All the Wild Children Read Online Free PDF Page A

umbrellas...”
    “Larry the chicken and Jerry the hippo?”
    “Yes... hippopotamus’ don’t care if it rains.  But chickens...”  No one can tell a joke like my little sister.  She turns randomness into an art form. 
    We’re sitting there, eating sandwiches, backs against the tree trunk.  I can feel its flakey rough bark and smooth skin, the dappled sun warming us.  One moment we are sitting against that tree chatting...
    And then we’re not. 
    We are in a shitty apartment in student housing at Stanford.  Our pets are gone.  Our woods are gone.  Our parents are gone.  My father to an even shittier apartment across town.  My mother to work and grad school.
    I am 8.  Shaun is 6.  Lark is 10.  Lilly is 12.  And we are on our own.  Only, on your own isn’t safe in the flats.  The flats have people.  People who aren’t us .  People who are clearly them .  There is a common out our back door.  Some grass and a small sand box.  The kids here aren’t like the hippy kids we grew up around.  These kids have a meanness about them.  I watch four boys knock a sparrow’s nest out of a sapling and stomp the featherless chicks.  I hate them.  I can’t stop them.  I hate my impotence.
    I do what I can.  I lovingly grow tomatoes from seed in the tiny patch of dirt out our back door.  I love the plants.  I love how they flourish with a little water and care.  I watch the buds become blooms become round green globes.  I water them every day.  I watch them.  They are beautiful.  The fruit becomes yellow, then red starts to show.  My mother says we should pick them.  I want to cherish them one more day.
    The next afternoon, when I come home from school I find all the tomatoes have been torn off the plants and smashed on the grass.  I never grow tomatoes again.  I learn to make up tales, long intricate stories I tell myself as I lay in bed.  No one can take a story from you.  No one can make you move away from a good story.  If I can’t be with the fairies, I can make up legends about them.  My fantasy life becomes mythic.  General Tangle and General JJ battle ogres and trolls on far off shores.  They sail long boats like their Viking kin.  I read books on Vikings.  I read Norse mythology.  It speaks in ways that the Christ of my family never has.  Norse gods screw up all the time.  They do good, they do bad, they battle the chaos that is always outside the gate, just across the ice bridge.  Waiting.  Ragnarok, twilight of the gods.  Chaos.  It is all waiting.  It is our job to hold it off as long as possible.  It is a warrior’s job to never accept it, even as it pulls us under.
     
    SEPTEMBER... No more hippy private school.  Parents stop teaching.  No more free ride for the Stallings kids.  We are sent to Palo Alto unified public school system.  We are to be split up.  Lilly will go to Paly High school.  Lark to Jordan Junior High.  Shaun and I to Escondido grammar school. 
    OK, so I’m dyslexic, but even I can work this out.  First your mom and dad split up.  Second you have to get rid of all your pets.  Third you move from the country into a small flatland apartment.  Fourth the only people you ever trusted are sent to schools miles apart.  Fifth the schools they send you to want you to wear shoes and act like a robot.  Any way you add it up, it blows donkey dicks.
     
    “I’m scared,” Shaun says as we were getting ready for bed.  “What if the other kids hate me?”
    “Nobody can hate you.  You are consort to Queen Fen Starshine.  You are a member of the court of the Royal Blackberry.”  It is the night before we start the new school.
    “What if they don’t understand?”  Her brow is knit, tight, worried.
    “Then I’ll explain it.”
    “What if they are mean to me?”
    “Then I’ll kick their ass.”  She looks at me.  Thinks for a moment.  Her brow unknits a small bit.
    “Promise?”
    “Pixie promise.”  Solemnly we lock little