Telling Tales Read Online Free PDF

that. Unless you count me fancying Wade, which is pretty linear and only in a single direction. I mean, it’s not as though you can write a postcard to someone with “one-way” on it in big, fancy glitter letters.
    “Like this story?” Wade says, which isn’t the thing that makes me flip-flop inside.
    No. It’s him leaning over the side of the chair he’s sitting in to the satchel bag resting at its side, to whip out his usual scrunched-up bunch of semi-clipped together pages. Pages that could well have text all over them, and none of it subtext.
    Kitty squeezes my legs and squeals: “Ooooh, he’s a magician!”
    Because she’s bonkers. Only Cameron and I are sane, adrift in the sea of weirdness this whole night seems to be sinking into.
    “You’re not seriously going to read a dirty story, are you,” I hear myself saying, but it’s from very far away and the tiny section of me that’s cool is staring at this very far away person with a sneer on her face.
    “Well, it’s not as though Warren’s here to tell us off for using the word fuck ,” Wade says, and though it’s mean and Cameron interrupts with Hey, man, he just left us a house , he’s got a point. The Professor didn’t even like to hear the L-word in fiction.
    And the L-word’s loose . So you know. The craps and the damns didn’t stand a chance.
    “Why do you think he did?” Kitty asks, and we all sort of freeze in position, then. Not because it’s a little jarring in the middle of a discussion about smut that was starting to get…let’s say… heated —though it is. Jarring, I mean. The weird tension I can feel pushing against the nape of my neck and under my arms doesn’t dissipate, but it does start tapping its foot, waiting for us to go back to whatever Wade’s got us moving toward.
    But no, it’s the question itself that makes us freeze. As though we all know we’ve been kind of avoiding it, and maybe we wanted to avoid it a little longer. I can hear Wade shuffling the pages of his probable hellfire and brimstone story around, as though he just wants to get back to this, this is the point of us being here.
    Sharing what we never shared before.
    Though when I think about this idea, my stomach stops flip-flopping and drops out of me entirely.
    “Because he had no one else,” Cameron says, finally, and though Wade starts blathering on about Scooby-Doo and Kitty wants to know why he wanted us to stay here for a month first, then, if it was just about him being a lonely old bastard, I think Cameron’s right.
    I think we were his family, once. And maybe he just wanted his family to come back together, in some sort of wildly eccentric and completely inadvisable fashion. One that makes Wade say: “There’s a curse on the house, and a month is what it takes to possess us all and make us kill each other.”
    This time, Kitty manages to hurl a cushion at him. She even kicks one little leg out at him, and misses by a country mile.
    “You dick! I’m already not going to sleep tonight, thinking about people watching us.”
    “People watching us?” I say, and Kitty turns her head almost 360 degrees to shoot the weirdest look at me. It has nothing to do with the content of my words, though, I know, and everything to do with the fact that me and Cameron say said words at exactly the same time. We even use the same incredulous tone—or we would have, if I had a gun-metal voice like his.
    “Well yeah. There must be people watching us. Checking that we’re staying for the month, you know? Making sure we’re doing the ‘renovations.’”
    “The place doesn’t even need renovations,” Wade says, and he would know. But Cameron’s still stuck on this idea of being watched.
    “No one is spying on us. The solicitor even said to me that a clause like that wouldn’t hold up—that we didn’t have to stay if we didn’t want to.”
    We all go silent, then. Though I can practically hear what everyone’s thinking, anyway— so why are we