Free You Don't Know About Me by Brian Meehl

Huck goes sketchy. He disguises himself as a girl to try to find out what’s going on in his hometown.
    I got sleepy before I finished the chapter, but it made me say a little prayer before hitting the z-bag under the neon and the stars.
Lord, in my adventure over the next couple days, if I turn into a total weenie and put on a dress, have no mercy. Zap me with one of Your supernova-hot, jagged-judgment bolts.
I mean, I’d robe-up and become a Muslim before I’d put on a dress.

4
My Raft
    Clanging metal jolted me awake. Hearing the grinding whine of hydraulics I jumped up and ran to the back of the roof. The sky was graying up. The neon sign threw light on what was making the racket. The Dumpster was getting pulled onto a truck’s skid-bed. It was stealing my bike! Okay, not
my
bike.
    I grabbed my backpack and started down the ladder. Whoever was working the winch loading the Dumpster onto the skid-bed was on the other side of the truck. I jumped from the last two rungs, ran to the rising Dumpster, and threw my backpack over the side. I clambered after it and into the Dumpster. When the tilting Dumpster banged down on the skid, I dropped between a wedge of garbage bags. Something hard jabbed me in the back. I rolled and felt it: a bike pedal.
    The winch went silent; so did I. The last thing I needed was the driver thinking I was a raccoon or a big rat in his Dumpster. Then it hit me there might be
real
rats in there with me. It smelled like rat heaven: a swirling cloud of french fries, fried chicken, and sour milk. Under the low idle of the diesel, I heard the driver walk around the truck, get in the cab, and shut the door. So far, no stowaway coons or rats, just me. The truck ground into gear and jerked forward. I wasn’t hitchhiking, and it was no raft, but it would do.
    I lay on my garbage-bag mattress and watched streetlights flicker off as the sky brightened. Whenever we stopped at a light, the smell of old food swirled into my nostrils. With each stop it smelled less old. Me and mom had never been so poor or so hungry as to go Dumpster dining, but I hadn’t eaten in almost twenty-four hours, and my throat was so smack-cotton dry, I was ready to stick a straw in a mud puddle.
    I tore open garbage bags and looked for food scraps. I found a take-out box of uneaten ribs someone had forgotten to take out, half a baked potato still in tinfoil—but nosour cream—and a big Slurpee cup two-thirds full of soda. It wasn’t the Feast of Faith doughnut spread, but it tasted like a feast. Besides, Dumpster dining was in the Bible. They didn’t call it that—no Dumpsters back then—but they always left the fallen bits of the harvest in the fields for the poor people to “glean.” I told myself I wasn’t Dumpster dining, I was doing some latter-day gleaning.
    After we turned onto a highway, I cleared trash off the bike and pulled it to the top. I found my backpack; it had a black stain where it had come to rest against a box of discarded oil filters. I checked inside, and some of the waste oil had spread onto the leather Bible. The pages were now a mix of gilt-edged and oil-edged. I grabbed a rag and wiped off as much as I could. I’d broken enough commandments without turning the Good Book into the Gunk Book.
    We turned off the highway and headed for a big landfill. I two-shouldered my backpack and got the bike into position. The truck backed up to the dumping area and stopped. I waited for the driver to get out and gave him a few seconds to walk around to the controls on the other side.
    I must’ve waited too long, because the hydraulics suddenly kicked in. I lifted the bike and dropped it over the side. The Dumpster started to tilt. I hoisted myself over the edge and jumped backward, making sure to clear the bike.
    â€œJesus!” someone shouted in a high voice.
    Between the voice scaring me and the weight of my pack, I landed off balance and back-stacked. More