Free We Are Pirates: A Novel by Daniel Handler Page A

down on the back of his bald head and the strange curl of a bulge on his neck, which was pillowed with white hairs. Gwen hadn’t expected it would be like this, but of course it would be. Even with a happy childhood, or naive is the word Gwen thinks for it, you’d slowly start to be embarrassed by everything in the world, and eventually the weight of all these things, years and years of burdens and rebukes, would just collapse in your lap like a bag of heavy water, and your shoulders would sag from carrying all of it, and of course your shirt would be too small, plaid, buttoned too high and too tight, and of course your shoes would be ugly in some way that was demanded of you by the keepers of your prison hallways, and of course your face, Errol’s face, would show all this, old in the land of the free, old and reined in with people punished to be your companion. These people, all of these people like Errol and herself, with their happiness stolen, every scrap of it, cast off with nothing they wanted. Surely there was a way to steal some back. She opened the book.
    “Oh captain, my captain,” she read uncertainly.
    “No, no, no,” Errol said, pointing at the pirates on the shelf. “Read me something else.”
     
    An easy way to broadcast a hero, Leonard Steed told him once, was to have the hero do something nice for a child right away, so the audience can see he’s a good guy. The Belly Jefferson interview opens with Belly telling a story about teaching a kid the guitar—a story that was not part of the original interview, but one Phil Needle added to the show to make the heroism authentic. Phil Needle swirled honey on his daughter’s toast before bumping it over to her. Gwen was staring out the window and biting into an apple. She was wearing a blue shirt with a green design, gray jeans, something with a hood tied around her waist, and some boots he had never seen before that Marina kept glaring at.
    Gwen put the wounded apple down on the table. The bites were perfect.
    “Are you going to eat that, Gwen?”
    Gwen scowled at her mother and then shoved the whole toast into her mouth like she did. It looked like she was eating a sleeping bag. Her hair was tucked safely behind her ear, but what else was safe, squirreled away? Today, June whatever-it-was, Phil Needle was flying down to Los Angeles to seize what was his to be seized. But he worried about leaving Gwen. School was out and she had nothing to do but a punishment Phil Needle did not like to think about. Without swimming—why had she quit, could she just tell him that?—they didn’t even spend time in the same body of water. With Marina it was worse. Last night they’d raged at each other until Gwen had stalked upstairs, where Phil Needle was hiding and trimming his nails. She had a pen in her hand, and before he could even look at her, she’d grabbed his wrist and written I HATE HER and was gone again with that music, Tortuga, turned up loud and muffled in her room. He’d scrubbed and scrubbed at it and there it was, still bruised on his skin. It looked like he’d had his hand stamped at a club.
    “Are you?”
    “What?”
    “Are you going to eat that, Gwen?”
    “I’m eating toast now ,” she snarled, and then turned to Phil Needle with very fake calm. “Thanks for the toast, Dad.”
    This fancy kitchen he could not afford, and it was a minefield.
    Marina wouldn’t quit. “Because if you’re not going to eat it—”
    “I’m going to eat it. ”
    “—then you’re wasting apples.”
    “I’m going to eat it !”
    “They cost money. They don’t grow on trees.”
    Phil Needle looked down at the front section of the newspaper, which at the time this story takes place showed a photograph of a senator who was resigning his position in order to spend more time with his family. Phil Needle also wanted to spend time with the senator’s family. Look at them! Such beaming daughters! Not like Gwen, who was giving her mother a look of such