she said. "Tell me your secrets!"
"Stop!" Alan said. "Please! I'm going to piss myself!"
"What's that to me?" she said, tickling more vigorously.
He tried to buck her off, but she was too fast. He caught one wrist, butshe pinned his other arm with her knee. He heaved and she collapsed ontop of him.
Her face was inches from his, her breath moist on his face. They bothpanted, and he smelled her hair, which was over his face and neck. Sheleaned forward and closed her eyes expectantly.
He tentatively brushed his lips across hers, and she moved closer, andthey kissed. It was wet and a little gross, but not altogetherunpleasant.
She leaned back and opened her eyes, then grinned at him. "That's enoughtorture for one day," she said. "You're free to go."
#
She "tortured" him at morning and afternoon recess for the next twoweeks, and when he left school on Friday afternoon after the last bell,she was waiting for him in the schoolyard.
"Hello," she said, socking him in the arm.
"Hi," he said.
"Why don't you invite me over for supper this weekend?" she said.
"Supper?"
"Yes. I'm your girlfriend, yeah? So you should have me around to yourplace to meet your parents. Next weekend you can come around my placeand meet my dad."
"I can't," he said.
"You can't."
"No."
"Why not?"
"It's a secret," he said.
"Oooh, a secret," she said. "What kind of secret?"
"A family secret. We don't have people over for dinner. That's the wayit is."
"A secret! They're all child molesters?"
He shook his head.
"Horribly deformed?"
He shook his head.
"What, then? Give us a hint?"
"It's a secret."
She grabbed his ear and twisted it. Gently at first, then harder. "Asecret?" she said.
"Yes," he gasped. "It's a secret, and I can't tell you. You're hurtingme."
"I should hope so," she said. "And it will go very hard for you indeedif you don't tell me what I want to know."
He grabbed her wrist and dug his strong fingers into the thin tendons ontheir insides, twisting his fingertips for maximal effect. Abruptly, shereleased his ear and clenched her wrist hard, sticking it between herthighs.
"Owwww! That bloody hurt, you bastard. What did you do that for?"
"My secrets," Alan said, "are secret."
She held her wrist up and examined it. "Heaven help you if you've left abruise, Alvin," she said. "I'll kill you." She turned her wrist fromside to side. "All right," she said. "All right. Kiss it better, and youcan come to my place for supper on Saturday at six p.m.." She shoved herarm into his face and he kissed the soft skin on the inside of herwrist, putting a little tongue in it.
She giggled and punched him in the arm. "Saturday, then!" she called asshe ran off.
#
Edward-Felix-Gerald were too young to give him shit about his schoolyardromance, and Brian was too sensitive, but Dave had taken to lurkingabout the schoolyard, spying on the children, and he'd seen Marci breakoff from a clench with Alan, take his hand, and plant it firmly on hertiny breast, an act that had shocked Danny to the core.
"Hi, pervert," David said, as he stepped into the cool of thecave. "Pervert" was Davey's new nickname for him, and he had a finelyhoned way of delivering it so that it dripped with contempt. "Did youhave sex with your *girlfriend* today, *pervert*?"
Allan turned away from him and helped E-F-G take off his shoes and rollup the cuffs of his pants so that he could go down to the lake in themiddle of their father and wade in the shallows, listening to Father'swinds soughing through the great cavern.
"Did you touch her boobies? Did she suck your pee-pee? Did you put yourfinger in her?" The litany would continue until Davey went to bed, andeven then he wasn't safe. One night, Allen had woken up to see Darrenstanding over him, hands planted on his hips, face twisted into anelaborate sneer. "Did you put your penis inside of her?" he'd hissed,then gone back to bed.
Alby went out again, climbing the rockface faster than Doug could keepup with him, so that by the time he'd found his perch high over thewoodlands, where he could see the pines dance in the wind and theant-sized cars zooming along the highways, Doug was far behind, likelysat atop their mother, sucking his thumb and sulking and thinking up newperversions to accuse Alan of.
#
Saturday night arrived faster than Alan could have imagined. He spentSaturday morning in the woods, picking mushrooms and checking hissnares, then headed down to town on Saturday afternoon to get a haircutand to haunt the library.
Converting his father's gold to cash was easier than getting a librarycard without an address. There was an old assayer whom the golems haddescribed to him before his first trip to town. The man was cheap but heknew enough about the strangeness on the mountain not to cheat him toobadly. The stern librarian who glared at him while he walked theshelves, sometimes looking at the titles, sometimes the authors, andsometimes the Dewey Decimal numbers had no such fear.
The Deweys were fascinating. They traced the fashions in human knowledgeand wisdom. It was easy enough to understand why the arbiters of thesystem subdivided Motorized Land Vehicles (629.2) into severalcategories, but here in the 629.22s, where the books on automobileswere, you could see the planners' deficiencies. Automobiles divided intodozens of major subcategories (taxis and limousines, buses, lighttrucks, cans, lorries, tractor trailers, campers, motorcycles, racingcars, and so on), then ramified into a combinatorial explosion ofsub-sub-sub categories. There were Dewey numbers on some of theautomotive book spines that had twenty digits or more after the decimal,an entire Dewey Decimal system hidden between 629.2 and 629.3.
To the librarian, this shelf-reading looked like your garden-varietyscrewing around, but what really made her nervous were Alan's excursionsthrough the card catalogue, which required constant tending to replacethe cards that errant patrons made unauthorized reorderings of.
The subject headings in the third bank of card drawers were the mostinteresting of all. They, too, branched and forked and rejoinedthemselves like the meanderings of an ant colony on the march. He'd goin sequence for a while, then start following cross-references when hefound an interesting branch, keeping notes on scraps of paper on top ofthe file drawer. He had spent quite some time in the mythologycategories, looking up golems and goblins, looking up changelings andmonsters, looking up seers and demigods, but none of the books that he'dtaken down off the shelves had contained anything that helped himunderstand his family better.
His family was uncatalogued and unclassified in human knowledge.
#
He rang the bell on Marci's smart little brick house at bang-on six,carrying some daisies he'd bought from the grocery store, following theetiquette laid down in several rather yucky romance novels he'd perusedthat afternoon.
She answered in jeans and a T-shirt, and punched him in the arm beforehe could give her the flowers. "Don't you look smart?" she said. "Well,you're not fooling anyone, you know." She gave him a peck on the cheekand snatched away the daisies. "Come along, then, we're eating soon."
Marci sat him down in the living room, which was furnished with neutralsofas and a neutral carpet and a neutral coffee table. The bookcaseswere bare. "It's horrible," she said, making a face. She was twitteringa little, dancing from foot to foot. Alan was glad to know he wasn't theonly one who was uncomfortable. "Isn't it? The company put us uphere. We had a grand flat in Scotland."
"It's nice," Alan said, "but you look like you could use some books."
She crossed her eyes. "Books? Sure -- I've got *ten boxes* of them inthe basement. You can come by and help me unpack them."
"Ten *boxes?*" Alan said. "You're making that up." *Ten boxes of books!*Things like books didn't last long under the mountain, in the damp andwith the ever-inquisitive, ever-destructive Davey exploring every inchof floor and cave a
nd corridor in search of opportunities for pillage.
"I ain't neither," she said. "At least ten. It was a grand flat and theywere all in alphabetical order, too."
"Can we go see?" Alan asked, getting up from the sofa.
"See boxes?"
"Yes," Alan said. "And look inside. We could unbox them after dinner,okay?"
"That's more of an afternoon project," said a voice from the top of thestairs.
"That's my Da," she said.