There was no ground beneath my feet, and I was clawing at mud. I stretched out my arm, trying to catch her. She called to me, and just the sound of her voice made my heart race. I was free falling, tumbling through the air. I never even saw it coming.ĩ.02 Dream On Falling. Turns out, I couldn’t have been more wrong. At least, that’s what I thought, when I closed my battered copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, clicked off my iPod, and turned out the light on the last night of summer. ![]() We were pretty much the epicenter of the middle of nowhere. There were no surprises in Gatlin County. Tomorrow would be the first day of school, my sophomore year at Stonewall Jackson High, and I already knew everything that was going to happen-where I would sit, who I would talk to, the jokes, the girls, who The neighbors kept watch from their porches in the unbearable heat, sweltering in plain sight. Gatlin wasn’t a complicated place Gatlin was Gatlin. The shops were on Main, the good houses were on River, and everyone else lived south of Route 9, where the pavement disintegrated into chunky concrete stubble- terrible for walking, but perfect for throwing at angry possums, the meanest animals alive. You could see a movie at the Cineplex about the same time it came out on DVD, but you had to hitch a ride over to Summerville, by the community college. The library still had a card catalog, the high school still hadĬhalkboards, and our community pool was Lake Moultrie, warm brown water and all. All we had was a Dar-ee Keen, since the Gentrys were too cheap to buy all new letters when they bought the Dairy King. We were too far from Charleston to have a Starbucks or a McDonald’s. Gatlin wasn’t like the small towns you saw in the movies, unless it was a movie from about fifty years ago. Just another reason I couldn’t wait to get out of here. Everyone under the age of sixty called it the War Between the States, while everyone over sixty called it the War of Northern Aggression, as if somehow the North had baited the South into war over a bad bale of cotton. ![]() Only folks down here didn’t call it the Civil War. Since my great-great-great-great-granddad, Ellis Wate, fought and died on the other side of the Santee River during the Civil War. My father was a writer, and we lived in Gatlin, South Carolina, because the Wates always had, Everyone else finds a way out.” There was no question which one he was, but I’d never had the courage to ask why. ![]() “The ones who are bound to stay or too dumb to go. “The stupid and the stuck,” my father had affectionately classified our neighbors. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.īEFORE The Middle of Nowhere There were only two kinds of people in our town. Hate cannot drive out hate only love can do that. Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl Beautiful Creaturesĭarkness cannot drive out darkness only light can do that.
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