Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand Read Free Book Online Page A

sitting there like it was the secret password, waiting for me to come up with the right retort. I remembered the feather in my knapsack. I remembered the figures in my room the night before, the rows of angels flanking my window. I shivered.
    Something truly weird was happening. Some kind of test, some bizarre initiation that I hadn’t been warned of. My fingers tightened on the edge of my desk as I raised my head.
    He was still staring at me. And suddenly, inexplicably, more than anything I had ever wanted before, I wanted him to like me. Wanted him to keep on looking at me like this: eyebrows raised, almost smiling—not snidely but gently, encouragingly, as though to say Come now, you know the next line.
    And the crazy thing was, I did.
    “‘Your hair wants cutting.’”
    The almost-smile disappeared. He removed his glasses and peered at me more closely. He looked dismayed, but also confused. All the glory faded from his beautiful face, the way the blue drains from a cornflower after it’s been picked.
    My heart sank. Something had gone wrong, his face showed it. He hadn’t expected me to know the answer—and why should he? Still …
    “That’s right,” he said. He folded his hands on his desk, frowning. I felt idiotic and about fifteen years old, as if I were waiting to hear I hadn’t made the cut for the cheerleading squad. But I couldn’t help it. Maybe it was just my homesickness, the terror that I would never make another friend in my life. That I would never wear the right clothes or say the right thing again. But somehow, it seemed that everything hung on whether he liked me or not.
    There was a long moment when I could hear the soft conversation of the others at the front of the room, the sound of a pen scratching on paper. Then, abruptly, he stretched a hand toward me and grinned.
    “Oliver Wilde Crawford.”
    I looked into those sea blue eyes and nodded slowly. As suddenly as it had appeared, his doubt was gone. We might have grown up together, played Ringolevio in the summer twilight, been betrothed as children. For a moment I could only stare, until he nudged me.
    “Sweeney,” I said. I took his outstretched hand. On his shirt cuff a watch had been drawn in blue ballpoint ink, the hands pointing to four o’clock. Always time for tea. “Sweeney Cassidy.”
    “Ah hah.” Oliver slumped back into his chair. His eyes narrowed. “Sweeney. You’re from someplace very cold. Maine?”
    I shook my head. “New York. Why?”
    He drew an imaginary line from my velvet-clad knees down to my boots. “It was cold in my room,” I said defensively.
    “Of course it was.” He nodded, tugging at the collar of his oxford cloth shirt. “I rode my bike down from Newport,” he went on. He spoke so quickly that I had to lean forward to make sure I didn’t miss a word. “A 103 Vega, I traded my twelve-string for it—1964 Gibson, with that kind of marbled bakelite detailing around the frets? That guy from the Thirteenth Floor Elevators had one just like it. Everything else’s coming in a trunk. Greyhound. I didn’t get here till yesterday night, took me three days, no change of clothes, I washed these this morning.”
    He held out his arm and I touched the cuff above the ballpoint wristwatch. It was damp, but I barely had time to register that before his hand shot back, swooping the hair from his eyes, and he continued.
    “So New York. Manhattan? Detour from the High School for Performing Arts? Or no, NYU film school but then you saw that Truffaut movie and—”
    He cuffed my boot. “—here you are, Iphigenia in Northeast, our own Voila! And you’re taking Warnick’s class,” he added approvingly, adjusting his glasses. “Have you seen the pre-Columbians yet?”
    I blinked. I was sweating so heavily I was surprised there wasn’t a pool at my feet. “Pre-Columbians?”
    “At Dumbarton Oaks. We can go this afternoon. They open at two.” He glanced down at his wrist. “Can you borrow a bike? Or the