Pamela Dean Read Free Page B

"Where's the rest of your stuff?"
    Somebody else knocked. Janet and Christina both called, "Come in!" Janet thought she could grow to hate that hallway with the closets; you always had to wait for who was coming.
    Who was coming, as it lumped around the corner, appeared to be composed largely of scuffed blue suitcases. It dropped these, panting, and emerged as another tall person, maybe five eight, with curly brown hair, a sharp, freckled face, and the clothes that should have gone with Christina's hair. Not the Indian cotton, but well and truly faded blue jeans, old sandals, a denim shirt with a peace symbol embroidered on one pocket and a rose on the other.
    "Hello, Molly," said Janet.
    "Hi. Which of you is—oh, far out! " She lunged at the bookshelves, brought up with her nose an inch away from the books, and tilting her head sideways read her way down every spine there, nodding and exclaiming. "I hate Hermann Hesse," she said, wheeling around, "but the rest of these are my very favorites."
    "They're mine," said Janet, beaming at her.
    "So you're Janet. Can you really read Hesse?"
    "My best friend likes him," said Janet, "and he's very intense."
    "I thought he was boring," said Molly, "but never mind. What else have you got in here?" She folded herself to the floor and looked expectantly at Janet. Janet, feeling unfairly that Christina would have just ripped the boxes open, supposing she was interested at all, sat down too, and reached for the one containing the new books, the ones getting ready for college had not left her time to read.
    "I left my stuff down in the lobby," said Christina. This was merely a statement of fact, Janet thought, intended to explain why she was going out the door instead of joining in the examination of the box; but both Janet and Molly, without exchanging a glance, scrambled to their feet and accompanied her down the four flights of steps, and toiled back up them again with suitcases, footlocker, and four cardboard boxes. These last were too light to contain books.
    Christina promptly ripped the brown paper from her bedding and made up one of the bottom bunks. Janet and Molly unloaded the box of new books.
    "I haven't had time to read these," Janet said.
    "Well, let's see," said Molly, turning the books over one by one. She had very long fingers. Till We Have Faces, All the Myriad Ways, Jack of Shadows, The Children of Llyr, More Than Human, The Daughter of Time, The Crystal Cave, and A Tan and Sandy Silence fell through her searching hands, accompanied by exclamations of approval and puzzlement and anticipation. Janet watched them, and wished for a quiet corner with any one of them. They would let her read here, all right, until her eyes fell out of her head and she babbled of green fields; but they wouldn't let her read any of these.

    "Oh, do you read mysteries?" said Christina, peering over Molly's shoulder at the entirely misleading cover of The Daughter of Time. "I love Agatha Christie."
    You would, thought Janet. She said temperately, "I used to like the Tommy and Tuppence books a lot." Christina looked as if she, too, were thinking, you would.
    She turned to Molly, looking, Janet thought, martyred, and said, "Which desk do you want?"
    "I don't care," said Molly. "I work on my bed. At least"—and she cast a jaundiced eye at the bunk beds—"I did at home. Do we have to have these things?"
    "You can't type on your bed," said Christina. "Do you want the desk by Janet's bookshelves or the one by my bed?"
    "Wanna bet?" said Molly. "I don't care, really; but you do have a point. Do we want to clump up in little corners, or go wandering through each other's territory all the time?"
    "We have to dress all in a row in the hallway," said Christina, rather wearily. Janet looked at her for the first time since the conversation began and saw that she was clutching a Smith-Corona portable typewriter case, presumably with typewriter inside it.
    "Put Molly by my books," she said hastily. "You take