Mountain
The Window
Paper
Airfield
Pictures,
It's the 1930s, the Great Depression, and thousands of teens roam a country where everything seems to have gone wrong
HITCH
Chapter 1
I woke up shivering in the boxcar where I'd spent the night. Late October might be the tail end of summer in Texas, but it wasn't up here, wherever here was.
I coughed and ran my tongue over the grit clinging to my teeth. My body jangled with the vibration coming up from the train wheels.
Sharp lines of sunlight edged the wide, almost closed doors of the car and lay in stripes across the forms of men sprawled around me. We must have passed out of the dust storm, I thought, remembering the day before, when the train rushing north across farmland had entered a blackness of blowing dirt unlike anything I had ever seen.
First I'd wondered if the huge cloud moving toward us, too dark brown for rain, might be smoke. Then somebody called it for what it was, just before we got swallowed up in a violent torrent of sandpapering earth.
I'd fallen asleep to the how of it.
Leaning into the boxcar door, I pushed it open. A wedge had kept it from shutting all the way--a safety, against the bar-latch on the outside coming down and locking us in. Dazzlingly bright light flooded the car, and someone demanded, "You trying to blind us?"
HITCH by Jeanette Ingold
A novel for teen readers · Historical fiction at its best