to anything except to the narrow escape from death.
Rudy and I looked at each other. He was propped up on his elbow, my hands were behind my head. I noticed for the first time his Adam’s apple, nearly hidden under all that hair, his eyes the same stupid color as mine, gray with an orange ring. We looked at each other.
Then we heard the yell.
Here we are dealing in matters of scale. We had been so focused on the sheer girth and weight, the incomprehensible muchness of Aldi’s ancient oak, that we had failed to notice how heavy and destructive a normal oak tree branch can be. When the old oak was freed, it had torn a branch off one of the younger oaks. It was this young branch that punched a hole in Aldi’s garage roof, that dealt Aldi Birch a glancing blow to the left hip as he stepped out his door.
14
PERLEY
I’m not a little fucking moron. I know whose boy I am. I am Mama L’s boy which I knew when she pushed me on the swing and it was never the same after that. It was never the same after that to ride in the Outside Girl’s totally sweet Camry, or to eat pancakes at Grandma Barlow’s, or play the PlayStation. It wasn’t even the same to be with Altemonte. I knew I needed to harness my skills and find the right tricks to get home, and I knew I needed Altemonte to come home with me even if he himself didn’t know it yet. And I knew that I had to prove to Mama K that I was worth the ransom, and I knew that if I used my skills to get us home again then Mama K, my elfin chief, my noble wolf, would claim me.
All of which was really no problem because me and Altemonte, our brains were superior, we were digging a portal to the elf world, which who could do that but a boy genius or two? Our motto was excellence.
But the trouble with portals is that when you open one you start seeing portals everywhere.
At first I liked that my brain was a crystal ball held in a chiseled wizard’s hand, but then the crystal ball started showing weird stuff.
Sometimes when I looked through the crystal ball it wasn’t a portal into the elf world. Instead it was a hole. The hole was deep and its sides were made of dirt and stone, you could see the tree roots sticking out the side, you could see how deep it went into the ground, and below that was the blank universe, and the world became slippery and slanted and I was sliding down into the hole and I had to fight and fight and fight to stay out.
This could happen anytime. This could happen at school during my Specials or when Grandma Barlow showed me math equations, or when Altemonte threw a flaming axe at my forehead or when I shot a flaming arrow at Altemonte’s forehead, and especially it would happen when Altemonte and I were digging with our hands in the gnome house our portal to the elf world. One time we were digging and I had to stop and crawl out of the gnome house really quick and lie down with my face in the snow and Altemonte came out and said, Are you okay? and I said, Yes, and Altemonte said, No, you’re not, what is it? And I said, Nothing, and he said, Do you want to stop digging? And I said, No way are you kidding we are almost to the World of Two Moons we have to join the Wolfriders in the battle at Blue Mountain there’s no time to waste.
I knew that Altemonte missed his dad really bad even though he acted like he didn’t and I knew he missed his mom, too, even though he said she was a hypocrite and I knew that Altemonte acted like he didn’t know anything at school when actually he knew more than the principal and the teacher put together and I knew that Altemonte’s favorite plant was gall of the earth because it had the dwarfest name and I knew that one time Altemonte tried drinking cooking sherry and it made him throw up and then go right to sleep and I knew that Altemonte liked to gnaw on unripe pears like a deer eating a tree but I did not know how to ask