Chapter One
On September 4, 1781, a group of forty-four men, women
and children who call themselves the Pobladores
establish a settlement on land that is near the center
of contemporary Los Angeles. They name the settlement El
Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de
Porciuncula. Two-thirds of the settlers are either freed
or escaped African slaves, or the direct descendants of
freed or escaped African slaves. Most of the rest are
Native American. Three are Mexican. One is European.
They can see the glow a hundred miles away it’s night
and they’re on an empty desert highway. They’ve been
driving for two days. They grew up in a small town in
Ohio they have known each other their entire lives, they
have always been together in some way, even when they
were too young to know what it was or what it meant,
they were together. They’re nineteen now. They left when
he came to pick her up for the movies, they went to the
movies every Friday night. She liked romantic comedies
and he liked action films, sometimes they saw cartoons.
They started the weekly outing when they were fourteen.
Screaming, he could hear her screaming as he pulled into
the driveway. He ran into the house her mother was
dragging her along the floor by her hair. Clumps of it
were missing. There were scratches on her face. There
were bruises on her neck. He pulled her away and when
her mother tried to stop him he hit her mother, she
tried again he hit her mother harder. Mother stopped
trying.
He picked her up and carried her to his truck, a
reliable old American pickup with a mattress in the back
and a camper shell over the bed. He set her in the
passenger seat carefully set her and he covered her with
his jacket. She was sobbing bleeding it wasn’t the first
time it would be the last. He got into the driver’s
seat, started the engine, pulled out as he pulled out
Mother came to the door with a hammer and watched them
drive away, didn’t move, didn’t say a word, just stood
in the door holding a hammer, her daughter’s blood
beneath her fingernails, her daughter’s hair still
caught in her clothes and hands.
They lived in a small town in an eastern state it was
nowhere anywhere everywhere, a small American town full
of alcohol, abuse and religion. He worked in an
auto-body shop and she worked as a clerk at a gas
station and they were going to get married and buy a
house and try to be better people than their parents.
They had dreams but they called them dreams because they
were unrelated to reality, they were a distant unknown,
an impossibility, they would never come true.
He went back to his parents’ house they were in a bar
down the street. He locked the doors of the truck and
kissed her and told her she would be fine and he walked
into the house. He went to the bathroom and got aspirin
and Band-Aids, he went into his room and pulled a video
game case from out of the drawer. The case held every
cent he had $2,100 he had saved for their wedding. He
took it out and put it in his pocket he grabbed some
clothes and he walked out. He got in the truck she had
stopped crying. She looked at him and she spoke.
What are we doing?
We’re leaving.
Where we going?
California.
We can’t just up and go to California.
Yes, we can.
We can’t just walk away from our lives.
We don’t have lives here. We’re just stuck. We’ll end up
like everyone else, drunk and mean and miserable.
What’ll we do?
Figure it out.
We’re just gonna leave and go to California and figure
it out?
Yeah, that’s what we’re gonna do.
She laughed, wiped away her tears.
This is crazy.
Staying’s crazy. Leaving’s smart. I don’t want to waste
our life.
Our?
Yeah.
She smiled.
He pulled out turned west and started driving towards
the glow it was thousands of miles away, he started
driving towards the glow.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Bright Shiny Morning
by James Frey
Copyright © 2008 by James Frey.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
HarperCollins
Copyright © 2008
James Frey
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-157313-2
