War Games by Audrey Couloumbis

Author:Audrey Couloumbis [Couloumbis, Audrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-375-89302-5
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2009-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

chapter 26

Everything went very well at first. Stavros met them in the road and the boys played the game as before, but without laughter or cheers when they made a good catch. Before, it seemed this distracted the eye of anyone watching and it was good. But nerves stole the laughter out of the game.

Petros caught and threw the sand ball and dropped a note whenever he’d found a good place for it, but he saw how different it was this time. At first it was nerves, but when Stavros threw too hard, nerves quickly gave way to anger. They all threw the sand ball to be caught, but threw harder.

Only when the last note was dropped did the boys stop to argue about who threw the sand ball too hard first. The fight ended when Stavros threw the sand ball to the ground hard enough to burst the cloth. Petros expected to share a glance of there he goes again, but Elia didn’t look at him.

Petros wanted to have something funny to say, or wanted someone else to make a joke, but nothing like that came to any of them. Still, without a word to show he’d been angry or now wasn’t, Stavros walked away from the village with them. Petros said, “There won’t be any more messages for a time. Zola said so.”

“I guessed it,” Stavros said. He sounded like this was the worst news he’d gotten since his mother left for the mountains. But also there was a certain relief in his voice.

Elia now felt free to complain that the palms of his hands still hurt. Stavros touched a fresh bruise on his collarbone—Petros thought he had a similar bruise. No one apologized, but all agreed they didn’t like catching the sand ball when they’d thrown it so hard.

The boys walked without speaking. Petros thought through the short list of things they’d do when they reached the farm. Everything paled beside the game of sand ball.

“If only we had a kite,” Stavros said.

“If only,” Elia said. “But with what paper?”

Bumps rose on Petros’s arms.

Since the iceman had gone, there was no ice to be had. Mamas wrapped their cheese and meat in newspaper and hung the food in burlap sacks inside the well.

Petros had excellent paper, of course.

“We could steal the paper from the cheese,” Stavros said, “if there were cheese.” Stavros didn’t have a goat. This was the case before the war—Auntie didn’t like goats. But her family had always had cheese. Petros felt the shock of this news, but only for a moment.

Whether they seized on this idea—a kite needed a big piece of paper, the paper needed a frame, the frame needed a tail—or the idea seized them, it made the blood rush, it made them giddy with planning.

“Brown paper. There’s still brown paper,” Elia said, as if that settled the matter. It didn’t, for brown paper was among the many items people had begun to hoard.

Stavros said, “What good is a kite without a tail?”

“Money,” Elia said.

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