All Night Read Free Page B

honour your missing partner?”
    “We haven’t.” The floor is cold. I move to get free of Jess but she pulls me back. I let her.
    “You haven’t actually replaced Peter already, have you? Mr. Elephant?”
    I am not an elephant beside her. More a giraffe beside a herd dog.
    “Of course we haven’t replaced him yet.”
    “Can’t you do improv with two people?”
    “Not really, not as well,” I say. “Three people are funnier. They can trip each other up. Aren’t you cold?”
    “No.” She is focused. Focused on fixing me. “Okay,” she says, “pretend it’s Saturday night. Jeremy Elephant is away. It’s just you. Some big talent agent is in the crowd. You’re all alone onstage. What are you going to do?”
    “I don’t know,” I say, and I mean it.
    “Now, ladies and gentlemen! Direct from the filthy, frozen apartment he will never escape! Mr. Gregor Luft!”
    I stay still.
    “Master of stacking chairs and cleaning cake from carpets!”
    “Shut up.”
    “Gregor Luft! The funniest man making minimum wage. It’s your big moment.”
    “It’s not my big moment. It’s not Saturday night. I don’t feel right.” I pull free, get up, and see the hot plate. It’s all we have for a stove, nearly useless for cooking. But thats not what we need right now. I turn it on. The hot plate element begins to glow orange.
    I smile at Jess—she is looking at me. I hold my chilly hands over the hot plate burner. Surely she can see me now—the real me? The burner isn’t much, but it’s quietly funny, and a little warm. Lovely in the dark, like an old campfire. From back when we humans were hardly more than giraffes and elephants.
    Any other time she would smile, but not tonight. Peter’s death really has rattled her. “Let’s just go to bed,” she says, her voice now dim, like a candle flame almost out.

Chapter Four
    Suddenly, the wind blows the door open again. I hadn’t told the landlord a crazy story: we really are fighting arctic storms.
    “Shut the door!” Jess wraps herself in blankets. “Come to bed!”
    I jam a National Geographic magazine under the door to keep it closed. Then I return to my laptop.
    “I hope there are no elephants in that magazine,” Jess says. “If the lock is broken, how are we supposed to keep out burglars?”
    “We have nothing to steal,” I reply. “That will keep out burglars.” On the laptop I try her account, but I can’t get in. “Did you change your password?” I look up from the screen, waiting.
    “Maybe.”
    “You never change your password.”
    “You haven’t known me very long,” she says. “I changed my password all the time before I met you.”
    My fingers are still waiting. “Two years is a long time. What’s your new password?”
    She tells me it’s a secret because she doesn’t know mine. But I did tell her, that night in the taxi, when we were stuck in the snow. She had decided she wanted to know everything about me.
    I remind her of that conversation. “Oh, that famous night when we took a taxi!” she says. “We were just blowing through money!”
    She’s stalling. She really doesn’t want me to know her password. Why would that be?
    Because words have power. More than we know.
    “I will tell you mine again,” I say, “but then you might feel bad for not remembering, and blame me. So you need to forgive me now.”
    “I forgive you,” she says.
    “Okay. Here’s the clue: one of the toilet inventors.”
    “Oh! Oh!” She holds her head in her hand. “A password so stupid I should never have forgotten it!”
    “At least you forgave me,” I say.
    “But you must have changed it by now,” she says.
    “I don’t go around changing things that are perfectly good,” I reply.
    “No. No one will guess ‘Crapper.’ Thomas, wasn’t it?”
    “Thomas Crapper. Now you tell me your password,” I say.
    Jess closes her eyes. “Can’t you guess it? I thought you knew me better than that.”
    “You couldn’t guess my password, and