The Children's Crusade Read Online Free

wondered what it would be like to carry aroundan actual clock, invisible to everyone else, ticking in his hands. He didn’t really remember last year’s party. “Is it the one with all the food and all the people?” he’d asked the night before, and his father had placed his palm on Ryan’s head and smiled.
    James spooned sugar into the mush of cereal and juice in his bowl. “I see, I see, I see,” he sang; or maybe it was “Icy, icy, icy.”
    “What do you see, James?” Ryan said. His badger was on the table near his elbow, and he thought they’d been apart long enough and tucked the animal under his arm.
    “Goin’ for the salt now,” James said, unscrewing the top of the saltshaker and trying to pour some into his spoon. It came out fast and spilled into his bowl. “Goin’ for the pepper now,” he crowed.
    Robert came over and grabbed his hand. “James, no.”
    Ryan made big eyes and covered his mouth to show James that he shouldn’t be scared of Robert.
    “Nye-nee,” James said happily.
    “Nye-nee” was as close as James could get to “Ryan,” and Ryan smiled. “You want to come with me?” he said. “Come with Nye-nee?”
    James launched himself from his chair. He was big and clumsy, prone to spectacular tumbles—loud wailing, tears and mucus everywhere, blood on his knees. This morning his feet landed flat on the linoleum. “Go with Nye-nee!” he said.
    Robert watched his brothers head off. This moment alone in the kitchen was rare and not to be wasted. He knew he should clean up, but on a shelf next to the refrigerator a jar of coins waited for him. He scooped out a handful and slid them into his pocket. He was quite certain his father wouldn’t mind if he knew why Robert was taking the coins, which was so he could practice the magic tricks he’d been teaching himself since summer began.
    “I’m telling.”
    He turned and there was Rebecca, standing in the doorway. Hesaid, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “Yes, you do.”
    “What then?”
    Just a day earlier Rebecca had overheard her father telling her mother that this minor stealing of Robert’s was just a phase, some need to approach the line between good and bad, and “not an occasion to humiliate the boy.” Rebecca thought wrong was wrong, but because it was the day of the party she decided to let it go.
    “We should clean up,” she said.
    “Then let’s clean up.”
    Once they were finished, she went outside to see what needed to be done. The house had its morning look, closed and dark. She had never thought about the house’s color until the day in first grade when she saw a house that was violet. Now she knew houses could be any surprising color you could come up with—turquoise, buttercup yellow—and she thought the dull, plain surface of her house demonstrated a failure of imagination. She kept this to herself, though, because of how much her father loved the house and how much she loved her father.
    Robert wondered when his mother would get up. With nothing else to do, he sat at the piano and looked at his sheet music. He hadn’t practiced in weeks and was in a state of conflict about the whole matter. When school started up again he would be in the fifth grade, the age at which Mrs. Bostock, his piano teacher, made you start playing in recitals. This wouldn’t be so bad except she wanted the students to memorize their pieces, and Robert was sure he wouldn’t be able to do that. The obvious solution was to begin campaigning to quit piano well in advance of an actual recital setting up residence in his worries, but the problem was that he was pretty good at piano, and it wasn’t just his father who said so—Mrs. Bostock did, too, and so did Mr. Gleason, his fourth-grade teacher.“Very agile” was what Mrs. Bostock said, while Mr. Gleason demonstrated his approval by sometimes calling on Robert—but never anyone else—to accompany the class when they sang rounds on Fridays.
    Robert realized