Lily and the Lost Boy by Paula Fox Read Free Book Online Page A

you could stay awake twenty-four hours, you wouldn’t miss a thing except your dreams.
    Her parents’ room was dark, the tall wood shutters closing out the light. She always loved to push them open. They swung out like sails, and the day poured in.
    Light was what furnished their house, flooded the rooms that were empty except for a chair or two, their beds, and the baskets Mrs. Corey had bought in the village, in which they kept their clothes and bed linen and towels.
    Although she was so tired she was stumbling, Lily went into the kitchen to get a piece of bread and cheese. She was even hungrier than sleepy.
    Would Jack think a god had left him the bread and honey? What would he think? She suspected he would laugh at the old stories. A god hadn’t left him food. She had. But then, maybe she had been led to leave him food by a god. She had cut herself a slice of bread and was about to take a piece of cheese from underneath the wire net where it was kept, when she heard a scrabbling noise from beneath the table. Nervously, she stooped down to look.
    â€œA tortoise!” she whispered aloud. She picked it up. It tucked in its head and legs, and it just fit her palm.
    â€œWhere’d you get that?” Paul whispered from behind her. He was standing in the doorway in his pajamas, yawning. “It’s the same color as the honey,” she said. “It was under the table.”
    Paul walked over to the sink and turned on the faucet, filling his hand with water and gulping it down.
    â€œIt’s just a snake with a shell instead of scales,” he said.
    â€œIt is not!” she said. Some mornings started this way with both of them ready to be bad-tempered. She never understood why.
    â€œYou don’t know everything,” he said. “And you sure don’t know about reptiles.”
    â€œI’m petting it,” she said calmly. “I’m going to call it Glaucus. That’s the name of a general whose cenotaph is in the agora.” She paused and looked at her brother. “In case you don’t know what cenotaph means, it means a tomb without a body.”
    â€œIn case you don’t know, there’s a slug in the sink,” he said.
    Lily knew there were never slugs in the sink in the morning.
    â€œA slug is a body without a tomb,” Paul said.
    â€œLame,” commented Lily. But he was grinning, and she giggled. The match was over for the moment.
    â€œHow come you’re up so early?” he asked. “You didn’t go back to the beach, did you? I can’t believe it!”
    â€œWell—I did,” she said. She took out a piece of cheese and wrapped bread around it.
    He looked at her with interest. “Did you get any sleep at all?”
    â€œNone,” she said. She held out the tortoise. “I almost bit into Glaucus,” she said. “Would you put him out in the yard?”
    He took it from her and examined it closely. “We could keep it,” he said.
    â€œNo—he was born free,” she said. Paul laughed and took it out the back door. She watched from the window as he put the tortoise down beneath the mulberry tree. She was thinking about Jack, who might be awake by now.
    If she told Paul she’d found him there in the shack, he would know Jack had lied, was hiding something—about his father or himself. Would it matter to Paul? She was confused suddenly. Why did it matter to her? Why not tell Paul in the usual way she told him things? Because she knew it wasn’t usual; because she was worried. But did it matter to her what Jack did?
    She had left him the sandwich partly from an impulse of mischief—to baffle him. But she’d pitied him too, asleep on the ground, snoring like an old person. What she was feeling now—at least, so she thought—was an odd protectiveness toward Jack. But she couldn’t think against what.
    â€œDid you put all the tables and chairs back the way they