Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

Author:Carol Rifka Brunt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780812992922
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-06-18T22:00:00+00:00

Toby offered to walk me to Grand Central. The weather had changed while we were buried in the basement. When I left school there were only a few clouds, but by the time we left Finn’s building the whole sky was dark. We’d only walked a few blocks when the first fat raindrops splashed down.

“Shit,” Toby said. “No umbrella.”

We ducked into a deli, hoping maybe we could wait it out, but after we’d made three rounds of the aisles, the guy behind the counter stepped out and asked if we needed any help. Toby told him we were just looking for some mints, and the guy pressed his lips together hard and pointed to the candy rack in front of the register.

We walked downtown in the rain, both of us sucking on those hot, spicy mints we hadn’t meant to buy. When the spiciness started to kick in, I almost spat mine out, but then I didn’t. I thought it was good to test yourself sometimes. It was good to see how much you could take.

Toby asked me for one of my Finn stories. I hesitated for a few seconds, deciding, then finally I told him about how once on Thanksgiving, when everyone else was watching the football game, Finn and I snuck out of the house and walked into the woods until we were lost. “Just the two of us,” I said, “because we hated football.” I told Toby how good the woods smelled and that Finn made us a little campfire using only sticks and then we sat huddled in close and Finn taught me what all the Latin words in the Lacrimosa part of Mozart’s Requiem meant, and we sang it over and over again in our wobbly singing voices until I knew all of it by heart. I said that Finn told me he wanted to stay there forever, that he never wanted to go back to the city again, but he knew he couldn’t. Then, I said, we followed our tracks home and saw that we weren’t even very lost at all. When we got back, my mother had two pieces of pumpkin pie with Cool Whip saved for us, and we ate them without telling anybody where we’d been.

“Hmmm. That’s quite something, June.”

“Yup.”

Toby started telling me about this time Finn tried to disguise himself so he could go to an exhibit of his own work and hear what people were saying about it. Toby rambled on with his story, but I was drifting away until all of a sudden the shiny roundness of a rain-slicked manhole caught my eye and I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.

Toby kept walking.

“Hey,” I shouted to him. “What do you know about those buttons? Those black buttons on the portrait?”

Toby was a few steps ahead, but he heard me and stopped. He didn’t turn right away. For a few seconds he just stood there. When he finally did turn around, he had a pleading expression on his face.

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