The Bronze King Read Online Free Page A

Oriental slant, but light-colored and bright and watchful, like a cat’s. He hadn’t looked grubby, like most beggars, but very neat in a rust brown corduroy jacket and pants and a light blue shirt without a tie.
    And he had played and we had danced. It was the craziest thing.
    But what was it that I had that the Princes of Darkness wanted?
    I got very tired, and next thing I knew my mom was waking me up. She asked if I was all right because it was unlike me to sleep in the daytime, and here it was time for dinner.
    At the table Mom started in with carefully casual remarks about this guy she’d been out with the night before. That meant I didn’t have to listen yet. She wasn’t nearly at the point of talking about how I should meet him, how I would like him, how we could all go to a movie together or whatever. At least this one was some kind of senior editor, not a shrink like the last one she’d brought around. (I knew a kid once whose stepfather was a child psychologist , which meant everything she did or said or  didn’t  say got “translated” to her mother by this guy; and that’s no way to live.)
    So I put the conversation on automatic pilot and concentrated on my own problems. Mostly I decided that the subway dance had to have been a hallucination. Maybe Margie wasn’t as cubed as she made out. Maybe she had slipped me something in that ginger ale I had at her place.
    But I’d tried a couple of pills and things with Megan when she was raiding her mom’s medicine cabinet, and I knew what that stuff felt like. Not like this. There never was a pill or anything else that could make me know how to dance.
    Maybe I was getting a brain tumor like the boy in Death Be Not Proud , and I had imagined the dancing. Maybe I would never get to be introduced to Ralph or Howard or whatever the editor’s name was, because I would be a vegetable by morning.
    I fell asleep sweaty with terror and trying to find the headache I’d had the day before, to sort of get the feel of it and see if it felt like a tumor, if that’s what a tumor feels like.
    The next day I coasted through school as if there was a plate glass door between me and everybody else. I tried, once, to talk to Megan about what had happened. All she was interested in was what the three Princes had looked like. She made moronic jokes about how I’d have been better off with them than with some grubby old pervert, meaning I should watch out for the man with the violin, not the creeps. She even got a laugh out of me, calling him a “ mole -ster.” I couldn’t help it.
    This was a joke from when we saw the words child molester once in the paper and were struck by the obvious pronunciation. Girls in New York have to get wise about sick-ohs pretty young. You either learn to see them coming a long way off and get out of the way fast or you give up ever going outside.
    â€œI’m too old to be mole -sted,” I said, and Megan said, “You’re never too old, thank goodness. Now, when Micky tries to mole -st me . . .”
    Off she went again. I made a joke about “Micky Mole -ster,” and she got furious and stomped out of the room. There just wasn’t any point in talking to Megan anymore.
    My heart sort of lurched with joy when I heard faint violin music as I headed into the park to go home that afternoon. A little group of people were gathered around a man playing his fiddle on Jagiello’s terrace.
    As I hurried over he finished, and people dropped money into the open violin case on the ground and wandered off, all except a skinny boy in chinos and a checked shirt and a scarf around his neck, who was sitting on the rock by the lake. He wasn’t from my school or my building. I didn’t know him, but at least he didn’t wear a gray nylon jacket. I felt safe in ignoring him. It was the violinist I needed to talk to.
    He was squatting by the open violin