Double-Dare O’Toole by Constance C. Greene Read Free Book Online

voice.
    â€œYes, it’s all right. Monday’s fine.” Mr. Palinkas pulled at his nose, then looked down at his jacket and brushed at it as if he’d spilled something on himself.
    There didn’t seem to be anything more to say.
    Mrs. Timmons nodded to Fex. “See you then,” she said.
    â€œThank you,” Fex said. “Thanks a lot.” He backed out and stumbled over the doorsill.
    Mr. Palinkas looked up.
    â€œBetter watch your step,” he said.
    â€œYes, sir.” Fex turned and ran.

10
    Long ago, when he’d been small enough to fit neatly under his mother’s arm as she read to him before bedtime (and sometimes she read to him in the middle of the day, for no reason at all), she’d read him a tale about a baby who had been born under a cabbage leaf. Left there by the fairies, the baby had been picked up, nourished, and cared for by an old couple with no children of their own. When this cabbage leaf baby became a man, he was good and noble and did all sorts of good and noble things.
    At times, Fex liked to think that he too had been born under a cabbage leaf. It seemed to him a quaint and original way to come into the world. Never mind the tiny bracelet made of blue beads, reading “O’Toole,” which his mother assured him had once fitted around his wrist as he lay in the hospital nursery—placed there by diligent nurses so he wouldn’t get mixed up and go home with the wrong family.
    Never mind the birth certificate stating that one Francis Xavier O’Toole, sex male, had been born on June 27 at 1:50 P.M. That struck him as odd. He’d always understood that babies arrived in the middle of the night. But there it was: 1:50 P.M. The sun had been shining brightly, his mother said, on the day he was born. People were going to the movies at 1:50 P.M. Or coming back from lunch. Or standing up in English class trying to remember the poem they were supposed to have memorized the night before.
    There was a picture on his father’s dresser of Pete, aged three and a bit, and an ancient girl cousin, at least ten years old, holding him, Fex, a wizened, wrinkled baby, up for the camera’s inspection—holding him as if he were a bomb that might go off at any minute. Passing him back and forth between them as if he were a football.
    No cabbage, leaf baby ever got that kind of treatment.
    He didn’t look like anyone. Not his mother, who was fair with blue eyes. People were always saying Jerry looked like her. When he heard that, Fex pushed down the terrible pangs of jealousy he felt. He longed for someone to say that he, Fex, looked like his mother. Was, in fact, the image of her. No one ever did.
    And he certainly didn’t resemble his father, who looked rather like pictures Fex had seen of Abraham Lincoln. Fex thought his father was cool looking. He wished he looked like him. And he didn’t even look like his brothers. Not Jerry the violinist with the face of innocence and sweetness that made him the old ladies’ darling. And not Pete, who was tall for his age, good-looking and filled with aggressive self-confidence. Pete had curly brown hair and had never wondered for a moment where he was going, who he was. Things would most likely turn out the way he’d planned them for the simple reason that Pete wouldn’t have it any other way. People like Pete had a head start on life, Fex figured. Pete was off and running before he, Fex, had even warmed up.
    They had never been friends, he and Pete. Sometimes Fex thought they weren’t really brothers at all. Weren’t even related to each other. That’s when he pulled the cabbage leaf theory out and examined it. Suppose those little blue beads that spelled out his name were lying. Suppose in the night someone had sneaked into the hospital nursery and switched the bracelets and he was really someone else. Stranger things have happened. All you had to do was read the newspapers