کتاب 03-04

4

Michael brought Nick back a few minutes before dawn. Nick was soaked through and shivering from his night out, his dark hair matted into tangles, his eyes sunk in deep hollows. Harper thought he looked feral, as if he had been raised by wolves.

The boy walked swiftly past Allie’s bed, without so much as a glance at his sleeping sister, and went straight to Harper’s cot. He wrote on a sticky pad: I don’t want to sleep with her anymore. can I sleep here?

Harper took his pad and wrote: teach me how to say “time for bed” in sign language and it’s a deal.

That was how Nick Storey came to sleep with Harper instead of Allie, and how Harper renewed her education in American Sign Language; they settled on one new word or phrase a night as the price of admission to her bed. She was a good student, she liked practicing with him, and she was glad to have the distraction.

Although maybe she was too distracted: when the thief got around to stealing the Portable Mother, Harper didn’t even know it was gone until Renée Gilmonton asked what had happened to it.