1notes: This was written for the Twice Told Fandom challenge. It's kind of a love letter to the written word, I suppose, and it's in celebration of my completing my MLIS degree.

---

When she was little, Tyra used to call summer days that were this hot Tar Days. They were the days when the tar they used to patch up the roads around the trailer they were living in at the time would melt during the long Texas afternoons.

On a good Tar Day it'd get sticky enough to pull out in clumps, roll into balls you could chuck at the bratty boys next door. Tyra'd walk down the thin, black lines, arms sticking out at her sides like she was some lady at the circus on a tightrope, letting the tar stick to her feet until she couldn't stand it anymore and would be forced to run home and spray her feet with the garden hose. The water didn't take the tar off none, but it felt good on her tingly, inky feet.

There was just something about those Tar Days. They caused a huge mess, and burned her feet. Tyra'd squirm and kick, but her mama would hold her down and peel the tar off after it hardened before scrubbing her with the hard soap. "Tyra Leigh Collette," her Mama would sigh as she rubbed her feet "I do not know what I am gonna do with you. You were just born into trouble."

---

Now, Tar Days mean that Tyra hopes for a long shift at Applebee's, because it's no fun to be carrying plates of spicy Buffalo Wings all day, but at least the place is air conditioned and lemonade is free. And on days when there is no Applebee's, more often than not, Tyra finds herself at the Alamo Freeze.

It'd be funny to see anyone else with a god-damn State Championship Football Ring making her a chocolate dipped ice cream cone, but it's Matt Saracen so of course he's gonna still be dipping cones and making Frosties in-between two a days. Clark Kent has nothing on this kid. Him and Julie are making cow eyes at each other (like usual) so Tyra has to nudge her in the back to get her to leave the counter and come sit in a booth instead.

As Julie dips her fries in ketchup, Tyra takes time between licks to explain the utter importance of lip-liner. She doesn't spot Landry until he's caught the two of them in his sights and is on the way over to their booth. He nods to Julie and slides in next to her, across from Tyra, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Just like that, he's off on one of them spurts of conversation that don't seem to need a pause.

"Hey ladies. How is our summer going so far? Good for me, I mean, I heard some new Hungarian hardcore speed metal, this band called Nylka, that's Hungarian for mucus. Anyway, it's turning things around for the band. We're working on some pretty amazing material, lots of practicing to get this new sound fine-tuned."

Julie speaks for both of them when she asks, french-fry halfway to her mouth, "Did you just say mucus?"

Tyra can't help but laugh, watching Landry's mouth make like a fish.

---

Ten minutes later Mr. State Championship himself is on break and he doesn't have eyes for anything else but Julie, not even when there's five freshmen girls and three seventh grade boys standing by the counter wanting to tell him how he is their total hero and can they please-please see... the ring? He heads straight for Julie, who stands up and explains as how they need to go outside to talk, just give them a few minutes, all right.

So there she is, licking her ice cream cone, which is now sadly missing its chocolate coating, and looking at Landry, waiting for him to say his next crazy thing.

"Hey, so... are ya keeping up with your algebra this summer? It's really important you don't lose the skills set, you know. Math requires lots of practice."

Ah-ha, there that next crazy thing is.

---

But later that night, lying in her bed, trying to sleep in the heat, even her top sheet bunched up at the bottom of the bed, Tyra thought about what Landry had said.

No, she thought about what it had been like after she'd worked out one of those equations, after she'd come up with the answer by herself, erasing a few dozen times, sure, but finally making those numbers add up and even out and making x equal the right damned thing.

What if she spent her whole summer carting around quesadilla burgers and didn't do nothing worth anything? What if Landry was right and she was getting rusty at this very second, at 12:04 AM, lying in bed, sweaty?

Tyra didn't want to go back to not having the answers.

---

So, she let Landry start "tutoring" her again, although he said that they should call them "refresher" sessions, since they weren't really preparing for anything other than another year of high school. Basically, they met up at the Alamo Freeze every three or four days, whenever their schedules aligned for time off, and worked on problems. It didn't even seem weird to Tyra at first that Landry had a math book because, really, if someone was gonna actually own a math book, that someone was gonna be Landry Clarke.

The easier the math became (and the damnedest thing was, it really was starting to get easier. Not having to worry about quizzes or deadlines somehow made everything click just a little quicker.) the more the conversations Tyra found herself having with Landry.

Sometimes she told him about especially irritating customers at Applebee's and he would counter with stories about the idiot adventures he and Matt used to have when they were little. He's a good listener and a goofy, good storyteller. It's not like Tyra has forgotten what he said, or the way he'd looked at her, that night at the roast, it's just that even though she hasn't quite made up her mind how she feels about it, she knows he meant what he said. And she knows he genuinely likes her as a person, which counts for more than you might expect, it being such a seemingly little thing.

One especially hot day, almost a month after their "refresher" sessions started and right smack in the hottest part of July, Tyra's notebook paper was starting to scrunch up under repeated attacks from her eraser. She heaved a deep sigh and threw her pencil down. "I need a second," she said in a hurry as she rushed to the girl's room to splash water on her face.

When she shuffled back to the booth, she saw Landry had bought her a Oreo Frostie, her favorite, and set it right on top of her scribbled out and torn notebook paper.

"Thought you deserved a break," he said, casting his eyes towards the table.

Tyra took the time to savor a few spoonfuls, letting cool thoughts drift through her mind in no hurry. Today was definitely a Tar Day, even here, inside the Alamo Freeze with cookies and ice cream.

She wasn't even surprised when almost that exact sentence burst from her lips, finding Landry curious and ready for a story.

"What's a Tar Day?"

So she told him. She told him the whole story, like how much she hated living in that ratty trailer in the neighborhood that needed so much road patching and how she needed the rolled up balls to throw at the boys next door who were already trying to sneak peaks under her shirt when she wasn't even 12 yet.

And she finished with the same thing her Mama'd say every night, peeling the tar off her skin. "You were just born into trouble. I dunno how many times I must've heard that while I was growing up," she laughed a little.

Then she saw Landry's eyebrows perk up, in that way that meant she'd said something especially interesting or revealing. And, like usual, there was no way of telling what exactly she'd said unless she asked. "What'd I say this time?"

"Oh, not you, your Mama. That line, born into trouble. I think it's from the Bible originally, sort of. But that exact line, it's this documentary we watched freshman year, do you remember? Right before we started Huck Finn? That's what they said about Huck. That he was born into trouble."

"Huck Finn? I don't remember that one at all. I remember not reading the terrible one sophomore year about that horrible town that made that poor woman wear the giant A."

"You don't remember... Huck Finn?"

The low, slow way Landry said it made her know she'd pushed him over the edge of disbelief. He was staring at her with those giant "are-you-kidding-me" eyes.

"Sorry, but unless he's the one who made that woman wear the A then, no." She wasn't defensive about it or anything, there was plenty she bet Landry remembered she didn't, so she couldn't get her feelings hurt just because he remembered some book.

"Well, damn-it, Tyra!" He smacked the top of the table with an open-hand, smiling at her in the strangest way. "What are we doing wasting our time on this algebra then?"

---

That was how they started the books.

And the books changed everything.

---

She couldn't quite believe how quickly she read Huck Finn. The first time it was another sweltering night, when she was too hot from wishing for central air that she felt like she was going to explode. She had to have something else to concentrate on. Anything else. She picked up the worn-out paperback Landry had pressed into her hands two days before and thought she'd read a few pages until she passed out from the sheer boredom.

But reading Huck Finn wasn't like that at all, and not just because she knew she wasn't going to have to write a report about it. No, it was something else. It was maybe the way Mark Twain wrote, the voices the characters were talking in that sounded somehow very familiar. It was maybe the way she needed to see what happened next for Huck and Jim both on that raft and then on shore. And it was, maybe most of all, that Huck Finn himself.

He was a troublemaker who never knew how to quit when he was ahead and, more than that, he was determined to do things his own way, no matter what anyone else had to say about the matter.

He was "born into trouble."

Just like Tyra.

---

"See, every time they come on shore, some awful thing happens, worse than the next, so I figure that the river is everything that is good and the land is everything that is bad." Tyra had written this in the margins of the book the night before, at almost two in the morning and she had been excited to see Landry's reaction.

His eyes lit up. "That is exactly it! And see, each one of the people they meet on the land, is a parody of a certain part of American life at the time, like, look at the con men, the Duke and the Dauphin...

Tyra felt a shock of pleasure run through her body. This was better, a hundred times better, than making x equal eleven. This felt like it meant something.

---

Next came To Kill A Mockingbird, which was easier to read and which Tyra read in just two days because she got lucky and had a day off from Applebee's. Tyra liked Scout, Jem, and Atticus, but she loved Boo Radley something fierce. Landry said most everyone did and asked why she thought about how things turned out for Tom Robinson.

Then there was The Crucible, which she didn't want to read at first being that it was a play and she'd never just read one, but Landry said it was just like Dillon and he thought she'd relate. She sighed, but he hadn't been wrong yet and sure enough, that whole nasty town was just like Dillon, willing to believe any nasty lie about someone they heard, unable to think one god-damn bit for themselves, and ready to strike out at anyone who didn't do just what they said.

She and Landry had a fight over that one, though, when she told him there wasn't one damned good thing about John Proctor. Oh, Landry had a thing or two to say about Proctor's final decision but Tyra said that didn't cross out the rest of what he'd done and failed to do.

Sitting in the IHOP, discussing the morals of that play, Tyra felt like maybe this is what the rest of the world would be like: people who listened to her ideas and didn't automatically think she was the trashy girl with the Mama who'd made a scene at church.

July was over and Tyra Collette didn't want to stop reading.

---

Tyra was waiting for Landry outside the Alamo Freeze, her nose stuck in the latest book, Wuthering Heights. Three days before Landry had said it was time to experience something British, but there'd be no wasting time with Miss Austen and her parties, instead there'd be Heathcliff. Tyra had a hard time with the tone at first, but then Heathcliff and Cathy start swearing eternal devotion and she couldn't put the damn thing down. She wanted to tell them both to not be fools but, as she'd learned, sometimes in gothic tragedies, that's the way it goes.

(Being able to use terms like tone and tragedy and gothic and diction and allegory were all things picked up from Landry and a literature textbook he'd somehow gotten his hands on. He said these terms were the essence of the "refresher" sessions, but she knew they weren't really. It was caring about the books.)

When she looked up from the windswept moors she was surprised to see Lyla Garrity sitting right beside her, licking an ice cream cone. "What are you doing?" Lyla asked, not unkindly, just curiously.

"I'm reading a book, what does it look like?" Tyra took a surprised satisfaction at being able to give this answer.

"But why?"

"Because I want to find out what happens to Heathcliff."

Lyla stared at her for a long moment and said, smiling, "That one is no good. You should try Pride and Prejudice instead. Mr. Darcy takes the cake over Heathcliff any day!"

But Lyla's smile wasn't a mean smile, a catty one, or a condescending one. It was a real smile. Just like the one Tyra felt stretching across her face. "Nah. I like gothic tragedies more."

---

There was still time for the occasional math problem, after all it was a skill set that required practice. "School's starting soon, you know," Landry said the next week, sitting across from Tyra as she tried to work out what y was equal to.

"Thanks for the unpleasant reminder," she answered, not looking up from her notebook.

"I guess that means the end of the book club, huh?" Landry's voice faltered here and when Tyra looked up she saw he was shredding a napkin into a huge pile in front of him.

She almost laughed at how nervous he looked but something stopped her.

It was the memory of that night at the IHOP, fighting about John Proctor and the way he'd said "exactly" during their first discussion about Huck Finn. It was how in those moments, Landry Clarke looked at her in a way that no other person ever had: as if she were someone with something worth saying. Something worth hearing.

She tapped her pencil on the tabletop. "Don't be stupid, Landry, why would we quit reading? We'll just have to read a little less 'cause we'll have other homework."

There. She'd said we. Not we as in "we are going to fall in love" but we as in "we are going to keep spending time together and see...what maybe happens."

And Landry, grinning back at her like a fool, had heard.

---

The book hit the table with a loud THWAP. It was the biggest book yet, probably twice the size of Wuthering Heights. She saw Landry sliding into the booth across from her.

"I thought for our last summer book we might as well make it something worthwhile. Send the summer out in style if you know what I mean. That's if, you know, you feel up to it, of course."

It was a challenge.

Tyra picked up the huge book and looked at the guy on the front. He had a hat cocked on the side of his head and his hand on his hip. She looked under the man and read the title. "Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman."

Then she smiled at Landry and said, "Oh, I'm up to it."

---

Landry Clarke gave her a book of dirty poems!

But they were more than just dirty poems Tyra discovered over the next three days. (but, boy, some of them were dirty! She didn't know you could write things like that and have it be called "literature" but it made her feel flushed and happy with the possibilities. All the possibilities.) Besides the dirty ones, they were poems about war, poems about the outdoors, poems about going places and most of all, they were poems about people. People who had real jobs, people who did everyday things, people who wanted things and felt loss, people who were somehow desperately, wildly alive. Sometimes she didn't understand what the hell Walt was saying and she was pretty certain he made up words if he felt like it, but the strangest thing was, she still always, always understood.

Leaves of Grass made something stir in Tyra's stomach. She read the poems slowly, bit by bit, told Landry she didn't want to talk about them until she was all done. She had to keep them all inside her, savor them bit by bit, sort them out there first, figure out what Whitman meant and what he made up and how it all connected. Day after day she would re-read them, letting summer wind down. She wasn't scared of going back to school anymore and she sure wasn't scared about what was going to happen after that.

This was what all summer had been leading up to, these poems that had a heartbeat that had gotten under her skin and were making her think amazing, crazy things. This is what all those books had been getting her ready for.

Landry had been right. This was something worthwhile.

---

On the last day of summer, right before she was supposed to meet Matt, Julie, and Landry at the Alamo Freeze for a final Frostie, Tyra drove her truck out to the edge of Dillon as the sun was setting. Maybe tonight she'd ask Landry just what exactly Walt was talking about in the Children of Adam section; see his face get all blotchy. Tyra grinned at the thought and found she was more eager to see what Landry had to say about the Civil War and Drum-Taps. (It was good, she thought, to have a boy around that made you want to discuss history and turn blotchy.)

She held Leaves of Grass and watched the road leave Dillon.

Instead of that tiny two-lane, she thought of Walt's ride on the Brooklyn Ferry and then she thought of huge, sprawling interstates, stacked right on top of each other, criss-crossing the way they did in Dallas.

But not just Dallas, no sir. The whole country. The whole world.

All those roads were stretched out there, taking millions of people millions of places every single second.

Tyra heard Walt.

You road I enter upon and look around! I believe you are not all that is here;
I believe that much unseen is also here.

And one day, one day not too far from now, Tyra Leigh Collette was going to take one of those criss-crossing highways out into the world and see what was waiting on down the road.

---------

(Tyra's poem is the classic Song of the Open Road, from Whitman's Leaves of Grass. This is my favorite work of fiction ever, and if you haven't ever read it stop everything this second and do so, you're sorely missing out!)