Prophet of Bones Read Free

of the street, one block down.
    “We’re practically neighbors,” he told her.
    Paul rode his bike up her driveway. The screen door squeaked as she opened it, but she didn’t step inside.
    “Those papers,” she said. “What were you drawing?”
    For a moment, Paul wasn’t sure how to answer. She must have sensed the hesitation. “You don’t have to say if you don’t want to,” she added.
    Her saying that made it possible. So he told her.
    “What do you mean, ‘cages’?” she asked. She let the screen door close and sat on the stoop.
    He pulled the pad from his paper-route bag. “Here,” he said.
    Rebecca took the papers, and her cousin leaned close.
    “Construction plans, I guess you’d call them,” Paul said.
    She flipped to the next sheet. This one showed his largest cage, drawn out in intricate detail.
    “You built this?”
    “Yeah. It wasn’t that hard.”
    “It looks hard to me. Where is it?”
    “In the attic over my garage.”
    “Can we see?”
    Paul glanced in the direction of his house. “No, I better not.”
    Rebecca flipped the page and studied the final drawing carefully. “It must have taken you a long time to put all this together.”
    “Months.”
    “What are they for? I mean, if these are cages, what’s supposed to go inside?”
    “Mice.”
    She nodded to herself. “Mice,” she repeated under her breath, as if it made perfect sense. “Where’d you get the stuff? All the wood and nails.”
    Paul shrugged. “Here and there. Just scraps, mostly. Other stuff I had to buy.”
    The little cousin finally spoke: “My parents don’t let me have pets.”
    “Neither do mine,” Paul said. “But anyway, the mice aren’t pets.”
    “Then what are they?” the boy asked. He stared over his cousin’s shoulder at the drawings.
    “A project,” Paul said.
    “What kind of project?”
    Paul looked at the graph paper. “I’m still working on that.”
    *   *   *
    The bell rang at two thirty-five.
    By two forty-nine, school bus No. 32 was freighted with its raucous cargo and pulling out of the parking lot, headed for the highway and points south and east.
    Paul sat near the back and stared out the window, watching the Grand Kankakee Marsh scroll by. Around him, the other kids talked and laughed, but only Paul sat silently, fidgeting with the large blue textbook on his lap, waiting for the road to smooth out so that he could read. As they crossed the bridge, he finally opened his life sciences book.
    Today Mr. Slocam had gone over the study guide for the test.
    Figure 73 showed two ellipses graphed like a crooked half-smile between an x- and a y-axis. The caption explained that the first slope represented the number of daughter atoms. The second slope represented the parent atoms. The point of intersection of the two slopes was the element’s half-life.
    “You will need to know this for the test,” the study guide declared in bold heading, followed by a series of bullet-pointed facts.
    The study guides were always like this.
    Need to know this for the test. The common refrain of the public schools, where academic bulimia was the order of the day—and tests simple exercises in regurgitation. Paul knew the drill.
    The bus made several stops before finally pulling to rest in front of his house. Paul climbed out.
    His father was out of town again, at another scientific conference, so dinner that evening was a quiet undertaking. Later that night he went up to his room and copied his study guide onto a series of flash cards. Just before bed, he found his mother in the kitchen. “Will you quiz me?”
    “Of course.” His mother’s doll face shattered into a smile.
    They sat at the dining room table, and his mother flipped the first card, on which was drawn two crooked lines on an x- and y-axis. “Describe the point of intersection,” she said.
    “It’s an element’s half-life.”
    “Good,” she said, flipping to the next card. “When was radiometric dating