Cloud and Wallfish Read Online Free Page A

saying?”
    “Bingo,” said his mother. “We all changed our everyday names when we moved to Oasis. That was actually kind of the point of moving. To start over.”
    “Because you were in the picture,” said Noah’s father. “Look, think of it this way: a tiny sweet baby, born into a family of, um, let’s say, wild adventurers — that’s your mother and me. Magicians, trapeze artists, mountain climbers —”
    “Trapeze artists?” said his mother. “Don’t get carried away!”
    She was grinning, though, Noah could see. She would be a pretty awesome figure, catapulting from a high trapeze.
    “Wild adventurers,”
said his father again. “But let’s see. When
wild adventurers
have a baby, sometimes they decide it’s time to turn over a new leaf and start right over, do you understand me? To begin a brand-new life, somewhere quiet and peaceful. Because they’re nice people, even if they’ve been wild adventurers all those years, and so they’re going to do
whatever it takes
to make a nice, safe life somewhere for their sweet baby boy. Right? Am I right? They’re going to do whatever it takes.”
    The rental car shuddered as Noah’s mother overtook another truck.
    “So that’s what we did,” said his dad. “We gave up all our old names, and we became the quiet Kellers. We picked a quiet little town. We took you to play in the quiet little park. We became super normal, quiet, ordinary people for a few years.”
    “Ten,” said his mother, as if that had been a very, very long time. “Ten years.”
    “A great ten years. It’s been good, living normal lives in Oasis, right? But now this amazing opportunity for your mother’s research has come up! We have to grab that. The thing is, our Oasis names are lovely and useful, sure, but not technically official. So it’s simple: we have to leave those Kellers behind for a while. Just until we return to Oasis, of course. Then we can be Kellers again.”
    “What are you saying?”
said Noah, who had been stunned into complete, total silence for the whole one minute and fifty seconds of this extraordinary speech. Now he felt his lips going dry, his heart beating fast.
Leaving themselves behind?
“What are you even saying? Are you saying we’ve been
hiding
? Is this like the Mafia’s after us or something? Are we in
danger
? Because every day I go to school. That’s the opposite of hiding.”
    “Well,” said his father in his mild-mannered way, “going to school could be a way, actually, of blending in, if you think about it.”
    “The
Mafia
!” Noah’s mother laughed to herself as if it were the funniest thing anyone had ever suggested in the history of suggestions.
    “Point is,” said Noah’s dad, “we came to Oasis to start our lives over as the nice, calm Kellers. People do that. They start lives over. But to pull off this trip to East Germany, our names and our birth dates have to match up with our documents. That’s just how it is. So what if the names are different from what we’ve gotten used to? It’s a matter of wearing the appropriate costume for the occasion. Think of it this way: Does Cinderella go to the ball in her ordinary rags? Does she ride to the ball in an ordinary pumpkin? No! She puts on a special ball-going gown, and she rides in a transformed golden carriage, and every part of that outfit of hers has to be just so, so that no one looks at her and says, ‘Hey! I think that’s that kid Cinderella from back in Oasis!’”
    “Dad!” said Noah.
    “That’s what we’re saying: all the data we show the East Germans — the birth certificates and marriage licenses and passports and everything — it all has to match up.”
    Noah’s father used words like “data” because he himself was a “data analyst” for some big company in Virginia that probably did things with stocks or graphs or money or something. Noah was a little vague on the details of his father’s job, but it was the kind where you had to wear a tie and