Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street by Peter Abrahams Read Free Book Online Page B

and—”
    “Yeah?” he said. “Like how?”
    “Well,” I said, my vision getting blurrier, “something really strange has been happening to me.” I put on my glasses.
    “Yeah?” said Tut-Tut. “Like wha-wh-wh-wh-wh-w-w-w-w…”
    “Tut-Tut?”
    His eyes, his mouth, all opening wide: the look people get when they’re about to get mowed down or blown away by something terrible, like an earthquake or a hurricane. “I-,” he said. He tried so hard, on and on, veins popping out in his neck, his face swelling up. “I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-” But it was no good. Tut-Tut put his hands over his ears and screamed, a long unstuttering sound, but not speech.
    “Tut-Tut!” I reached out to him. “What’s happening? Try to get back to how you were feeling when—”
    But before I could even finish with whatever dumb notion that was going to be, Tut-Tut had wheeled away and taken off. He ran right out of his flip-flops, andsomething fell from his pocket. Tut-Tut was very fast, the fastest kid I’d ever seen. I’m a pretty good runner, too, but catching him was out of the question. All I could do was pick up the flip-flops and the thing that had fallen from his pocket, which turned out to be a can of purple spray paint.
    I took a long detour on the way home. I’ve always liked walking, but that didn’t explain this particular walk, which led me past the subway stop a block and a half from school; it was more that my feet simply wanted to go in that direction.
    What I was hoping for was to see the old homeless woman back in her usual spot and return the bracelet, but she wasn’t there. I went into the newsstand and up to the counter. The man behind it was busy with a Sudoku puzzle. He glanced up.
    “Hi,” I said. “Um, the old woman? Who sits out front all the time? I was wondering whether…”
    “She died,” the man said, and went back to his puzzle.
    My knees got weak; it turned out not to be just an expression. I felt a train rumbling down below.

A fter that came the illness part. I remember walking home with the flip-flops and the spray paint; I remember seeing that neither Mom nor Dad was back yet; I remember feeling way too hot, and also way too tall, which was very weird, plus, everything looked yellow at the edges, like old newspapers. Then I was in my bed, and hotter than ever, and Pendleton was beside me, licking my face from time to time. His tongue felt nice and cool.
    Time passed, maybe not a lot. When you’re sick, time loses its strict shape, starts ballooning and/or shrinking, like an image in a funhouse mirror. Mom and Dad appeared, standing over me. My temperature got taken—I didn’t like the feel of that glass stick under my tongue; worried looks got exchanged; headaches were mentioned. Did I have one? No, but I’d had a few lately. The worried looks grew more worried, as thoughthe guy who painted that
Scream
picture was doing their portraits.
    Whispers went back and forth:
    “Headaches? Didn’t your father…”
    “Chas, must you always jump to the most…”
    Whispers buzzing around like insects, but not as loud, more like insects with mufflers. That phrase “insects with mufflers” went round and round my brain, round and round my brain, and wouldn’t stop. A strange idea hit me—that I now understood stuttering from the inside—and vanished almost right away. Insects with mufflers, insects with mufflers.
    Then there were phone calls. “One-oh-four-point-five.” And a taxi ride across the Brooklyn Bridge, with me lying back and the whole structure, all those beams and arches, lit up against the night sky, a scary image for some reason; and walking into the hospital, although Mom and Dad were kind of holding me up; and there was my uncle Joe, wearing a white coat and with a stethoscope around his neck. Uncle Joe—my dad’s older brother—was a surgeon at the hospital.
    “Hey, cutie,” he said to me, laying his hand, so nice and cool, on my forehead. He looked like my dad