Every Hidden Thing Read Free Page A

calm and somehow dignified, standing still as my father fumed and circled. Like he knew he couldn’t be struck down, because he was right.
    â€œFather, stop!” I yelled again.
    He lurched in close for another jab at Cartland, too close, and the cast-iron professor stamped hard on my father’s oversized shoe. He’d paid a cobbler in Chicago a fortune for those shoes. Father jackknifed with a whoop, then butted against Cartland’s belly with his full weight. They both toppled over, each trying to thrash and claw his way atop the other.
    Suddenly the girl from the lobby was beside me, cheeks blazing. I’d never seen anyone look fiercer. She grabbed my father’s ear and twisted like she was trying to yank a turnip from the earth.
    â€œHey!” I yelled. “Easy!”
    â€œGet him off my father!”
    Stupidly I looked from Cartland to the girl. “ That’s your father?”
    â€œYes!”
    â€œWell, maybe you should remove your father from my father,”I bellowed, and pointed down to the writhing mass: Cartland now had the upper hand and was strangling my father, who was drooling slightly.
    We each took hold of our struggling parents and shouted and tugged. In all our grappling, her hands and mine got tangled briefly.
    She looked at me, and I couldn’t look away. Her eyes were extraordinary, not just for their piercing blue—it was the white and amber markings in her irises, like shooting stars and the aurora borealis radiating from the blackness of her pupils. I felt like I was witnessing the birth of the universe.
    It took me completely by surprise: With absolute certainty, I knew I’d fall in love with her.

2.
THE CRATE
    I FOUND THE CRATE THE NEXT MORNING.
    It was unopened under Father’s desk. The muddy boot prints on its lid told me he’d been using it as a footrest for a good while. Exactly the kind of thing my father would do absentmindedly. I dragged it out and cleared a space on one of the worktables.
    A small crate, not much bigger than a shoe box, stenciled all over with the faded insignia of the Kickapoo Medicine Company. It was addressed to the “Most Esteemed Professor Michael Bolt” in a spidery hand. Clearly the sender was hoping flattery would get Father’s attention. Which was normally an excellent plan. But in this case it still hadn’t saved him from being used as a boot rest.
    Tons of things got sent to my father by amateur naturalists. Ancient leaf impressions in sandstone, the giant toe bone of some extinct mammal, the skins of two warblers with unusual wing markings. And lizards. Plenty of lizards. Sometimes they weresent to him care of the academy; other times they came direct to our house. Our doorframe was splintered by the number of crates wrestled through. They stacked up in the hallway, in the long, narrow rooms of our ground floor.
    The floors crunched with dried clay trimmed from fossils. You stepped around rickety towers of dusty books and papers, trays of things yet to be labeled—and tried not to tread on Horatio, our tortoise, who made his slow creaking perambulations around the house and somehow managed to turn up underfoot when you were lugging something tricky.
    There was no parlor or living room or library. No comfortable room with great leather armchairs for guests to sit and stretch their legs. Our decorations were the skins of a vole, a snake slowly uncoiling in a jar of spirits, an antelope femur.
    Mrs. Saunders, our cook and housekeeper, was forbidden from cleaning these front rooms—Father didn’t trust her not to whisk up some treasured body part or scrap of paper with a brilliant note. Not that she’d ever set foot in here, even if ordered. She hated the chaos, our salamanders, and the sight and smell of our Gila monster, who had a habit of regurgitating her meals.
    Often there were students over, or colleagues, helping father with something or other. Some days it was like