Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

had heard Frank up at the Gas ’n’ Go, howling his werewolf howl. She had giggled softly at the sound of shrieks and monstrous growls. It was fantastic. No one knew where she was. No one could see her up here. She had collected a little bit of candy before Caroline’s fall, which she now ate. It was the best candy she had ever eaten. Nothing, in fact, had ever tasted so good.

She had stayed in the tree for a long time. Even when her muscles began to cramp and her tailbone to tingle, even when Frank had stopped howling and porch lights had begun to go out, Rachel stayed in the tree. The wind sounded different in the darkness than it ever had before. This could almost be a different town. She could almost be a different girl. But not a milkmaid.

When she got home that night, later than they’d expected her to be, Rachel’s parents had scolded her mildly. “We were starting to get worried,” they said. “Is that all the candy you got? You ought to have a bushel by now.”

“My shoelace came untied on the bridge,” she told them, “so I set my bucket down on the rail and I tied my shoe and then I knocked the bucket over by accident and the candy fell into the creek. Most of it anyway.” She pulled a few crumpled wrappers from her apron pocket. “I ate the rest,” she said. It was the only lie she could ever remember telling her parents.

The next year, and for every year after that, she made sure to collect plenty of candy before parting company with her friends and heading for the willow tree alone.

Now, grown up, her parents dead, Rachel did not consider it odd to be sitting in the old willow, an elaborate octopus, a cherry lollipop in her mouth, waiting for children to seek her out. No odder, at least, than Frank in his werewolf costume or Joe as a troll laying claim to the bridge. Belle Haven, she thought to herself, tentacles swinging lightly in the black breeze, is a town that praises its oddities. “I am what I am,” she said out loud, somewhat fiercely. But it came out as Popeye always said it—“I yam what I yam”—and, spoken by a young woman dressed as an octopus, clutching a lollipop, it lacked what she had intended: conviction at least, if not certainty.

Inside, somewhere near the place where memories of Otto Browning still lingered, Rachel felt a hollowness that her solitude could not in any way explain. But then a new passel of children came across the park toward her, and there was suddenly no reason to be anywhere else.

Chapter 26

        As winter approached, Rachel climbed up into the loft at the top of her house and brought down her cold-weather things. At the windows, she hung sapphire blue drapes. In front of the fireplace, she placed a huge oriental carpet (her second extravagance), two comfortable chairs, an old butter box full of books, and a good floor lamp. To her bed she added a comforter half a foot thick, for the room was not quite as warm as she’d hoped.

The basement was not so cold, for the old furnace ducts passed through it on their way upstairs. Gloomy as it was, and sometimes damp, the basement was where Rachel spent a good deal of her time that winter, for she had bought herself a potter’s wheel and a kiln, put them in her basement, and picked up right where she had left off in the eighth grade, making pots and plates and vases for no other reason than that she liked to. She liked the feel of the cool, wet clay. She liked the way it evolved so quickly from one shape to the next with the slightest movement of a finger or a wrist. She liked not knowing quite how something was going to turn out until she opened the lid of the kiln.

Sometimes, after the Kitchen was closed and while Dolly tended Rusty in the apartment above, Angela would climb the hill to Rachel’s house with a bottle of questionable wine and a bucket of chicken.

“Yessir, this is just what I thought I’d be doing in my twenty-ninth year. Sitting in a moldy basement, eating cold chicken out of a pail, watching you make whatever the hell that is you’re making. What the hell is that, anyhow?”

“It’s a honey pot.”

“A honey pot.” Angela poked through the chicken in search of a leg. “A honey pot? You’re sitting here in your basement making honey pots? While the infamous, luscious Joe walks the world above? You’re off your nut, girl.”

Rachel let her wheel spin, picked up her wineglass with wet, gray fingers, and took a long drink. “Yech,” she said. “Next time bring beer.”

“Pardon the hell out of me.” Angela finished the chicken leg and washed her hands in the laundry tub. Her knuckles were red and scaly from too much washing. “So where is Joe tonight?”

“How should I know? I see him when I see him. He never calls, never tells me where he’s going to be or when he’s coming by. He just shows up here.”

“Hmmm. You don’t sound too pleased about it.”

“That’s because I’m not.”

Angela poured herself another glass of wine. She wandered around the basement, liking the feel of the hard dirt floor under her feet and the smell of cold stone. “Let me ask you something, Rachel,” she said, cocking her head at the ceiling. “Which would you rather have: a man who loves you truly but doesn’t always act like it, or a man who’s not really in love with you—and you know he’s not—but he does everything right. Flowers now and then, slow sex, conversation, the works.”

“God, what a question.”

“Well, here you are complaining that Joe doesn’t pay enough attention to you, but we both know how he feels.”

“We do?”

“Well, I do.”

“He’s never said he loves me.”

“That’s my whole