My Cousin's Keeper Read Online Free PDF Page B

she groaned. “Kieran. He was supposed to be in the house looking after Bon. Weren’t you?” She eyed me sharply. “Go and play,” she instructed. Then she stepped into the Guys’ Room and pulled the door closed behind her.
    I stayed nearby, eavesdropping.
    â€œWell,” came Mom’s voice. “You won’t believe what Renee’s just asked.”
    â€œTry me,” I heard Dad reply.
    â€œIt was about Bon. She wants to leave him here.”
    â€œWhat, for a little vacation?”
    â€œMore than that.”
    Their voices dropped to a low hum, apart from the one swearword I heard Dad use.
    I found my bike and rode aimlessly around the backyard and around my sister. Gina chattered about Bon and how she thought it was nice to have him as a cousin. I tried to make sense of whatever it was my aunt had said, and I hoped that my mom’s anxious face and voice did not mean what I started to imagine.
    â€œWhat did Aunt Renee want? It sounded important,” I asked later.
    â€œIt was,” Mom replied patiently. “But for now it’s just between us adults. It’s not anything you need to be worrying about.”
    â€œBut you were talking about Bon,” I persisted. “It’s something about him.”
    I had pushed just that bit too hard, and I got the lecture from Mom that I didn’t want to hear — how Bon was my cousin, that I needed to be a lot nicer to him. And was I helping him settle in at his new school?
    I went into my room to peel off my sneakers and socks. And there on the bed sat my missing white horse and armored knight. Gone for two years, they had reappeared to ride across the hills of my blanket and pillow. Something about the knight seemed different. His outstretched arms still carried his flag and sword, but the flag was now wrapped in a small sheet of folded paper. When I picked it off and opened the folds, there was a message in tiny, messy writing, and it took a little while to figure out what it said.
    Bon had written,
We were borrowed and have been on many adventures. Now at last we are home
.

Of course I pretended not to be interested.
    But whenever I saw her on the playground, I tried to walk near to where she was, or somehow make whatever game my friends and I were playing veer close to Julia and the friends she had made. I hoped there would be a reason or excuse for her to talk to me, and I tried to hear what she was talking about, so that after a while, the sound of her voice was in my head whenever I wanted it. What spoiled this every time was the fact that wherever she was, Bon was there, too. Julia’s new friends seemed to have become his friends, all of them girls. Bon kept away from us boys.
    I put a lot of thought into where Julia might live, and her jeans and riding boots told me — a farm. Julia had to be an out-of-town girl whose parents had bought one of the horse or alpaca properties that spread themselves across the green hills outside our town. Some of the kids at school were from farms; I had been to a couple of birthday parties at houses that I felt quietly envious of afterward: huge backyards, land big enough for trail bikes or horses, dams deep enough to swim in and wide enough for paddling canoes. This, I wanted to think, had to be the sort of house where Julia would live.
    While just about every other kid on the playground wore a blue-and-red school uniform, Julia always wore jeans and those brown riding boots. I imagined that as well as having a big house on a beautiful farm, Julia was the sort of girl who might have her own horse, and that I would one day see her mom dropping her off at school in a luxury SUV that towed a horse trailer. But Julia’s mom didn’t seem to fit this picture at all. I had seen her walking Julia to the school gate each morning, and she was there every afternoon as well, meeting Julia and walking her away. There was no car that seemed to be theirs, and I never saw