Free Turtle Moon by Alice Hoffman Page A

cut with a sharp knife, perfect for shoplifting. "That's rare," he said. "Most boys his age get in trouble for something. Smoking, shoplifting, that kind of thing."
    "Really?"
    The way Lucy says "really" makes Julian want to kiss her. His blood feels much too hot, as though it doesn't even belong to him anymore.
    She's going to protect her son, no matter what, Julian knows that for a fact. All his life, he has tried to understand what makes a mother love her child and what makes her cast him aside. He has seen female pelicans care for their young so tenderly they'll pluck out their own feathers to line their nests, leaving pinpricks of blood along their skin. They'll starve themselves if necessary for the sake of their brood. Certainly, there can be no uglier offspring than a baby pelican, which can't even waddle without staggering under the weight of its enormous beak. And yet Julian has witnessed this sort of devotion again and again.
    He's watched a twenty-pound fox stand up to Loretta, its fur a ridge of fury along its back, all because of a hidden pair of kits. He's found ants dead of exhaustion on his windowsill after carrying hundreds of egg cases to safety. Why is it, then, that a she-bear would have loved Julian more than his own mother? He was born premature, too soon for his mother to get to the hospital in Hartford Beach, a tiny baby so ugly he must have seemed like a punishment. Just two hours after Julian was born, he died. He simply stopped breathing, and he would have stayed dead if his mother hadn't run all the way to Lillian Giles's house. Miss Giles rubbed his hands and feet and breathed into his mouth; she wrapped him up in dishtowels and finally placed him on a rack in the oven, where she kept him until he was no longer blue. He has tried to remember back to that day when he was given away. He's been told he was fed sugar water, dripped into his mouth from a cloth, until he would take a bottle of milk. When he cried, the toads in the garden buried themselves in the dust, the wild linses dropped from the trees.
    Although he's had no personal experience with it, Julian knows there are certain things you can't do in the presence of devotion. You can't look for marijuana seeds in the dresser drawers, for instance, or satanic messages scribbled inside a school notebook.
    "How about a Coke?" Julian says. "Maybe with some ice.
    "Now?" Lucy says.
    "I'm dying of thirst." Julian puts a hand to his throat and realizes that it's true.
    "I only have Diet," Lucy tells him.
    "Diet," Julian says. "Diet's great."
    Once he's gotten her out of the way, Julian goes through the desk drawers, then sorts through the clothes tossed into a jumble on the floor. He gets down on all fours and peers beneath the bed. It's not as if he knows what he is looking for, but he does know more than he'd like to about boys who search for disaster until they find it. He also knows when he's being lied to.
    When Lucy comes back with his Coke, the light from the hallway forms a white circle around her. That's when Julian understands how much she knows. He reaches out suddenly, and as he pulls Lucy to him, the Coke spills on the carpet.
    Lucy's knees buckle beneath her, and for hours afterward she will wonder why she didn't break away from him right then. He keeps one hand on her waist, while his other hand quickly moves down her leg.
    Lucy pushes against him, but he grabs her foot anyway and jerks off her sandal.
    When he lets go, Lucy stumbles backward until her spine is pressed up against the cool plaster wall.
    "Size eight," Julian says as he examines the sandal. "How come I'm not surprised?"
    This is the time of night when the humidity can be downright unbearable, the ivory hour when nothing rises, not even your spirit.
    They stand facing each other beneath the glow-in-the-dark stars, not noticing when the stars begin to fall, one by one, pulled down by the thick, wet air.
    Neither of them has to be told that once someone is lost a stone forms