The Sky Below Read Online Free Page A

slip inside other houses, try them on, haunt them a little. I was about eleven the first time, still runty and skinny with big eyes, and I knew I could say I was lost, or fake a limp as if I were hurt, if anyone came in. I could try to pretend now that I was tired of getting beaten up, but that would be a lie. I was tired of the endless, bloody wars at school—they felt longer than any dinosaur war—of my role, you might say, but to be honest, I think I would have done it anyway. I had a yearning. And a talent for it.
    That first house was a cozy house, for Brewster, with bright blue decorative shutters and a clothesline in the backyard hung with clean white T-shirts about my size. I used to cut through that yard on the way home from school, and one day I just strolled in through the open back door. I carried a paper clip in my pocket so I could quickly jab myself in the leg if I needed a little bleeding injury. But inside, not a soul was home. The air was still. Someone liked roosters and chickens: ceramic fowl lined the windowsills and crowded together on the counters. The clock was in the shape of a crowing rooster; the oven mitts were rooster-shaped, too. Inside the refrigerator was a bowl of blackberries with a white paper towel resting lightly on top. I ate a blackberry; it had a dark, slightly malevolent sweetness and it crunched at the center. The blackberry tasted like joy, a secret, stolen joy. It emboldened me. It thrilled me. It led me deeper into the house, through the small, dim, neat living room with the flowered drapes drawn against the heat, through the dining room where a porcelain rooster with cold
black eyes perched in the center of the dining room table. I couldn’t believe how easy it was, as if I had acquired special powers. I knew—suddenly, wildly—that no one was going to stop me.
    I wandered toward the back of the house. An adult bedroom, with a flowered bedspread that matched the drapes. Next to it, there was a room with a set of bunk beds and a
Dukes of Hazzard
poster on the wall. On the dresser was a hairbrush that had a cartoon picture of flying pink ponies taped on the back. I picked up the hairbrush and, looking at myself in the mirror, brushed my curly red hair. It made me feel strange, and mean, and related. These girls—twins?—would find a strand of bright red hair in their hair and brush it away, unthinking. I liked that: being almost a part of them. A presence in the house that had just disappeared, that the people, when they came home, could almost sense, but not quite. One blackberry gone from the bowl. One strangely bright strand. They would miss me, the way the Darlings missed Peter Pan. They would wish I would come back without having met me. Or so it seemed to me as I ran one finger down the hard, unmoving feathers of the porcelain rooster. I don’t know how to explain it, but that’s what I wanted: to be missed, but like a dream you can’t quite remember the next morning. None of them would be able to tell the others that they had dreamed of a wonderful boy, a boy with curly red hair and long eyelashes, and in the dream the boy lived there, right there in the house, but he always disappeared in the morning.
    That cozy house with the roosters and flying ponies was on Dragonfly Drive. There were others, on Locust Lane and Cicada Court and Ocean Drive. I slipped into them all, whoosh, swish, then away again. It was romantic to me—dangerous, faintly pointless in the way of many dangerous endeavors, lonely. I was some sort of reverse rebel: I didn’t run away from home, I ran away to other people’s homes and stood around.
When I looked at myself in other people’s mirrors, the world was my diorama:
Early Gabriel I with Pink Pony Hairbrush on Dragonfly Drive. Early Gabriel II on Locust Lane. Early Gabriel III on Cicada Court.
I discovered that spying on Brewster was much better and more interesting than actually living there.