she doesn’t talk your head off about stupid stuff. She only talks when she has something to say. A lot of grown-ups will always ask how things are going when they don’t really care, but she actually wants to hear what you’re saying. Anyway, I really like that sometimes Mamaw and I can just be quiet with each other. And that’s what we were doing. Looking at the night sky. Listening to that little bunch of