The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,23

a smile.

He reminded me of my momma and my brother, Joe.

When we were going to bed that night, he asked if he could sleep in my bed for the whole night. I thought of Cole, then set that thought aside. This was not the same. This strange man was different and, I reminded myself, not quite a man anymore. I pushed the blanket aside to make way for him as I had the night before.

He laughed a soft belly laugh, clear and pretty as springwater, and climbed in beside me.

Though we slept fully clothed for warmth as we had the night before, I was very conscious of him next to me under the covers. He went to sleep almost immediately. Then there was just the warmth of his breath on my neck, the sound of the rain, and, harmless on the other side of the walls, the night.

What he was doing was impossible: no one healed or changed so fast. It was impossible and unnatural, but I had watched it happen. Tentatively, I touched his hand and found it as warm and smooth as my own. What he had done could not be done; it could not be. But it was. A dizzying panic filled me. I took my hand away from him. I wanted light. I focused on the gray rectangle of window in the darkness, forced myself to listen to the rain. Rain was still just rain. It sounded on the tin roof as it always had. I calmed myself by listing the other things that were also the same: Hobo sleeping on the porch, the chickens in their coop, and the cows making milk, my family sleeping down the hill, the houses of the mill-village spread out on either side of my family’s house. In each of those houses slept the people I had known all my life. Nothing else had changed. And no one else knew about him. I was the only one who had seen him change. The experience was mine. Only mine. How could I possibly explain what he had done? I pictured myself trying to tell my momma, and my mind froze. How would anyone believe me? Eventually, I slept, dreaming the same dreams as the night before—disturbing, beautiful dreams of touch and taste.

For two more days I explained the farm and its various chores to the strange man who shadowed me, ever more agile and confident, recalling nothing of who he was or where he came from. The rain abated for hours at a time, then swept through with renewed fury.

Sunday morning arrived. I got up in the darkness, stoked the stove, set the coffee on it, and then went back to bed. On Sundays, I allowed myself the luxury of snuggling warm in bed for the time it took the kitchen to warm up and the coffee to begin percolating. Aunt Eva would have considered it a sinful self-indulgence not to begin the chores immediately upon waking, which I did every other morning. But I was queen of the farm now, and the animals were no worse for the half-hour Sunday delay, and the Lord, I was certain, had better things to judge.

I returned to the bedroom with the lantern, and, as I slipped back between the covers and settled on the pillow, he turned, his face inches from mine. His eyes were green now, flecked with gold. Like Momma’s eyes and Eva’s, the eyes I’d looked into all my life. We lay there for a long time, absorbing each other. No one had ever regarded me like that, not even Cole when he lay with me. We touched each other’s faces—lips, eyelids, cheeks. A single reverberation of thunder broke our reverie. The rain began its pounding anew. We got out of bed.

I heard a voice call my name as if from far away. I turned him to face me, to see if this was one more strange thing he could do.

His shirt had come unbuttoned in the night, and I saw them—breasts. Not the fatty chest muscles of a boy, but a woman’s small, fully formed breasts. I stepped back, alarmed.

“I have to see!” With my hands shaking, I fumbled the lantern and pulled him toward the light.

I opened his shirt. His nipples puckered in the cold. “You’re a girl!”

He peered down at his breasts, too. “I’m like you.” He smiled, as if his breasts were gifts for me. Behind his voice was another, fainter, more familiar call: “Evelyn!” He