The Order of Odd-Fish Read Free Page B

fleeing victims; the audience roared with delight. Aunt Lily started to get distracted. “Well, if you do open it, let me know.”
    “I won’t open it until he wakes up,” said Jo.
    “Suit yourself.”
    “Maybe I’ll take a bath,” said Jo.
    “Whatever.”
             
    Jo’s bathroom, like everything else at Lily Larouche’s palace, was a gilded wreck of red and gold marble, kaleidoscopic mirrors, and frenzied geometric mosaics, dimly lit by dozens of spicy smoking candles sprouting from a brass chandelier so mammoth and ornate it seemed like a fiery flying city. Jo lay soaking in the ivory bathtub, the silence broken only by the distant chatter of the television, and thought about Aunt Lily.
    When Jo was small, she had believed Aunt Lily was the most fascinating woman in the world. But nowadays Aunt Lily was just exasperating. The more Aunt Lily aged, the more childlike she became; soon Jo found that
she
had become the real parent of their little family.
    Jo loved Aunt Lily, but it was hard taking care of her. And she had little help. There was Dust Creek, where Jo worked as a waitress, but everyone who lived there was old, almost dead. Every Christmas Aunt Lily threw a costume ball for her old Hollywood friends, but otherwise the ruby palace had few visitors apart from Hoagland Shanks, the local handyman. He showed up once a week to shuffle around the palace, supposedly repairing this or that, but mostly he just stared off into the distance and mumbled about different kinds of pie he liked.
    There’s got to be more to life than this,
thought Jo, sliding deeper into the warm pink foam.
I can’t spend the rest of my life squirreled away in this old house. But where can I go?
    She went nowhere. Jo spent her days prowling the red dusty hallways, looking for new ways to kill time—practicing the antique organ, riding her bicycle awkwardly around the blazing golden ballroom, or just lying on the roof, staring out into the desert night sky.
    More than anything, that note from the washing machine—that word,
dangerous
—teased her, pricked her curiosity. She still had the note. She was secretly proud of it; she liked the idea of being “dangerous.” Sometimes Jo thought that if she was
really
dangerous, she would run away—just steal one of Aunt Lily’s cars, drive to the city, and see what the world was really like. The idea excited her. It sounded like the kind of stunt Aunt Lily might’ve pulled when she was young.
    So why don’t I do it?
thought Jo, frustrated.
What’s holding me back?
             
    It was almost time for Jo to go to work. She got out of her bath, dried off, and changed into her waitress uniform—a pink, itchy polyester dress that didn’t really fit—and went to check on Colonel Korsakov.
    She knocked on his door. No answer. Jo hesitated, then cautiously tiptoed into the darkened room.
    Korsakov lay on the sagging bed, snoring and snorting, his stomach heaving under his pajamas like an unsteady mountain of jelly. Jo stared in a kind of awe. Korsakov was somehow even more colossal than she remembered—like an exuberantly portly walrus.
    On his bedside table sat the package from the sky.
    The back of Jo’s neck tingled. She reached out, touched the package…no, she couldn’t open it. She would wait for him to wake up. All his talk about “unsafe in the wrong hands”—Jo had never thought of her hands as wrong, but she had never thought of them as particularly right, either. And yet…
    She took the package.
    The room was silent. Even the snoring Korsakov was momentarily still. And before Jo knew it, she had broken open the lid, sifted through wadded-up newspapers, and grasped the thing inside.
    Jo stared at it. It was a black box, made of intricately carved wood and decorated with silver designs. A faint jingling came from within. She put her ear on it and heard something like a tiny alien orchestra: gurgling chimes, the cry and echo of horns, murmuring beeps and