The Radleys Read Online Free

on the dying and the dead.
    Harper heaves his gigantic body up the aisle, and Rowan hears him sit down next to Toby. At some point on the journey, Rowan feels something pat repeatedly against his head. After a few bounces he realizes it’s Toby’s tennis racquet.
    “Hey, slo-mo. How’s the rash?”
    “Slo-mo,” laughs Harper.
    To Rowan’s relief Clara and Eve aren’t looking back yet.
    Toby breathes against the back of his neck.
    “Hey, freak, what you reading? Hey, Robin Redbreast . . . What you reading ?”
    Rowan half turns, his dark bangs flopping down into his field of vision. “It’s Rowan,” he says. Or half says. The “It’s” comes out as a whispery rasp, his throat unable to find his voice in time.
    “Knobweed,” says Harper.
    Rowan tries to concentrate on the same line.
    Day glimmers on the dying and the dead.
    Stil Toby persists.
    “What are you reading? Robin, I asked you a question. What are you reading?”
    Rowan reluctantly holds the book up, for Toby to grab it out of his hand.
    “Gay.”
    Rowan turns in his seat. “Give it back. Please. Just . . . could I have my book back?”
    Toby nudges Harper. “The window.”
    Harper seems confused or reluctant, but he stands up and slides open the narrow top window.
    “Go on, Harper. Do it.”
    Rowan doesn’t see the book change hands, but somehow it does and then he sees it fly back like a shot bird onto the road. Childe Harold and Manfred and Don Juan al lost in a moment.
    He wants to stand up to them, but he is weak and tired. Also, Eve hasn’t noticed his humiliation yet, and he doesn’t want to do anything that might make that happen.

    “Oh dear, Robin, I’m ever so sorry, but one appears to have mislaid your book of gay poetry,”
    says Toby in a falsetto.
    Other people on the seats around them laugh out of fear. Clara turns around, curious. So does Eve. They can see the people laughing, but not the cause.
    Rowan closes his eyes. Wishes he could be in 1812, in a dark and solitary horse-drawn carriage with Eve in a bonnet beside him.
    Don’t look at me. Please, Eve, don’t look at me.
    When he opens his eyes again, his wish has been granted. Wel , half of it. He is stil in the twenty-first century, but his sister and Eve are talking, oblivious to what has just happened. Clara clenches the rail on the seat in front of her. She is feeling il , obviously, and he hopes she isn’t physical y sick on the bus, because much as he hates being the subject of Toby and Harper’s attention, he wouldn’t want them to start focusing on Clara. But somehow, through some invisible signal, they pick up this fear and start discussing the two girls.
    Two months ago a new girl had arrived at their school. Tal , wisplike, with the kind of angelic beauty that makes even the most hard-core hip-hop fan hear harps when she walks past in the corridor. But she was clearly shy, and with no real knowledge of where she should be placed in the school hierarchy. How else could anyone explain why she would choose to gravitate toward Clara Radley, even if they did happen to live in the same vil age? A fifteen-year-old loner whose previous best friend had been her even weirder older brother?
    “Eve’s mine tonight, Harps,” says Toby, nodding his head toward a girl who, in any rational universe, even he knows would be out of his league. But as this is a universe where Eve—a girl who turned every single head the day she arrived—can be friends with a geeky vegan nearly two years younger than her, Toby fancies his chances. “I’m going to wet that whistle, mate, tel ing you.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Don’t worry. You’l be getting yours. Shitstab’s sister is completely into you. I mean, gagging .”
    “What?”
    “S’obvious.”
    “Clara?”
    “Give her a tan, take her specs off, she’d be worth it.”
    Rowan feels Toby lean in, to whisper. “We’ve got an inquiry. Harper’s into your little sister.
    What’s her nightly rate again? A tenner?