Eli the Good by Silas House

Author:Silas House [House, Silas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7636-4341-6
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2009-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

We were all in bed, but none of us was asleep when the headlights slid through my bedroom window. I could hear Josie’s and Nell’s muffled talking over in their room beside me. There was no noise from my parents’ room, but I knew they were still up. We were never made to go to bed early in the summertime, as my mother believed we ought to wring every moment of freedom out of our days. But none of us could bear to look at one another after Daddy broke the guitar, so we went to bed. We didn’t know why we were all ashamed, but we were.

I was lying propped up against several pillows, writing in my notebook about what I thought of Anne Frank. After finishing a big chunk of diary, I had just written I believe that Anne Frank is becoming one of my heroes when the car pulled in next door. I snapped off my lamp and scrambled up onto my bed so I could look out my open window undetected. As soon as I put my face against the screen, the crickets sounded louder, but I could hear car doors slamming and then footsteps up the side of Edie’s house as people made their way to her back door. All was darkness out there in the space separating our houses, but I knew someone was moving about, even though they weren’t saying a word. When the light popped on in the kitchen windows, I knew that Edie was finally back. I couldn’t imagine where they’d been so late.

I tugged on my cutoffs that I had let crumple to the floor beside my bed and slipped out of my room, easing the door open and shut, tiptoeing down the hall. I scurried past my parents’ room and slid out the back door like a breath, scampering across the backyard with the grass warm beneath my bare feet. The moon that had lit the yard earlier was now high and smudged silver behind a haze that I knew was heat.

Just as I reached her window, Edie’s bedroom light came on. If I put my eye right up to the edge of the shade, I could see in. The window screen was gritty with dirt. There she was, pausing for a moment with her hand still on the light switch, looking at her room as if she had never seen it before. She moved like an old woman over to her dresser, where she pulled off her watch and laid it down, ran her fingertips along the top of a little Holly Hobbie music box she’d had for ages. I thought she might pick up the box and wind the music, but she didn’t.

I rapped on the window with two knuckles, two sudden tap-taps, but she wasn’t startled at all. When she appeared at the window, her face was flat and void of any kind of emotion or hint to give me about where she’d been or what she’d been doing all day.

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