The Place Will Comfort You Read Online Free

aren’t theirs.”
    â€œThey asked the mayor.”
    â€œThey hate our mayor. They hate to ask.”
    â€œHe said okay. They came last year and yesterday.”
    â€œThere is no
time
for this!” the orphan yells. “One is heading over with her stick! Act normal. It’s two. It’s three now! What is the fastest way home?”
    Hand in hand, we run around the slide, over the path to where it softens by the water fountain, then off, between two baby cypresses and over the low border. The orphan follows every move I make along the shortcut that I found when Crazy Petersburgski,from the house without its panes and door, zigzagged through traffic and stepped up behind me. From our porch, I saw him pass the opening in our hedge, continue down a block, then blaze a trail through the weedyard of his house, his hands still moving with his shouting at the air. Some days he doesn’t.
    This time, when the orphan and I lean out from the seventh floor, we see nothing but my key chain swinging from my neck plus, lower down, the roaming little sisters from the arguing apartment.
    â€œWe should spit on them,” the orphan says.
    â€œShould not.” I hold her wild blue eye just long enough. I live here. I have seen the mother of the girls throw sheets of newspaper for them to move their bowels onto, on the street. They do it. I understand from this it is a rule with them that, once you’re out, you can’t come in. I don’t need trouble with this type.
    The orphan pushes a thin shoulder into me, so now her smile is my only view. “Wow, scary! Right?” she says. “We ran hard.”
    â€œCan someone pick you up?”
    She grabs a rail of the porch. “I never had my lunch,” she says. “I missed the cafeteria break. Like I could stay after what happened in Leviticus? She didn’t give me any choice.” Her voice begins to fade. “I could collapse and faint.” Her neck grows soft. “There’s a condition that I have,” she says. “I get too hungry, I can die.”
    In the kitchen she heads immediately for the stove, kneels, and glues her face to the cold glass. “Where’s your cake?”
    â€œWe don’t keep it there.”
    â€œThen where?”
    â€œNowhere. It’s the middle of the week and no one’s birthday.”
    I know for a fact all she can see are two bare racks, but you would think the glass looks out on the sparkling sea. It does not. I know this from across the room. I know it just the same once I’m beside her, tiles against my knees.
    â€œNone?” she says. “Nowhere? Nothing?”
    â€œIf we had any it wouldn’t be here.”
    She keeps staring in. No, she is looking at my image. In the see-through mirror, all of our differences are two: the first our hair, dim gold streaming by a black-brown cloud, and the second our shoulders, mine saddled with my bookbag straps, hers bare. The rest is twinned: pink shirts, pink-collared necks, a face next to another, egg-shaped both, eye-stained, the details blurred but sharper than the room around. The oven rungs show clearest through the areas of dark.
    â€œThen where?” she says.
    â€œWhere it won’t spoil.”
    â€œSo? An oven between bakings is good. Cool, very dry.”
    â€œThere isn’t the right level of concern for hygiene in this country. You should keep it in the fridge wrapped up in plastic.”
    â€œSays who?”
    â€œMy mother.” I push away the floor and stand. I can’t not say
my mother
in
my home.
Anyway, the orphan isn’t bothered. She hops up. Her mood is much stronger than a minute ago. We’re still facing the oven, but she’s looking at the tin-handed timer clock.
    She bats her lashes. “When does she come home?”
    â€œAt the end of her work.”
    â€œAnd makes dinner?”
    I cannot carry on with such talk, when I know this: It is one hour and ten