by: Sarah Stodola

TWO MONTHS LATER…

“Good mornin’, good mornin’, good mornin’!”

Luke groaned and pulled his pillow over his head. The covers were swept off and away, and the pillow forcibly snatched. Bo bent down, blond hair even more tousled than normal, and grinned.

“Good mornin’!” he repeated. “Get up!” When his older cousin only mumbled something indistinguishable, Bo jumped onto the bed on hands and knees and bounced it. Then he sat back, hands on his hips. “C’mon, Luke,” he complained. “Get up.”

Finally the dark-haired Duke yawned and sat up, blinking. “What time is it?”

“Seven.”

“Too early.” He fell back down on his back. Hah, Bo grinned a bit to himself. Only too early if you’d stayed out late Friday night, like they had. But Bo wasn’t tired, and he had seen the twinkle in his cousin’s eyes that meant he was willing to play. He pounced, tickling the sleepy older boy. Luke yelped and pushed away, falling with a resounding thud onto the floor. He sat up, eyeing Bo.

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by: Sarah Stodola

Luke woke early, having slept peacefully despite his worries of the previous day, and headed straight for a shower, and after that the kitchen. He’d been no cook before, and Bo even less of one, but they’d had to get out that old cookbook and figure it out if they didn’t want to starve, and starving was about the last thing they’d wanted to do. So, both boys, though mostly himself, had learned how to make meals.

He quickly fried strips of bacon, then scrambled some eggs in the leftover grease, and with what was left after that, heated up some of Sunday’s hash browns that had been in the icebox. Spreading the crispy potatoes on the bottoms of two plates, he dumped the eggs on top, laid bacon on top of that, lightly salted the whole mess, and went to go locate his younger cousin.

Bo was easy to find. He was still in bed. Or rather, on the bed. The lightweight covers were rumpled, kicked aside and down, and the blond boy lay half-sprawled on his back at a diagonal across the mattress, with his head a good foot from his pillow. He was sleeping soundly, his breathing deep.

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by: Sarah Stodola

“O-kay, turn ’im left. U-turn right! Back up and spin around to face me. Whoa!”

Luke smiled as Cooter barked the final order and held both hands up as if to stop a running horse. The smile broadened as a blond head poked out of the driver’s side window of the orange racer, quickly and agilely followed by the rest of a slim teenager.

“Okay?” Bo called to him, sitting on the door. Luke gave him a thumbs up from his seat in the shade on top of an old cold box.

“Great! More than okay! You did great!”

The blond boy thrust one fist into the air victoriously. “Yee-haaa!”

Luke grinned again. He was proud of his younger cousin, yet again. He was learning so quickly, doing so well, that the older Duke often forgot he didn’t yet have a license. Which he had to have before the end of August, on his sixteenth birthday. It had been decided that he would drive the summer’s-end race. The younger boy was both nervous and ecstatic at the thought.

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by: Sarah Stodola

“Luke! Luke!”

It was a couple of days after he had met Anna. He was still trying to get his emotions on that matter sorted out, while trying to coax a dying pickup back into life. He frowned and pushed his way out from under the machine, wrench in hand, just in time to get landed upon by a blond teenager. It quite literally knocked the breath out of him. He coughed, trying to breathe.

“Oh, gosh, I’m sorry!” Bo realized what he’d done. He scrambled up and offered a hand to his older cousin. “I’m really, really sorry!”

The pleading dark blue eyes melted Luke’s heart almost before he started to get mad. He sighed and nodded, accepting the hand up and brushing himself off. “I’m okay. What is it?”

“Can I go into town with Greg and Laura? They’re going to a movie.”

Luke pondered that for a moment. Greg and Laura were brother and sister, from the next farm up the road. They were good kids. “Well…”

“Please?”

“All right. Go on. But be back for dinner!” he called after the already-running boy.

“Okay!”

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by Sarah Stodola

Originally written 1998. Edited/reposted March 2005 

Author’s note (updated):

It is not normally my style to write an extended intro to a story of mine, but I feel I should, for some reason, to this one. This novel, I suppose I should call it, has been a work of much love on my part, an attempt to see inside people that I feel I know as well as I could know anyone, and show what I see to others.

“Cousins”, though an alternate-universe adventure story where most of the events center around the creation and racing of the General Lee, is also a journey through the hearts and souls of two boys that we all know and love. Events and even people are slightly different in some, more outside, ways, but I have tried to capture the essence of who they are, deep down. I hope I have succeeded. Enjoy, and any and all comments/reviews are greatly appreciated.

Many thanks to all my friends and fellow authors from the Crossroads who so quickly accepted me when I first began to write so many years ago, and originally cheered the creation of this story on. I am very grateful to be back in Hazzard again now, and especially to find so many of my friends remaining at HazzardNet.

And I can’t think of anyone better I could ever dedicate this work to than Daisy, without whom I would never have understood or loved her cousins as much as I do. (If you wish to understand this comment, read “A Christmas Tale.”)

Sarah C. Stodola

dixie_dream1n@yahoo.com

*****************

“Hey! Where’d you go?”

The young voice broke the stillness of the woods in playful complaint. Moments later, a young teenager trotted out of the trees into a tiny clearing. He paused and looked around, head high in an almost instinctive pride and dark blue eyes shining with laughter. He brushed his overly-long blond hair out of his face as he looked around.

“Kris! No fair! You’re supposed to stay in sight!”

In response, another boy, this one small and dark-haired, dropped down out of a tree and started running with a red flag clutched in his fist. The blond spotted him and took off like a shot, shouting to any teammates that remained for support.

The kids at Rialton Boarding Home, a cross between a boarding school and an orphanage, a place for kids whose parents couldn’t take care of them to stay, were playing Capture-The-Flag. It was a hard, quick, rough game, and most of the girls participating had dropped out some time ago, captured on purpose so as to be able to quit. The game was drawing to its close, and there were only five players left, two boys and a girl on the Red team, and two boys, one of whom was the young blond, on the Blue team.

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