Mr. Millman shrugged.
Nita shook her head again. “
That night Nita had a dream. In the dream she stood at the edge of darkness, looking in. Out there in the dark was a spotlight, wobbling around and around, shining on something, while somewhere off in the near distance, a single drum held a drumroll.
What the spotlight was following was a clown act. The clown had purple hair, and a little derby hat, and baggy patched pants, and it was riding around and around in circles on a ridiculously small bicycle, the circles ever decreasing. Around and around and around went the clown, in jerky, wobbling movements. It had a painted black tear running down its face. The red-painted mouth was turned down. But the face under the white greasepaint mask was as immobile as a marble statue’s, expressionless, plastered in place. Only the eyes were alive. They shouted, I
The drumroll went on and on. Beyond the light, a heartless crowd laughed and clapped and cheered. But there was no sound of growling now, no tiger waiting to pounce. It had already pounced. Now the tiger had become part of the clown…and the clown was its cage.
Nita woke up to the bright daylight, reflected from snow onto the ceiling of her bedroom… and she grinned.
The doorbell rang. Kit glanced up as he was throwing books into his book bag. He would have gone to the door himself, but his sister plunged past him. “What?” Kit said, looking all around to try to understand why Carmela was suddenly so hot to answer the door.
No answer came back. Kit could do little but shrug and finish packing his book bag. He stood up from the sofa just in time to look out the window and see the UPS truck pull away.
His sister closed the front door and nearly danced past him into the kitchen. “
Carmela got a particularly large knife out of the knife rack and began slitting the packing tape on the large
“It has to be clothes,” he said. After a childhood during which Carmela’s major occupation had been ruining the OshKosh overalls that were all their parents dared buy her, Carmela had suddenly discovered clothing as something besides protection from the elements. Now all her pocket money went in this direction, either down at the mall or via various strange mail-order firms. “Nothing but clothes gets you this excited anymore,” Kit said. “Except maybe Miguel.”
And having said that, Kit prepared to protect himself from the explosion that was sure to follow.
I
But the explosion didn’t follow. Carmela, grinning all over her face and singing a little la-la song, put the knife aside, opened the top of the box, and started removing the contents. These seemed to be only Styrofoam peanuts for the first thirty seconds or so. But then Carmela reached in and lifted out something wrapped in foam.
“It’s not clothes,” Kit said, astonished.
“Nope,” Carmela said. “Much better.”
This statement left Kit completely confused. Carmela carefully started unwrapping the foam from around the object.
“It’s some hair thing,” Kit said. “One of those hot curlers.”
Carmela just smiled and kept on unwrapping.
The last bit of wrapping fell away. Carmela held the object up delightedly, admiring it in the morning light, and then thrust it into Kit’s hands.
“Let’s see what the directions say,” she said. She turned back to the box and started digging through the Styrofoam peanuts again.
Kit looked at what he was holding. It looked very much like an eggbeater, except that eggbeaters don’t usually have pulse lasers built into them.
? he said silently.
A moment later the answer came back.
There was a pause… and then laughter.
…
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