Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand Read Free Book Online

beside the chalkboard, and in front of this a slight man stood sorting papers. Except for him and those four students, the place seemed empty. Some thirty-odd seats staggered toward the back of the room. In one of them someone slouched, head flung forward above the desk so that all I saw was a mass of long straight black hair, an arch of neck with a white crescent bitten out of sunburned skin. I had never sat in the front of a classroom in my life, but I didn’t want to be alone amidst all those empty chairs. So I settled on an empty seat near the black-haired apparition, who didn’t look up. I dug into my knapsack, grubbing among wadded tissue, leaky pens, three new notebooks already soiled with ink. For an instant I grazed something sharp: like running my fingers longways across a razor.
    The feather.
    I snatched my hand back, dug more deeply until I pulled out a heavy book. It fell open and I looked down at the curling pages, pretending to be engrossed. A much-worn copy of Finnegan’s Wake that I carried everywhere but never actually read. The room grew warmer, the other students whispered as I sweated and tried to focus my eyes.
O, O, her fairy setalite! Casting such shadows to Persia’s blind! The man in the street can see the coming event. Photoflashing it far too wide. It will be known through all Urania soon.
    “Hel loo .”
    I glanced aside. The apparition had moved. I saw streaming jet black hair above a field of white—white shirt, white pants, black wing tips with no socks—and large chapped hands swooping the hair from a sunburned face. When I lowered my gaze I saw the pants were not really white but baggy chinos, faded to the color of bone. The hands were large and nervous. After smoothing back all that hair they attacked a pair of spectacles with ugly black plastic frames, jamming them onto a hawkish face.
    I started. Something—the hair, that delicately curved neck or perhaps just the suggestion of affected disarray—had made me think the figure was another girl.
    But it wasn’t. It was a boy. He glanced warily behind him, then at the front of the room, then back at me, staring at me so intensely I started to feel a little uneasy. Then he stood, looking around nervously, and slid into the chair next to me. His chinos rode up to display glossy muscular calves, pale in front, sunburned in back, and completely hairless. Later he told me that he shaved his legs, something to do with the aerodynamics of cycling. But at that moment all I could think of was those eerie sexless angels gazing blindly from their ramparts at Rossetti Hall. He smelled of sweat and sun and 3-IN-ONE oil.
    “Well then.”
    He had a sweet voice, boyish, with that clipped prep school delivery that produces the faintest echo of an upper-crust British accent. Unexpectedly my heart was pounding. I closed my book and started to shove it back into my bag, when he leaned across his desk and peered up at me. His eyes were a piercing sea blue, startlingly bright against his sunburned cheeks. He had a sharp chin, a narrow, slightly upturned nose. The sort of handsome yet delicate face that you find in doomed matinee idols, James Dean or Rudolph Valentino. But his glasses were cheap and very dirty and seemed out of place. They might have been part of a bad disguise, Cary Grant as bumbling professor, or some ridiculous bit of stage business— put these on and no one will know you’re Superman! With a flourish he shoved them against his face again. Then he took the copy of Finnegan’s Wake from my hand, glanced at the title, and placed it back on my desk. His head cocked as he gazed at me and asked, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”
    He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen.
    I rubbed the bridge of my nose and looked away.
    Why is a raven like a writing desk?
    It was the Mad Hatter’s question to Alice, of course. I knew it because I had directed a children’s production of the play at home that summer. And now this boy was