Fitz Read Online Free Page A

spin on certain words—it’s like he speaks in italics. He can be so serious sometimes, people think he must be joking. But Fitz understands. That’s what makes him Caleb.
Check out the man’s
music, Caleb would tell him.
    Fitz looks around and finds a wallet of CDs above the visor. He takes it down and flips through it. On top is
Rubber Soul
. It’s a record that Fitz owns and has listened to for years: the Beatles are one of the bands Fitz and his mom agree on. The Beatles—that’s their common ground.
    They stop at a red light, and Fitz’s father glances over at him. “So what do you have in mind? The park?” He looks worried.He probably thinks Fitz is going to shoot him there and leave his body in the shrubbery for some jogger to discover. Like something from a mob movie, some poor loser gets driven to a desolate location and then whacked. Fine, Fitz thinks. Let him stew. Let his lousy life pass before his eyes.
    But what Fitz has in mind is a different kind of movie, a movie he’s been watching in his head. In this movie, there’s no dialogue, just Fitz and his father together, doing things. It’s a montage, snippets and glimpses of a shared life. They’re fishing; they’re washing a car; they’re shooting hoops. Some of the images don’t even make sense, at least not for Fitz—he’s never had any special love of basketball, for one thing. Maybe it’s just the best his imagination can do: probably these are scenes he’s cribbed from the movies or other kids’ lives. Somehow the particulars don’t seem to matter all that much. What matters is getting what he’s owed.
    A year ago, Fitz’s mom received a good-sized check from the school where she works as a teacher’s aide: it was to make up for a pay raise she was supposed to have gotten months before. Instead of getting a little bit every two weeks, she got it all at once, a big lump of money. Back pay, that’s what it was. Maybe that’s what Fitz wants: a lump sum of his father’s time and attention. Back pay.
    “First, we’re gonna check out the zoo,” Fitz says.
    “Sure,” his father says. “Check out the zoo.”
    Maybe his father thinks he’s kidding, but he’s not. The zoo is one of his favorite places in the world. His mom used to take Fitz to the Como Zoo all the time when he was little, probably because it was free. There were animals there he grew to love—the sea lions, the bison, all the cats, especially the snow leopard. Heloved the animals not as species but as individuals
—that
gorilla, the young male, the shy one; Buzz, the polar bear, and his brother, Neil. He didn’t just love the charismatic mammals: he loved amphibians and reptiles, too, he loved animals that were scaly and prickly, bug-eyed and menacing. Animals other kids thought were gross or uninteresting, the sloth, say, Fitz thought were simply misunderstood, as deserving of fans as their cuter fellow creatures.
    “The zoo even open today?”
    Fitz is still holding the CD wallet. He flips through to see what else his father listens to: the Clash, Dinah Washington, Lucinda Williams, Wilco, the Replacements, Bob Marley.
    “I’m in a band, you know,” Fitz says.
    “Really,” his father says.
    “Really.”
    “What’s it called?”
    “Creative Destruction.” Fitz and Caleb went around and around trying to come up with a name. At one point, they had more than a hundred possibilities. Creative Destruction was something Fitz heard on the radio. He didn’t know what it meant, but he liked the sound of it. Caleb had been holding out for Osgood-Schlatter, which is a disease but sounds like a person. Nora Flynn was with them after school that day in the commons. They’d been trying to recruit her to sing with them, so when she said she liked “Creative Destruction,” that sealed it.
    “Cool,” his father says. Fitz looks at him. Is he humoring him? Being smart? Yanking his chain—like Dominic at the playground? Fitz has no idea. He can’t read him. He