The Key to the Golden Firebird Read Online Free PDF Page A

burn marks on it? That couldn’t be good.
    â€œWhat if it’s Mom?” May called back.
    â€œWhat if it is?”
    One last ring and the caller was shuttled off to voice mail land.
    â€œThanks!” May added.
    â€œNo problem.”
    May heard the television volume increase. The kitchen wall began to vibrate. She got up and marched into the living room.Palmer was huddled close to the television, basking in its glow. She wore her sweats, her fleece jacket, and nasty fuzzy slippers. Additionally, she had draped the old crocheted living room blanket over her head like a hood and was wearing May’s chenille gloves. If she’d had a marshmallow on a stick pressed up against the screen, May wouldn’t have been completely surprised.
    â€œYou know that you’re not outdoors, right?” May asked.
    A cold stare.
    â€œCould you turn that down a little?”
    Palmer turned the volume up another notch.
    â€œWhere’s Brooks?”
    Palmer shrugged.
    â€œShe’s supposed to be taking me to work in an hour,” May said. “Do you know what time her team meeting is over?”
    â€œThere’s no meeting today.”
    â€œThen where did she go?”
    â€œHow am I supposed to know?”
    â€œDid she tell you?”
    â€œNo. She just left with Dave when you and Mom were asleep.”
    â€œDave?” May repeated. “Oh, great.”
    Dave had recently come into Brooks’s life. He had wide brown eyes, high cheekbones, thick eyebrows, and a fringe of long hair all around his face. He was always smiling a slow, mysterious smile, and he had to lean against something whenever he wasn’t sitting down. May begrudgingly admitted to herself that he was handsome—in a lethargic, werewolfy sort of way. She couldn’t tell if the two of them were dating, sinceBrooks never discussed it. And Dave certainly wasn’t shedding any light on the subject. May had exchanged exactly two sentences with him in the three or four months he had been coming by. One was, “I’ll go get her.” The other was, “She’s coming down.”
    If they were dating, Dave stood in stark contrast to Brooks’s last (and only) boyfriend, Brian. Brian was the brother of someone on Brooks’s softball team—a pleasant, extremely dull guy, who Palmer had blessed with the nickname “Nipplehead.” (There was nothing specifically nipplelike about his head, but the name just seemed to fit. Even their mom, who liked Brian, said, “You know, he really is a Nipplehead.”) He’d disappeared sometime during the events of the previous summer, and no one had asked about him since. Dave seemed nothing like Brian. When Brooks went out with Dave, she came back late and usually drunk. This was a new thing for Brooks. May was still getting used to the sound of hearing her come in and stumble around, doing everything too loudly and dropping stuff in the bathroom.
    But only one part of this interested May at the moment: Brooks definitely wouldn’t be back in time to take her to work.
    â€œPut my gloves back where you found them when you’re done.” May sighed. “Those are my good ones, from Christmas.”
    Palmer plunged her gloved hand into the remains of a bag of barbecued potato chips that lay by her side.
    â€œDon’t eat those,” May said. “I’m making you dinner.”
    Palmer shoved the chips into her mouth and turned back to the television.
    Sighing again, May went back to the kitchen and headed straight to the refrigerator. She pulled out Brooks’s bottle of Gatorade, poured herself a small glass, and dumped the rest down the drain. The empty bottle she placed in the middle of the counter. She looked out the kitchen window at the pounding spring shower that had come out of nowhere. This would prohibit her from getting to work on her bike—the trusty Brown Hornet, her dad’s twenty-five-year-old brown three