The Outlaws of Sherwood Street: Giving to the Poor Read Free Page A

might not have realized—shown in the right light, those kids could be stars.”
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œWhy not? Wasn’t Robin Hood a star?”
    â€œRobin Hood wasn’t even a real person for sure,” I said. “And maybe these . . . kids of yours aren’t real either.”
    Now Dina did smile. “Great answer,” she said. “You’d be a terrific interview.”
    I started shaking my head. She held up her hand.
    â€œSomeday,” she said. “Maybe. No pressure.”
    No pressure: I liked hearing that, began to relax a little, which was just when Dina asked one more question.
    â€œAnd your last name, again?”
    â€œForester.” I just blurted it out, taken by surprise, thrown by that sneaky
again,
too dumb to live.
    â€œRobbie Forester,” Dina said. Then came a strange silence, with my name just sort of hanging there between our breath clouds. “What an interesting name.”
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    Things had gotten suddenly busy back home, not unusual. Mom was at her desk, paging impatiently through a long document, her ear to the phone: Mom’s job had to do with restructuring debt, about which I had no clue. All I knew was that debt could need restructuring at any hour of the day or night. As for my dad, I could hear him upstairs, pacing around. Pacing around meant he was wrestling with a new idea. Those wrestling matches could also happen at any hour of the day or night.
    I called out, “I’m back,” then went to the kitchen, got out the chopsticks, opened the Your Thai cartons, and dug in.
    Surprise. I turned out not to be hungry. Not hungry even though I hadn’t eaten since lunchtime at school and here was fresh and steaming
kaeng phet ped yang
right before my eyes?
    But all I could think of was,
What an interesting name.
It closed my stomach up tight.
    I went upstairs to my room. From my parents’ room down the hall came the sound of my dad, still pacing, plus “but if . . .” and “why couldn’t . . .” and “that would mean . . .” and more writer talk like that. I already knew one thing for sure: no way I wanted to be a writer. A reporter, on the other hand? I entered my room, stood in front of the mirror, tried out narrow-eyed looks, some with glasses on and one blurry take with glasses off. Have I mentioned that I wear glasses? And that Dr. Singh, the ophthalmologist, won’t even consider contacts until you’re thirteen?
    I won’t bother to describe my room, except to say it’s not big. But in the city you’re lucky to have a bedroom all to yourself—although the truth is Pendleton is sort of my roommate. For example, at the moment he was lying on the bed, taking up most of the space. Pendleton’s a very big, tweedy-looking mix of this and that, and also timid and lazy. His sleepy eyes followed me across the room. He worked up the energy to raise his tail a few inches and let it fall in a soft thump of greeting.
    â€œMove over.”
    He didn’t budge. I squeezed onto a corner of the bed and gave him a pat. “We’ve got a problem, Pendleton. Any ideas?”
    He licked my hand, one of his two or three go-to ideas. I took out my phone, texted Ashanti, got no response, called, and was sent to voice mail. I called Silas.
    â€œYo,” he said.
    â€œSilas? Please don’t say yo.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œIt’s not you.”
    â€œWhat’s me?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “We need to talk.”
    â€œAbout what’s me?”
    â€œOh, my God. Silas!”
    â€œYo.”
    I took a deep breath. Friendship with Silas—if that was indeed what we had—involved taking a lot of deep breaths. “Do you know who Dina DeNunzio is?”
    â€œSpokesman for the pope.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?”
    â€œThat’s what a nuncio does.