The Family Fang: A Novel by Kevin Wilson Read Free Book Online

the already outlandish features of this man, turning her drawing into something not quite caricature and not quite portraiture. As she studied him for more details, he suddenly looked in her direction and she felt her face grow hot. She winced and returned her gaze to the notebook, running a lightning bolt of pencil marks across the image she had just drawn until it was unrecognizable, no evidence of her interest. She returned the notebook and pencils to her book bag and rehearsed her story. Nearly penniless, her mother had left Clara with her grandmother and moved to Florida to find a job. After six months, Clara was finally going to live with her mother again. “It’s a brand-new start for us,” Annie would say to the flight attendant or neighboring passenger when asked. If she did it right, and she always did, someone would slip her a twenty-dollar bill and tell her to take care of herself. When they finally got to Florida, Annie imagined that she would take the twenty dollars and bet it on jai alai while she drank a Shirley Temple so large it took three straws to reach the bottom of the glass.
    Buster had found that a plausible backstory took too long to establish and provided too many opportunities to be found out. So he had begun to create obviously false stories that, in turn, established a kind of backstory of its own, that of a bizarre child who should be avoided. As he sat in the airport bar and drank glass after glass of lemon-lime soda and ate handfuls of peanuts and pretzels, he had decided that, should someone ask, he was not a real child but a robot built and designed by a scientific genius. A childless couple had ordered him and he was now being delivered to them in Florida. Beep-bop-boop. Buster wasn’t even sure what the happening was going to be this time. His parents had only told him that he would have to pretend that they were not his real parents, to travel separately on the plane, and, when the event occurred, to react according to the general mood of the audience. “The less you know, the better,” his father said. “It’ll be a surprise,” his mother told him, “you like surprises don’t you?” Buster shook his head. He did not.
    O n the plane, Annie and Buster were each chaperoned by a different stewardess into aisle seats on either side of the first row so they were now just a few feet apart from each other and pretending they had never before met. The children watched their parents stroll down the aisle, hand in hand. Buster could not help but stare as they passed and Mr. Fang winked as they made their way to their seats in the middle of the plane. Buster asked a stewardess for peanuts and, when she brought him three packages, he asked for one more. The stewardess turned away from Buster to get another packet of peanuts and rolled her eyes. Annie saw this and felt her body go tense, one degree shy of anger. When the stewardess returned with her brother’s peanuts, Annie tugged on her sleeve and asked for five packets of peanuts, her eyes like slits, hoping for trouble that would overshadow whatever would happen later on the flight. The woman seemed unnerved by Annie’s nearly imperceptible quivering and hurried away to find more peanuts. As soon as she received her bounty, Annie turned to Buster and dumped them in his lap. “Thank you,” Buster said. “You’re welcome, kid,” Annie said.
    Everyone settled in, the stewardess having explained what to do in case of an emergency landing, Annie and Buster hoped that whatever their parents had planned would not end with the two of them floating in the ocean, holding on to their seat cushions, waiting for help that may or may not arrive.
    More than an hour into the flight, the children turned to watch Mr. Fang walk down the aisle and place his hand on the elbow of one of the stewardesses. Annie and Buster strained to listen to their father but they could not make out what he was saying. He held something out toward the stewardess and