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“What’s up?” I ask, crossing her room to flop on her bed. Becca is sitting on the floor in the nest of blankets she usually reads in, surrounded by shredded book pages. “Aren’t you like biologically incapable of destroying a book?”

“It was from the Goodwill. I read it first—boring finance stuff.”

“I won’t tell anyone your dirty secret if you show me what you’re hiding there.” I point to where she’s cupping her hands around something.

“Charlotte’s eighteenth birthday is coming up and I want to give her something.”

“Eighteen? I thought Charlotte was your age.”

Becca shakes her head. “She missed lots of school because…”

Cancer.

We don’t say it out loud though.

“I’m wondering what you think of my present,” Becca says, opening her hands. Inside is a small pin with a rose on it. The rose is made from the pages of a book, the petals of words delicately curving in on each other in a new story. Charlotte will love it.

“Wow, Bec.” I trace the edge of a paper rose petal. “You made this?”

Becca nods. “You really think she’ll like it?”

“I really do.” I wonder if this will be Charlotte’s last birthday, and how do you celebrate a birthday when you’ve got something like cancer, and how come Charlotte doesn’t seem super sick right now? Or is she? I noticed at the rose garden that her left hand shakes when she’s sketching.

But her personality and memory are still intact. She’s verbal and her balance is fine. Maybe she’s got lots more birthdays coming, and I’m just overreacting.

“Bec? What is Charlotte doing for her, uh, you know? I mean, she’s in school, so she must not be so sick. Right?”

Becca seems to sink a little further in her nest of blankets. Her fingers find their way into her long hair and begin to twist. Becca knows something. Dammit, I want to be the one Charlotte shares these secrets and fears with.

I nudge her. “Right?”

Finally, she looks up at me. “Charlotte’s done with all of that.”

“What’s that mean?”

“That she’s sick of being sick.”

Things reel for a second and come back into focus just as quickly. “She’s just letting it kill her?”

“She’s enjoying being normal for a while.”

“Normal? What’s normal about dying?”

“Nothing, Charlie.” Becca stands up to face me, her calm features distorted into a mask of chaos and fury. “There’s not one thing normal about any of this, but it’s Charlotte’s life. It’s her decision. So what’s it to you if she wants to spend a little time outside of a hospital for once?”

I blink. It’s the only safe response. Becca’s rare anger is about to explode.

“Exactly!” Becca is shouting now. Becca does not shout. “If Charlotte wants to spend the rest of her life as a fucking aerial-acrobat, than so fucking be it!”

Whoa. Becca definitely doesn’t say fuck.

Her hands are shaking fists. “Bec,” I murmur, reaching for her. She shrugs me off and opens her fist, holding out the beautiful rose she made for Charlotte, now crushed from her rage. She glances at it, and I think maybe she’ll erupt again, but instead all the fury wilts away.

“Crap,” she whispers.

I don’t know what to say. This is all new for me, this friendship with my sister. I don’t want to let her down. “Can you fix it?”

She looks into my eyes and shakes her head.

“I’m sorry.” And I do mean the flower, but so much more, too. I reach for her hand, still clutching the flower, but she shirks away again.

Becca’s voice is small in the space between us. “I’ll have to start over.” She tosses the flower in her trashcan and flops back into her reading nest. “There’s still time.”

When she’s not looking, I rescue the rose from the trash.

5.2

Greta shows up Sunday afternoon without James. “Lover’s spat?” I joke as I close the front door behind her.

She scoffs. “They went to visit his dad.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh.”

James doesn’t talk about his dad much. I know his dad’s buried in his hometown in Eastern North Carolina, a few hours from here. I know James misses him, even if he doesn’t say so.

Greta follows me up to my room, taking over my desk chair and flipping through all the open windows on my computer until she finds an online game she wants to play. She’s going to screw up all my character points. I just know it. I’d get upset, except it’s Greta.

I lie on my floor and read through my advanced physics notes. A silence settles between us, and it isn’t exactly uncomfortable, but it’s not like a pair of sweatpants either. Greta’s got something to say. I can tell by the number of times she’s tucked that one strand of hair behind her left ear.

Just as I’m about to bolt from the room under any pretense I can come up with, Greta turns from the screen. “When are you going to ask Charlotte out?”

I sit up so quickly all the blood whooshes in my ears. When she asked, I could taste Charlotte on my lips, like the memory was just lying in wait to attack. “Never,” I manage to grunt.

Greta cocks a brow at me. “You’re a terrible liar, Chuck. Your ears give you away every time.”

Damn. They do feel warm.

“Besides, never is a long time.”

“Depends on your perspective,” I say. These feelings that I have for Charlotte will pass, but she may pass before they do. Never may be a short time to wait in this case.

Greta’s face pales as she catches on. She takes a deep breath and blows it out, her freckles stretching with her rounded cheeks. “You’re right. Guess I just wanted you to ask her out to assuage my guilt about going to the winter formal when you don’t have a date. She’s probably all wrong for you anyway.”

“Wrong for me?” My nerves frazzle like sparklers in summer. “You don’t even know her, so how can you say that? Her art is so beautiful, Gret. Looking at her sketches is like looking through a microscope and seeing the core of everything around us. And she’s passionate, maybe not about math, but the feeling is the same, the desire to wrap your life up in something you love so you never have to be far from it. Charlotte gets that. I don’t know how, but she gets me.” My voice breaks at the top of a very long crescendo, and I have to catch my breath.

Greta’s eyes are wide green pools. “Okay, Chuck. I didn’t know.”

“No—shit—I’m sorry, Greta.” I slump, my spine too brittle to support me. “I’m scared,” I say to the carpet. Being left behind will break me. Of this, I’m sure. “How am I supposed to fall in love with a girl when I know she’s going to break my heart?”

Greta blinks, her eyes glistening in the light from my computer screen. “Maybe it’s not love.”

“Did you not listen to anything I just said?” The heat from my ears travels down my neck. I watch as Greta digests everything before I drop my forehead to the floor. “Plus, I kissed her,” I say into the carpet.

Greta falls forward from the chair onto her knees in front of me. “You what?”

“Friday. On the couch. Watching movies.”

Greta pauses long enough that I peek at her. I see the moment she swallows whatever other reservations she has and decides to be on my team, even if we’re going to lose. “Well done, Professor Peacock,” Greta chuckles. “How’d it go?”

I rest one cheek on the floor and look up at her. “She said we couldn’t.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Greta wrinkles her nose. “Because you suck at kissing?” Her ginger brows wag up and down, trying to lighten the mood.

I snort into the carpet. “Probably.”

She nods. “I knew it. You should have practiced more.”

“We can’t hurt Becca.”

“Have you talked to Becca?”

My horrified expression answers for me. “Right, well. You need to talk to Becca.”

I move my head so I’m resting on the opposite cheek. I can’t face the pity in her eyes.

“Hey,” Greta says, her voice sharp enough to pull my eyes back up to hers. Maybe that wasn’t pity. “You’re stronger than you think. If you want to fall in love, then fall.”

5.3

Since Thanksgiving, Ms. Finch has had her classroom rearranged to face the windows in the back of the room instead of the whiteboard in the front (backfire: “What a beautiful idea. Let’s all write poems about the fall foliage outside our windows”), her podium wrapped in holiday paper with penguins on it (“A gift? For me? You shouldn’t have”), and, my personal favorite, a full-scale cardboard cutout of Darth Vader with Ms. Finch’s face and the caption, “Come to the dark side.” She snapped a picture of it and texted someone immediately. Everyone’s hearts were racing that day, thinking Dr. Whiting had been on the other end of that text. (It was Charlotte, and she had this to say: “That’s the best you geeks can do?”).

Ms. Finch’s been marking off the days until winter break on the wall calendar with a fat red marker. Today she’ll “X” off the last day. I think we’re both relieved. It’s funny because I may have started this revolution against Ms. Finch, but the longer it wages, the more sympathetic I feel toward her, and the more I want to call the whole thing off and walk away.

My lack of fight isn’t because Charlotte is off-limits and my poor southern hemisphere is losing. Honestly, I feel helpless in the face of Charlotte’s disease. I want to make everything else in her life as smooth as possible, since I’ve got no way of making the cancer better. I’m pretty sure that’s what Ms. Finch is doing, too. We’re fighting the same fight to protect Charlotte.

Defeating Ms. Finch is like defeating myself.

Ms. Finch has a book open on her lap at the beginning of class. The book is old and dog-eared and the pages are covered with ink illustrations and writing so there is more black than white. I’ve noticed she carries it around with her wherever she goes lately.

She closes the book and sets it on her podium when the bell rings. Clearing her throat she begins.

“There are many kinds of heroes in literature, and people love to argue over what makes a hero and who represents them best. I’m going to give each of you a slip of paper with a quote from a literary character on it. I’d like you to read the quote aloud and then we’ll decide whether the character is a hero.” She pauses to pull a large glass jar from under her podium. It’s filled with colorful scraps of paper that remind me of rose petals aloft in the sky. “Oh, and why the character is heroic. Never forget why. ”

She walks up and down the aisles holding out the jar for each of us.

I pull an orange paper from the jar.

“I wanted you to see what real courage is… It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”

–Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird

It’s like a wave that has been pulling back from the shore, building upon itself and towering over me since I met Charlotte Finch crashes over me, and I’m choking on the salty water. I can’t win, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try. I can’t hold onto Charlotte forever, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t hold her now. I can’t—breathe. I fucking can’t breathe.

Ms. Finch reads the slip of paper over my shoulder. She touches my desk, her fingers fluttering there like leaves in a breeze.

“It’s true, you know,” she says quietly beside me. I want to yell at her. Of course it’s true, but I’m not that brave. I barely keep myself contained for the rest of class. All I want is Charlotte. I want to win just one more kiss and then another and…is it possible?

It’s the longest class in the history of ever.

Ms. Finch doesn’t linger after class. Today is Charlotte’s birthday. I’m sure they have plans. No one else sticks around either. Winter formal is tonight. I wish I had asked Charlotte, but…I was afraid—of hurting Becca, but mostly of rejection. On my way out the door, I notice Ms. Finch forgot her book where she’d left it on the podium. Curious, I glance at the title: To Kill a Mockingbird.

It’s the book—the book that will tell me more about this Atticus fellow whose words are making my insides explode.

I grab the book without further thought. I’ll return it after break. She’ll never even know it’s missing. I just need to know. Did Atticus win?

5.4

“Charlie?” My name is whispered across the darkness of my room that night. I fell asleep with my face on my physics book like it’s a pillow, so I can’t see so much as feel someone in here with me. My heart stalls. Charlotte?

Becca leans over and whispers my name again.

I groan and grab my sheets to pull them over my head, but she stops me. “Charlie, I need your help.”

I sit up, my eyes adjusting to the darkness and the shadowy figure of my sister. I notice she’s dressed. “What’s up?”

“It’s Charlotte,” Becca says, waving her cell phone at me. I see now the screen is lit and Charlotte is on the line. Becca foists the phone at me and starts tugging at a strand of her hair.

“’Lo?”

“CHaRliEEE!”

“Charlotte? You okay?”

“Iss my birthday! HaPPy BIRthDay to ME!”

“Oh-kay? Happy birthday, Charlotte. Whatcha doing?”

“I’m at my BirTHDay PartEEEE!”

I pull the phone away from my ear. “I don’t understand. What party?”

Becca’s finger is lost in a tangle of her hair. She loosens the bite on the inside of her lip. “We went to dinner earlier for her birthday. She said she had to go home and celebrate with her sister. She dropped me off here. That’s all I know.”

“So this isn’t really her birthday party?”

Becca shakes her head.

I nod and get back to the phone. “Charlotte, where are you? Becca and I want to come to your birthday party, too.”

“You do? How lovely,” she says, her voice tinged with sadness.

The party isn’t far from us. It’s in the neighborhood. The guy who lives here goes to school with Becca and Charlotte. We park the car amongst the others on the street and head toward the house. I’m still talking to Charlotte, narrating our every move.

“Okay, we’re here. Should we ring the bell?” Charlotte laughs maniacally. I decide that means no. I can hear loud music and voices. “Listen, Charlotte, once we get in here, how can we find you?”

“I’m upstairs.”

“Upstairs?”

“Un-huh,” her voice drifts away like she’s bored or on the edge of passing out.

I take a deep breath and look at Becca. Her face is pale, a sheen of sweat on her brow. I try to smile at her, like, No worries, I regularly crash stranger’s parties to retrieve drunk, terminally ill friends. I got this. We slip in. My plan is to get to Charlotte and get out without anyone noticing us.

“We’re heading upstairs. Where are you up here?”

“Bathroom.”

“Which door? There’s like six.”

“Ummm…”

Damn. I nod at Becca to start checking rooms. The first is unoccupied. The next is dark, but I can hear a lot of panting, so I’m guessing—occupied. Becca’s is a closet. The next one we try is locked.

“Hey, Charlotte? Did you lock the door?”

“Dunno.”

I chuckle. This is a pain in the ass expedition, but I have to admit, drunk Charley sounds awfully cute, from sober Charlie’s perspective. “Could you check? I’m standing outside a locked door and before I kick it in and rescue you, I’d like to know I’ve got the right princess.” I hear laughing, both on the phone and off. Yep. It’s this one. “Ha. Ha. Open up, will ya?”

“I wanna see you kick it down.”

I stare at the door.

“Go ’head. I’m waiting,” she says.

“Charlotte, come out,” I holler, pounding on the door. My hand throbs, irrefutable evidence I could never kick it down.

“All right,” she says, pulling it open in my face. “Don’t get your panties in a bunch. Geez.”

Becca pulls Charlotte to her in a big hug.

“Let’s go, ladies, before I’m spotted and someone tries to stuff me in a locker.”

“But, Charlie,” Becca says, looking around the dim hallway. “There aren’t any.”

Charlotte doubles over with a fit of laughter, slurred, but still musical. Someone else tonight must have been snared by her Siren call because a half-naked guy steps into the hall calling, “Charley, that you? Where’ve you been?”

Mostly-Naked stops short when he sees Becca and me propping Charlotte up between us. Beside me, Charlotte’s spine stiffens and she mutters something sounding like, “not this asshole again.” Which makes me smile because she isn’t talking about me.

“Who the hell are you?” Mostly-Naked asks, advancing at an angle.

“Uh…I’m Charlie.” Smooth, nut sack. Maybe you should run now? I start hauling Charlotte toward the stairs.

“Hey!” he shouts behind us. Charlotte’s feet aren’t working well, so he catches up, grabbing Charlotte by the shoulder and trying to wrench her from my grip.

Something snaps in my brain. “Back off, man. She’s drunk. I’m taking her home.”

“Who are you talking to, you little bitch?”

Becca untangles her arm and turns to face Mostly-Naked. “ To whom are you talking, Derrick No-Dick?” she asks, her lips grim lines of distaste. “My brother and I are here to collect our friend. Can you wrap the only organ in your body smaller than your penis around that fact?”

My little sister. I’m so proud.

Charlotte snorts with laughter and throws her hand in the air, “Oh, yes, speak the gospel, sister-friend.” Becca grins and smacks Charlotte with a high-five.

Derrick No-Dick doesn’t find it funny, though. He advances on me, even though I’m the only one here not insulting him. I’m trying to figure out how to avoid being hit and hold Charlotte when Charlotte relieves me of my second duty. Standing on her own, she stumbles toward Derrick and places her hands on his shoulders.

“Uh, Charlotte?”

She leans close to his ear, like she’s going to whisper something to him and he gives me this total suck it, assface grin. Charlotte knocks it off his face by ramming her knee in his groin. Big or little, that hurts like hell. My sixth grade experiment proved that, if nothing else.

Becca grabs Charlotte and takes off down the hallway. “Come on, Charlie.”

Derrick crumples to the carpet.

“Keys,” Becca says as we hit the curb. I toss them over and help Charlotte into the backseat. Then, I slide in beside her. Becca takes the first corner too fast, so Charlotte thumps into my shoulder. She rests her head there and looks up at me. “Thanks for coming to my party.”

“It was a real killer,” I deadpan.

She giggles again, which makes her hiccup. Her face, pink from the heat of the party, pales.

“You okay?”

Charlotte leans away and starts groping for the door handle even though we’re going forty miles per hour through the neighborhood.

“Whoa! Hold on.” I grab for her hands. “Stop, Becca.”

The car’s barely stopped before Charlotte bolts. She crawls behind an inflatable Santa and retches.

“Do you think puking on Santa gets you an automatic spot on the naughty list?”

“Not funny, Charlie,” Becca whisper-shouts. “Go help her,” she says with a shove.

“What about you?” I ask, but Becca’s paler than Santa’s beard. I’ll have two puking girls on my hands if I send her in to help.

Charlotte’s no longer puking, but she’s not moving either. She’s on all fours staring at the contents of her stomach. The smell is foul, the alcohol still strong enough to burn the inside of my nose. I gag. Smooth.

“Can you stand?” I offer her my hand.

Charlotte crawls away from her pile of sick to where I’ve retreated from the stench. She reaches up, and I grab under her arms to help her to her feet. We stumble over each other until I can prop her against the hood of my car. She leans forward into my chest and her shoulders sag forward. “I want to go home.”

“What about your sister?” I ask. Charlotte moans. The vibration from her moaning is somehow both inside and outside my chest. “You can come home with me. Becca and I will take care of you.”

She lifts her face up toward me, and I feel that familiar urge to kiss her, but her eyes are so glazed, and she is hiccupping, and some puke is on her chin. I clean her face with a napkin from my glove box before helping her back into the car.

At home, we sneak up the stairs, which is exponentially harder to do with Charlotte stepping in all the wrong places, and settle Charlotte in Becca’s bed. Becca leaves to get aspirin and water for our patient.

Charlotte’s wearing a sleeveless shirt thingy that ties behind her neck, her skin prickled with a chill. Becca’s book page rose is pinned to the fabric just above her right breast. I will myself to look away and pull off my sweatshirt, so I can yank it over her head, making her glossy black curls stand up at odd, yet sexy, angles. As I’m putting her right arm through the shirt, she looks at me, her eyes more focused.

“Know what I miss the most from my old life?”

“Old life?”

“The one before I was dying.”

My heart catches. “Oh.”

“I miss the boredom.”

Instead of saying anything, I help thread her left arm through the other sleeve.

“I miss thinking I had enough time to be bored. Nowadays, it feels like such a waste. But, I’m tired. Tired of the constant motion. Tired of running away from something so—” She fixes me with her eyes. “Consuming.”

It feels like a hand is crushing my throat. “You can’t give up.”

“What if I’m not giving up? Nothing lasts forever. What if my number is up? Or, like, my number line thingy is simply a short line?”

“Number line thingy? Are you alluding to a math theory?”

She laughs, her small shoulders shaking inside my sweatshirt. “You said ‘allude,’ which is totally a literary term. We’re even.”

I smooth a mussed curl from her face and press my palm there. Her eyes widen, and I retract my hand.

“Sorry,” I say and lean away.

Her hand reaches up to the same spot. “I don’t know what to do,” she says, her voice a low note on a saxophone. When her eyes overflow, I wipe the tears from her cheek with my sleeve. She catches my hand and holds it.

“Jo’s making us stay with Dad for Christmas. I don’t want to go. I’m nothing but a cancer patient to him anymore. It’s so horrible, Charlie.”

“I’m so sorry.” I move closer to her.

“He’s too chicken-shit to admit I’m losing this fight; the tumors are winning. We just lie to each other, like I’ll live happily ever after, and I hate it. I hate the lies.”

She lets go of my hand to wipe away the second round of tears coursing down her cheeks. I open my mouth, but Charlotte cuts me off. “If you apologize to me again for something out of your control, Hanson, I swear I’ll make your nose bleed so badly you’ll need super-size tampons to staunch the bleeding.”

I need to change the subject, so I go with math. “Did you know—” My voice sounds too high, like my vocal chords are strung too tight. I clear my throat, “Did you know the number-line-thingy has a special place for imaginary numbers?”

She looks at me like maybe my brain is addled with tumors. “And?”

“Isn’t that strange?”

“Mathematically?” Her mouth scrunches up to one side. It’s kind of adorable. “I have no idea.”

“The mathematical term, oddly enough, is not ‘number-line-thingy.’ We call it the Real line.” One of her eyebrows arches. “And the imaginary line, which is part of the complex plane, intersects with the Real line.”

“Complex plane? Sounds about right.” Her lips pull into a smile.

“Mathematicians invented imaginary numbers to solve these ridiculously awesome problems. The real numbers weren’t enough.”

“What’s the point, Professor Weird?”

I take a long, shaky breath. I hadn’t realized how fast my heart was racing. “The point is, sometimes real problems have to be solved with imagination. Maybe the lies aren’t technically lies, but imaginary numbers, and your dad needs them to cope with losing you.”

“That and whiskey.”

“Right.”

“It’s a nice fairy tale, but I’m still going to die,” she says, lying back on Becca’s bed and closing her eyes.

I sit on the floor next to her. “Are you afraid?”

Her eyebrows pull into a frown. It makes her look like her sister. “I’m not a coward.”

“No, you are not.”

She’s quiet. The whole house is silent. Charlotte grabs my hand. Her fingers are frail and white in my palm, like the bare branches of the birch in the backyard. Her voice in the stillness hurts. “Yes. I am.”

Becca comes back, and bustles between Charlotte and me. “Mom and Dad are still asleep,” she reports, and then sits Charlotte up to administer water and aspirin like a nurse. I stand to leave, but Charlotte’s grip tightens.

I sit back down next to the bed and watch as Becca strokes Charlotte’s curls, untangling them so they lay neatly against her face. As Charlotte falls asleep, her fingers relax and fall away from mine. I want to grab them up and hold them again. I want to, but I don’t.

5.5

Once Charlotte is sleeping, I slip off to my room. My nerves are buzzing, making me jittery. I need a good distraction. I could finish that physics chapter I was reading earlier, but for some reason it doesn’t appeal to me. I pace my room a few times and notice my backpack half-slung under my bed. I drag it out and fish inside for the novel I stole today.

I collapse on my bed with Ms. Finch’s copy of To Kill A Mockingbird. I smell the aging paper and hear the spine crackle, like it had under Ms. Finch’s careful fingers, as I open the book and am transported from my world to hers.

There are inscriptions on the title page:

To Charley: You are old enough to understand real courage.

For my Jo: You need this now.

I look more closely at the ink drawings in the margins, illustrations of the story. They are beautiful and intricate and each one is overflowing with something. Some tangible feeling. This is how Charlotte sees the words.

Between the illustrations, in a cramped script, are poems, each one a snapshot of the people in the story. This is how Ms. Finch sees the words.

The book is a conversation between sisters. A love letter.

I know the right thing to do is to return the book right this instant. Drive to Ms. Finch’s house and slide it in the damn doggie door. But I don’t.

I read.

I read through what remains of the night, hearing the characters in my head and seeing them on the page before me in beautiful details. Scout scowling in class as the teacher instructs her to stop reading so she can learn to read = loss. But then Atticus encourages her to continue, to do what’s right for her = win.

Jem wriggling out of his pants in his escape from the Radley yard = loss. Then the pants appear, patched and everything, and the kids begin to realize they have a secret ally = win. Crazy Mrs. Dubose and her Camellias. Well, that’s a big win.

Atticus defends Tom in court and I’m sure he’ll win. But Tom is found guilty.

Loss.

Tom Robinson’s life ends as he’s running to save it.

Loss.

Bob Ewell falls on his knife.

Loss.

Boo Radley saves Jem.

Win.

But goes back into hiding.

Loss.

I can’t figure out how Atticus stays so strong. Why doesn’t he flip the hell out? Everything is falling apart, but he’s as calm as he was the day he taught Jem about courage, not by staring down a gun barrel at death, but by standing by a person he admired as she died.

I read until the sun rises and filters through the white blinds in my windows. When I finish, I am so filled with the story, I feel alive. And I want to share the feeling with Charlotte.

Becca reads in her nest beside the bed where Charlotte is still asleep. It would be cruel to wake her, so I sit next to Becca with the book in my lap and wait.

“Morning,” Becca murmurs. Instead of looking at me, her eyes lock on the book in my hands. “You’re reading?”

“Have you read this?” I show her the cover.

“More than a dozen times.” People do that? Becca takes it from me and continues, “I’ve never seen one with such lovely illustrations.” She squints at the margins then looks up at me with wide-eyes. “Whose is this?”

“Teacher.” I shrug, but it looks more like a spasm.

“Charlie,” she breathes in an exasperated huff. She flips to the front of the book and reads the inscriptions. “Did Ms. Finch let you borrow this?”

“Sure.”

“Un-huh. Does Charlotte know you have it?”

I snatch it back from her.

“That’s what I thought,” she says, blanching at my rough treatment of the book. Her face gets a hard look about it I’ve never seen before. She points her finger at me like mom. “You listen to me, Charles Hanson, and you listen good. If anything happens to this book, you’ll have to answer to me.”

I grin. Just a tiny one because, who is she kidding? She takes the finger she’s wagging at me and pokes me in the chest, hard. “I’m. No. Joke,” she says, punctuating each word with another hard jab.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-24