Theo Read Online Free Page A

a hairychess board. It would flinch and throw off all the pieces. You’d have to tame it to play. Pink and brown, faded and pale. He feels like stomping a puddle but everything is dry. The sun is a big flashlight in the sky, white in the white.
    Then music. The music starts in the house, and flies out the open windows on the third floor and drifts down around him. Colin is definitely awake.
    Theo turns back toward the trees for an instant, shading his eyes with a hand. Colin sometimes didn’t sleep for days. His mother, when she came, he wasn’t sure about, because her door was always locked. Is she asleep or awake. Mostly awake, he guessed because of all the noise and people when she came, which was always like a wave washing through. Things would be empty and quiet when Theo locked himself in, then in the morning people in the hall or on couches, sometimes looking dead, and different smells, and different things scattered around. Hello, my beautiful boy, she would yell at him from somewhere, above on the stairs or from an open door, or in from the outside, her standing outside naked one time staring up at something, her body broken into squares by the big iron and glass doors to the terrace. Theo remembers again he needs to find something to cover the broken panes with.
    It is Wednesday, Theo guesses. He smells ocean. One of the dogs noses at him now, and Theo flicks his eyes down and smoothes Baron’s head and leans into the big yellow and black shepherd, nudges him for an instant, then turns and moves toward the doors, hungry, too, flanked now on his other side by Alex, the thickest animal on the planet, Gus calls him. Theo feels sorry for the dog, who has seizures and pants when he walks.
    The faded coppery dog’s domed head makes him look like a human baby, although he is thirteen and totters. He needssomething soft, his teeth going. Upstairs Colin yells now, and somewhere beyond the beach is the buzz and thump of speedboats, and the day is on its way. Theo slips through the French doors into the dark ballroom.
    There is a Japanese magazine on the parquet floor, his father on the cover. His face very white, like a doll. Is that powder.
Aidoru.
Dog claws click and slide on the wood, the sounds loud. A piece of floor is missing since yesterday, Theo notes. He keeps moving.
    Sand grains are scattered on the parquet, and Theo feels them under his feet. There are crumbs everywhere: sand, salt, food, because people like to walk everywhere in the house eating. The dogs lick at the floor a lot, and at spills everywhere.
    There’s not much furniture but there are lots of pillows, and cloth. Blankets, tapestries, sheets, rugs, carpet in piles or folded or left limp and crumpled in the middle of a floor, as if the person wrapped in it vanished on the spot.
    Theo skates across the ballroom, sliding his bare feet. A bird darts through the French doors he left open. It moves too fast for him to identify but he figures it is one of the little ones, sparrow or wren, always around outside, flocking to peck at grass or the terrace. All the people leave trails, or create them.
    He skates over to a plant tipped sideways in a Chinese vase. It has deep green leaves with wine-colored hearts and big veins and reaches toward the light. The shoots are arms extending, ending in brushes of little purple flowers. Theo sweeps the dirt back in with his hand and tips it up, pets it, and drags it over into a rectangle of sun. Then he skates the other way, toward the kitchen.
    The dogs stare up as he yanks on the heavy pantry door and goes in to rummage for something to feed them. Dog food ranout but no one has bought more, so Theo gives them peanut butter and things from cans, some of which they eat and some of which sits until someone else eats it: usually Colin or a guest.
    That’s what Theo’s mother called them. Make our guests feel at home, or friends. Theo wasn’t sure about the difference, except the guests came less often.
    There is a