My Chemical Mountain

by Corina Vacco

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2013 by Corina Vacco

  Jacket photograph copyright © 2013 by Shane Rebenschied

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vacco, Corina.

  My chemical mountain / Corina Vacco. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: The summer before they begin high school, best friends Jason, Charlie, and Cornpup go after the chemical plant that has been polluting their town, one seeking revenge for his father’s death and the others mainly for the thrill of it.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-97504-1

  [1. Pollution—Fiction. 2. Conduct of life—Fiction. 3. Best friends—Fiction.

  4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Environmentalism—Fiction. 6. Vigilantes—Fiction.

  7. Death—Fiction. 8. Compulsive eating—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.V15My 2013

  [Fic]—dc23 2012030550

  Random House Children’s Books supports the

  First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For my beautiful mother:

  activist, artist, cultivator of imagination.

  I love you.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Crash

  Chapter 2: Adrenaline

  Chapter 3: Sneaking Out

  Chapter 4: Trespassing

  Chapter 5: Mistakes

  Chapter 6: Threat

  Chapter 7: Two Mile Creek

  Chapter 8: Cookout

  Chapter 9: Buzz Kill

  Chapter 10: Monsters

  Chapter 11: Mareno Chem

  Chapter 12: Town Meeting

  Chapter 13: Bump Show

  Chapter 14: Viper

  Chapter 15: Shock

  Chapter 16: Bonfire

  Chapter 17: Golden Nugget

  Chapter 18: Plans

  Chapter 19: Chemical Mountain

  Chapter 20: Anger

  Chapter 21: Freak Tour

  Chapter 22: Landfill Mythology

  Chapter 23: Heavy

  Chapter 24: Confrontation

  Chapter 25: Fire

  Chapter 26: Change

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  CRASH

  THE wind carries sulfur and hard rain. Power lines are down in the streets. I trace the outline of a petroleum serpent on my foggy window and wipe it away with my fist. I think about the seventeen tons of Phenzorbiflux that went missing the night Dad died. Green, steamy chemical sludge. Coveralls in a puddle of liquefied human skin. The horrible phone call that woke us in the night. I am hungry for revenge.

  Last time there was a storm like this, me and Charlie hot-wired a dump truck and crashed it into the field of barrels. The time before that we started a small chemical fire in the creek, watched the water burn in the rain. Storms make us wild sometimes, like animals.

  Mom calls to me from the kitchen. “Jason, where are you? Can you believe how bad it’s raining? I wish you wouldn’t hide away in your room all night. Come help me fold towels.” I can tell she’s eating something from one of her stashes. She has hidden bags of cheese curls in the coat closet, pork rinds under an end table in the living room, chocolate-covered pretzels in a Christmas tin in the garage. Eating is her new tic, like a twitching eye or a stutter.

  There is an explosion of thunder, the kind that sounds like it’s right on top of you, or maybe even inside you, and then my room goes dark. The ceiling fan stops spinning. The television blinks off. Charlie’s gonna be here any minute now. It’s just a matter of time.

  Mom taps on my door. “It looks like you’re off the hook. I have a feeling the power’ll be out for the rest of the night. I’m going to bed.” She can be disgusting sometimes, spilling chunky beef soup down the front of her pajamas, falling asleep with potato chips in her mouth. I wonder what it feels like to wake up every morning as her—thirsty and still tired, crumbs on the pillow case, swollen fingers.

  Charlie, where are you?

  I lie on my bed and listen for cars on the 990. I have a short dream about blue spiders in an underground cave. Something rattles my bedroom window. My eyes snap open. My stomach is pulsing like a machine, painful pistons and gears. There is a siren in the distance. I grab an old sweatshirt and climb out my window. Slowly, silently.

  Charlie is standing next to his dad’s new four-wheeler. It is blue and black with a wolf custom-painted on the front. It smells like gasoline and vinyl. We aren’t supposed to go near it.

  “Think Randy can airbrush something like that onto my dirt bike?” I say. The rain is falling hard, like gravel on my face.

  Charlie just looks at me. Maybe he notices the stains on my jeans: black spray paint and battery acid on the knees, mud everywhere else. Or maybe he’s looking right through me, his mind kicking around some kind of trouble at home.

  “What’s your problem?” I ask. He’s seemed distracted a lot this summer, but the circles under his eyes are new.

  He blinks and says, “I can’t sleep. I’m so tired, I’m not even tired.”

  “I’m never tired,” I say. “I only sleep because it’s boring to stay up forever.”

  Already my sweatshirt is wet and heavy. Charlie has on army-green rubber boots and a pair of welder’s goggles. I consider the black garbage bags we have in the garage, how easy it would be to turn them into raincoats.

  Charlie’s scars look blue in the lightning. I sit on the back of the four-wheeler as he steers us away from our neighborhood. We take the old steel bridge across Two Mile Creek. We jump flooded ditches and skid onto empty highways. I lift my face to the sky and drink the rain. I taste motor oil on my lips.

  The Poxton landfill looms up ahead, black and eerie on the horizon. Charlie calls it Chemical Mountain. To him it is one of the wonders of the world. If we could spend every moment there, jumping barrels on our dirt bikes or racing snowmobiles, he’d be happy. Cornpup, though, he calls our landfill the Nightmare. He spits on it, pees on it, swears at it—like a mound of chemicals and dirt can have hurt feelings or whatever. He hammers toxicity reports to his wall and says words like uranium, then watches our faces for a reaction.

  When we pull up to Chemical Mountain, lightning strikes a nearby tree. My skin is buzzing.

  Charlie kills the engine. “When I come here, I feel real strong,” he says. “Like I could pull down a bunch of electric wires and not get shocked. Like I could pick up a cement truck and throw it across a field.”

  “I still think we should bottle the dirt, sell it,” I say. Then I feel stupid, because Charlie would never give away his secret. He eats handfuls of mud from Chemical Mountain. He swallows orange and green water from Two Mile Creek. He’s the only fourteen-year-old in Poxton who can catch a thirty-yard pass in triple coverage. His muscles are like steel coils under his skin. I’d eat anything to be like that, but I tried it once, and all I got was a rash of hot blisters on my tongue.

  Thunder rips through the sky.

  There is a ch
ain-link fence at the base of Chemical Mountain. Charlie pitches rocks at the NO TRESPASSING signs while I pry open the gate with his crowbar. We ride to the top of our landfill, lightning all around us, the air so electric I feel dizzy. I squint because the rain is falling sideways, straight at our faces. From the summit we look down on a large rectangle of darkness—our street and the neighboring streets, still without power—and we feel like war gods, like we’ve conquered something for real.

  “Drive fast,” I shout to Charlie.

  As if he has to be told.

  We fly down Chemical Mountain at full throttle. I think about how, two weeks ago, Mom missed my eighth-grade graduation. I came home to find her sitting on the kitchen floor, eating fried hamburger out of a casserole pan, holding her spoon like a shovel. I grabbed her ceramic turtle from the windowsill and smashed it against the tile. I would’ve broken more than just a turtle if Charlie hadn’t walked in. He swept up the mess, and Mom belched silently, and I wanted to pack a suitcase and take off. Except I don’t have anyplace to go.

  The thing is, she wasn’t like that when Dad was alive.

  My nose is bleeding again. I don’t like to bleed the way Charlie likes to bleed. It’s not a badge of honor to me. I wipe the blood on my sleeve. Neither of us thinks about the large metal vents that release gases from the landfill’s belly. We want the rush, the thrill of speeding without limits, without lights, without anyone to stop us.

  Halfway down the mountain, I hear a horrible sound, like a chain saw cutting through steel. The four-wheeler flips and rolls. I fly twenty feet, and my shoulder pops when I hit the ground. Pain shoots through me, but I do not cry out. There’s mud in my eyes. I hear Charlie shouting—“Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay?” It’s so like him to injure his wrist and ignore it, to worry about me instead. I don’t tell him I landed next to a damaged vent that’s reaching up through the weeds like a tiny sword. I think about the sandwiches at Tavern on the Creek. White bread and turkey and tomato and cheese with a toothpick stabbed straight through the middle.

  That could’ve been me.

  We stand over the ruins of the four-wheeler for a long time. The custom-painted wolf is crunched up, all that detail, just … gone. Dark liquid is dripping from the engine. Charlie is jamming his fist into his thigh, like he’s already formulating a plan. He says he’s gonna mess up the garage and make it look like a burglary, like the four-wheeler got stolen. I don’t understand how he will explain his swollen wrist.

  “You worry too much,” he says.

  We take a bold shortcut home, trespassing on Mareno Chem’s property, knowing that if we get caught, they’ll press charges. The parking lot is empty except for a shiny silver Lexus. A slimy liar owns that car. I wish I had the guts to slash his tires. Or worse.

  We enter mudflat territory. It’s hard to walk with the ground sucking at our shoes. I lead Charlie up and over a rugged, uncapped landfill, which is a mistake, because he finds a dead red-tailed hawk, its wings all soggy, and he makes me dig a hole in the wet garbage with his crowbar so we can give the bird a real burial. Just beyond the landfill is our high school. The sight of it makes me want to puke my guts out.

  Charlie says, “See the football field? That’s all fresh turf they’ve got there. I’m gonna get new cleats before tryouts. I’ve been real disciplined about saving my money.”

  High school will be easy for Charlie, because everyone likes him—plus he’s a badass football player. High school will probably be easy for Cornpup too, because he’s the type who doesn’t care what people think, and there’s so much freedom in that. I’m the one who’s scared. I’m the one who’s not ready. What if me and my friends drift apart in a big school? We could end up in different classes or get swallowed by totally opposite groups of friends. I feel the end of summer chasing me, snapping its jaws at my heels.

  “I’m starving,” says Charlie. “I have to eat soon or I’m gonna die.”

  Charlie’s dad can bust holes through a wooden door with his bare hands. One firecracker snap of his leather belt and you’re bleeding. It’s the whisky. It’s the economy. It’s always something.

  “Your old man’s gonna kill you when he finds out you destroyed the four-wheeler. You can crash on my floor tonight if you want.”

  “He won’t find out. I’ve got it covered,” Charlie says, spitting blood into a puddle. “Anyway, my mom went shopping after work. We’ve got blueberry waffles in the freezer.”

  Later, maybe tomorrow, Cornpup will yell at us for not dragging the four-wheeler home. He will walk all the way to Chemical Mountain to examine the twisted machine. He’ll fill a giant duffel bag with things that mean nothing to Charlie and me: hinges, strut springs, cables and belts, rotary valve parts, and a motor mount. It’ll take him weeks, and it won’t be pretty—bodywork is needed, and a new paint job—but he’ll get the four-wheeler running again, its motor purring like new. I give him credit for seeing potential where I see only a hopeless mess. I wish he knew how to bring people back to life.

  It’s not fair that my dad, a man who wouldn’t even plug in a table saw without safety gloves, is dead. He was a drummer and football player. He followed the rules. He picked up some overtime hours at the chemical processing plant, just wanted some extra cash, and now they say the accident was his fault. Being good didn’t get him anywhere. Playing it safe didn’t earn him extra points. He could’ve been a skydiver or a junkie or a stuntman. It wouldn’t’ve mattered.

  Charlie says it’s hard for kids to die, that it’s almost impossible, but I saw Joe Farley the day he puked all over the Pelliteros’ sidewalk. He’d gone swimming in Two Mile Creek when the water smelled like melted plastic, and anyone with half a brain knows that the colored water is fine, that it’s the smelly water you have to stay away from. His eyes were all bloodshot. I asked him if he was okay, and he said I should “piss off.” Later that day he fell from the window of the abandoned rubber factory on Grant Street. I’ve been in the building with Charlie a million times, but we were always smart enough to kick open the warehouse doors. We would never go up the fire escape and in through the windows, because there’s no way to climb down the fifty-foot walls once you’re inside. You have to jump to an old catwalk and catch a ladder that way, which is probably how the Farley kid fell. It’s not an easy jump to make. Only Charlie has done it, and even he says, Never again.

  Before I hoist myself through my bedroom window, Charlie says, “Mareno Chem reopened their drainage pipes. They’re dumping in the creek again.”

  “Cornpup’s gonna be so pissed,” I say. And we both laugh.

  Dumping.

  To me it’s maintenance, like taking out the garbage or getting a haircut. No big deal. To Charlie it’s what keeps us real; it’s what separates us from the hybrid car–driving wimps who couldn’t hold on to a football if their hands were covered in epoxy.

  But a few months ago, Cornpup started to really freak out. He said our creek was all poisoned or whatever. He took horsehair blankets and insulation from his attic and clogged up Mareno Chem’s drainage pipes while me and Charlie played football on the muddy shore. We told him his plug wouldn’t hold, but he wasn’t trying to stop the sludge forever. He was just sending a message. “I don’t want them to think we’re stupid, that we don’t notice what’s been going on,” he told us. Then Charlie threw the football hard, and sure as shit, it bounced off Cornpup’s hands and into the water. It was hilarious.

  There is another rip of thunder, then a flash of lightning so close and bright, we both stop laughing. Charlie lifts the welder’s goggles from his face. “Oh, one more thing. I think I know where they’re hiding the Phenzorbiflux.”

  He says he’ll show me where. Tomorrow night. He says some other stuff too. But I can’t hear him anymore. The monster is back inside my head, pounding on my skull. I can feel a bad migraine coming on. Sometimes I wonder about my anger, how long it can be controlled.

  CHAPTER 2

  ADRENALINE

 
THE day after a lightning storm, I sometimes get headaches, like the ones we all got the year our school was closed down because noxious gasses were coming up through the basement vents. My shoulder is still sore from the crash at Chemical Mountain, but if Charlie’s telling the truth, if he really found the Phenzorbiflux barrels, there’s no way I’m staying home tonight.

  Mom picked up an early Saturday shift at the plant. She left me a note on the table—Stay away from the creek—which makes me laugh, because she has no right to tell me that. Two Mile Creek is the heartbeat of our whole summer. It’s where we find tumor-covered snakes and two-headed robins. It’s where Charlie invented water football and you have to jump into a huge pile of rusted metal to get a touchdown. When Cornpup built a crazy-fast boat out of aluminum siding, a busted carousel horse, and a junk motor that runs on chicken grease, Two Mile Creek was where we first took it for a spin.

  Two Mile Creek is ours.

  I lie on the couch and watch Rocky III, the good one, where he loses to Clubber Lang, and then I cook some tomato soup with cut-up hot dogs. My headache goes away once I have food in my stomach. I’m bored, though. There’s nothing else good on TV.

  I walk to the creek because I want to see if the water is still the color of antifreeze, and because I want to sculpt creatures out of heavy mud and pieces of broken glass, and because Mom is stupid if she thinks she can keep me away from Two Mile with a note.

  The humidity today is almost unbearable. My thirsty pores drink in the steamy chemical fumes that blow in off Lake Erie. At the edge of the industrial park, I scale a chain-link fence. I walk along a footpath of garbage, plastic mostly—huge, crushed-up tubs that smell like gasoline. When I finally reach the creek, my head is foggy. I swear I can almost hear how this place must’ve sounded a hundred years ago, when all the factory machines were humming, before everything got shut down.

  There’s an orange film on the creek. I drag a stick through the water, breaking up the color as I walk, but the suds come together again real quick, like a wound healing. Colored water is so much cooler than regular old murky creek water, but there are people—like Mom and Cornpup—who say it’s toxic. They want the creek fenced off. Me and Charlie, we’ll fight them every step of the way.