When the Night Comes Read Online Free

touching anything. You had to try not to fall down. Whoever could stand like that for the longest time would win the game. I really liked that game—I liked the feeling of balancing high up on the water, of moving with it, like you were part of the ferry, like my body was part of its body, sailing on the cold water.
    When the tide was low, the ferry couldn’t pull right up along the wharf and had to stop at the very end of the jetty. It sat low in the water and we had to jump from the jetty down to the deck. Sometimes it was slippery. Sometimes it felt like a long way to jump—a leap of faith. My brother really hated that.
    The only time it was easy to get on the ferry was when it was mid-tide.When the tide was perfectly in the middle of low and high, when everything was balanced.
    Mid-tide made us all relax. When it was a mid-tide you knew it was going to be a good day. I would always hope for mid-tide, but it didn’t happen that often.
    The water was different every day and mid-tide came when you least expected it.

A GIANT AT THE TABLE
    W e were near the outskirts of the city and my brother wasn’t walking slowly like usual—his blue sneakers were right there, keeping up with my white ones. I kept my hand on the money in my pocket, on the twenty-dollar bill.
    It was so much money.
    Mum had never even asked for change or anything, and I didn’t know how much movie tickets cost, but I was sure that there would be some money left over for a drink or maybe something to share, like popcorn.
    I didn’t mind going with my brother. He was keeping up and I knew that he was probably smiling. I didn’t look across to see. I could just feel him there, and that was good.
    We saw a movie called Beat Street . My brother chose it and it was the best movie I had ever seen. It was full of music, full of dancing. There was only one scary bit when one of the main characters got electrocuted on the train tracks near the end. I had never seen a film where anyone died before. He left behind a young baby.
    He was a graffiti artist and he had painted some great work on the gray walls of the busted-up city in the movie. Somewhere in New York. Maybe the Bronx. A big city made of bare concrete.
    He made the city look better.

    After the movie, the walk back home wasn’t so long, it wasn’t tiring. We were carried along by the energy of the movie, the music, the freedom. At the old sweetshop on Hampden Road, we stopped and looked in the window at all the jars of flavored sweets. Jars and jars filled with bright pink and green apple drops, red-striped sticks of candy, soft yellow squares coated with powdered sugar. My mouth watered.
    My brother turned away from the window. He told me that he was going to start doing graffiti, not on walls or anything, just on paper.
    â€œMaybe in a notebook.”
    He was quiet then, until we were near our street.
    â€œI can’t draw very well,” he said and looked down at his sneakers. “But maybe I can do this and it doesn’t matter. Maybe I can just do it and no one can say it’s wrong.”
    I ran my hand along the fences as we walked, the picket fences, the brick walls. Bees hovered above a lavender bush, and there were roses a color I’d never seen before. Almost pink and almost violet but not quite either—just somewhere soft in between.
    â€œNo one can say it’s wrong,” I said.

    When we got inside there was a giant in our house. He was sitting at the kitchen table, his chair pushed out so that his long legs could fit. Mum was sitting opposite him, her chair close to the table, her small yellow teacup in her hand with the matching yellow saucer in front of her.
    My brother and I stood by the door and Mum said, “This is Bo.”
    The man stood up. “Hello,” he said in a deep voice. “How was the movie?”
    My brother walked over to the table and sat down.
    â€œWe saw Beat Street ,” he said. “It