Free After Eli by Rebecca Rupp Page B

sneakers and a T-shirt that said I FIGHT ZOMBIES IN MY SPARE TIME .
    “You know that you guys have a very unusual fashion sense?” I said.
    “We were watching for you,” Jasper said. “But we didn’t see you because you’re wearing black like a spy.”
    “If you were a captured spy,” Journey said, “would you rather be hanged by the neck until dead or shot by a firing squad?”
    “Or sizzled up in the electric chair?” Jasper said.
    “I’d rather not be captured,” I said.
    “Shut up, twins,” Isabelle said. “Come on, Danny. Come up here and sit down.”
    She was sitting in a wicker rocking chair and wearing one of those Indian-print skirts and a white top with skinny straps and silver earrings the size of hockey pucks. And she had those blue, blue eyes. Isabelle always took my breath away.
    “You know Walter, don’t you?” Isabelle said.
    And there on the other side of her was old weird Walter with his too-short pants and his chewed-up haircut, sitting on a little wicker stool so that his knees bent up practically to his ears.
    It’s something you can’t explain exactly, why people become friends. It’s chemistry, is what they say. Maybe it’s just being the right people with the right feelings in the right place at the right time. But whatever it is, that summer Walter and Isabelle and I had it. And maybe even the twins too.
    I wish I’d written down somewhere everything we talked about that night on Isabelle’s porch. At the time I thought I’d always remember, but then I didn’t, and now all that’s left of those conversations is a sort of flavor of something special and exciting and strange.
    What I usually talked about with Peter Reilly and Mickey Roberts and Ryan Baker and all the rest was stuff like the Yankees and the Red Sox and the kind of motorcycle Peter was going to buy someday, when he had enough money to buy a motorcycle, and what really happened at the end of the
Sopranos
and who was dating who from school.
    But with Walter and Isabelle and me, it was different. We talked about things that meant something. And we all listened to each other too, which, if you think about it, is rare. In most conversations, people don’t really listen. They just wait for you to be done talking and shut up so that they can say something of their own. Or they shut you up before you even begin, like my dad does.
    All the time we were talking, the twins were running around in the grass chasing fireflies, which were blinking on and off all over the place like crazy things. Fireflies were new to them, due to there not being any in apartments in New York City.
    “They’re magic,” Isabelle said. “They’re like little bits of stars.”
    Then Walter, who sometimes can’t help himself, said that firefly light was really the result of an enzymatic reaction and that fireflies weren’t flies anyway, but beetles. I was worried that Isabelle would get upset with that, because even though Walter is a genius, his explanations can be real downers sometimes, but instead she just started to laugh.
    “I’m not listening, darling,” Isabelle said, and she put her fingers in her ears.
    It was right then on Isabelle’s porch, with the citronella candles with their fake-lemon smell and the creaking sound of rocking chairs, that I knew something was happening. That my life was beginning to change.
    I knew that if at the lunch table at school, I told Peter and Mickey and Ryan and everybody that Walter was a really cool guy and we should have him come over and sit with us, they’d hoot and boo and laugh until milk came out of their noses and ask what I’d been smoking or if I’d been popping pills. They wouldn’t care that Walter knew all about parallel universes and philosophy and art and literature and beetles and all, because they wouldn’t see anything but that stupid haircut and that thing he does with his eyes.
    I also knew if I took my tray over to sit with Walter, I might as well kiss my social life