Page 3 of The Corruption of Hollis Brown

Rot

Hollis didn’t know any other way to be.

He had a temper. Not the kind that makes you lash out at your friends and family. But . . . his mouth got away from him. You couldn’t be like that when you were like him. It bucked the social order.

He wasn’t a loser. But if someone popular asked to copy his homework, he shouldn’t just snap “Go away” at them if he didn’t want problems. If he missed a shot in gym and one of the jocks called him “butterfingers,” he shouldn’t whirl on them and ask about their parents’ divorce. But he did.

James Miller was tall, blond, popular, and had about fifty pounds of muscle on Hollis.

Hollis told him he was going to die in this town.

No one’s parents had much money for college, very few people figured out how to leave, but James was trying and trying hard. Punching Hollis into a brick wall a few times was the correct response to hearing his greatest fear tossed right in his face.

Annie was right, he was an asshole.

Not to her and Yulia, of course, but the fact remained.

Hollis turned on his side and coughed hard. He swallowed his own blood, wiped his tears on his sheets.

It was ironic though. That James was so scared of never leaving this place, when Hollis was sure he’d make it out.

Hollis would have to stay though.

His bones belonged to this soil.

Home

They lived in a forgotten American dreamscape. A sliver cut from time.

There were other towns like it: coal towns, lumber towns. Places of Industry left to rot when some factory everyone worked at boarded up or government investment ran dry. Where people put down roots and built homes and schools and churches. Lives dependent on work.

An economy dependent on work.

Most of these kinds of towns eventually died. The young moved away, the elderly expired, and the wind turned their houses into wood and stone sculptures.

That was the best-case scenario.

The worst-case scenario was a town full of hungry people. Parents driving hours to other cities for work, paint peeling and metal rusting, time slowing and slowing until it stood still.

Good enough to keep things going. Not enough to ease anyone’s suffering.

Just enough that people refused to move away.

They stayed, caught. They died there.

Hollis understood why it chilled the sweat on James’s back.

Broad

Hollis peeled himself out of bed and wandered downstairs. He could smell spaghetti sauce from his room and now he was hungrier than he felt hurt.

His ma was on the couch burning through another episode of The King of Queens. Mrs. Brown was red-haired, broad-shouldered, and fine-boned like a bird. Pretty in a way that time couldn’t snatch, and Hollis looked too much like her.

She caught his eye as he passed through the living room to the kitchen and whistled low.

“You’re not staying home tomorrow.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hollis mumbled. “I gotta bake Yulia some bread later; she handled my copay. You need the oven?”