The Wild Things Read Online Free PDF Page B

they flew in and attacked them. They bit them. One of the vampires bit the tallest building but his fangs broke off. Then the rest of his teeth fell out. And he cried because he would never get new teeth again. And the other vampires said
Why are you crying, aren’t those just your baby teeth?
And the vampire said
No, those are my grown-up teeth
. And the vampires knew he couldn’t be a vampire anymore, so they left him. And he couldn’t be friends with the buildings because the vampires had killed them all.”
    “Is that the end?” his mom asked.
    “Yeah,” Max said.
    His mom finished typing and smiled sadly down at Max.
    “The end,” he said.
    She continued to rub his stomach with her foot. It felt good and terrible and he was so tired, so very tired, so incredibly tired all over.

CHAPTER VI

    A quiet, cream-colored morning. Max stayed in bed until Claire was gone, then slipped into her room. Her bedspread had, for now, been replaced by a sleeping bag. Her wall, where he had soaked her photo collages, was stripped clean. In his bare feet, he could feel the cold water still in the carpet. He knelt and rested his head on the floor. He could hear no creaking in the beams, no signs of permanent damage. But there were dangers, he was sure, that could not be seen or heard, structural weaknesses that might suddenly give way.
    Downstairs, Max sat alone on the couch, eating his breakfast -- cereal, grapefruit juice, and two bananas. He was reading the sports section of the newspaper, a habit his father had encouraged; when Max was not yet two he began eating his breakfast next to his dad in the morning, the two of them nestled in a corner of the couch, reading the comics and then the sports and sometimes the real estate section.
    “Hey Max,” Gary said from the kitchen. “You know where your mom keeps the coffee?”
    “In the cabinet under the sink,” Max said.
    He heard Gary open that cabinet and close it.
    “You sure?”
    This was the one pleasure Max took from having Gary in the house. Gary couldn’t remember where anything was in the kitchen, and seemed to be the most gullible adult Max had ever met. This made it far too easy for Max to hide something different every day, some different essential element of Gary’s breakfast, and then pretend to help him find it. One day it was the coffee; another day the filters; another day the lemonade Gary liked to drink; another day the little scooper Gary needed to determine the correct dosage of lemonade crystals in his glass. One day Max replaced Gary’s new English muffins with the molding ones his mother had just thrown out. Another day Max put the butter in the freezer, and heard, from the couch, Gary ruining his muffin while forcing the ice-hard butter into the muffin’s nooks and crannies.
    “Maybe the one by the hall?” Max said.
    Gary opened the cabinet by the hallway, spent some time looking inside, and finally Max heard it close.
    “Wait. I think maybe the fridge,” Max said. “Mom read something about refrigerating it, how you’re supposed to.”
    “Thanks bud,” Gary said. And so the fridge opened and closed. A minute later: “Darn,” he said. “I thought we had it that time.”
    “Aw, shoot,” Max said.
    And the great thing was that whenever Max played the game -- only a few times a week, so as to avoid arousing suspicion -- Gary seemed to think that the two of them were in it together, that Max was doing everything in his power to help. In Gary’s mind, they’d bonded.
    “Oh well,” Gary said, entering the foyer. “Guess I’ll have to spring for the real thing at Monaco’s, eh?”
    Max nodded, not having any idea what that meant, and returned to his newspaper. A few seconds later he looked up to find Gary sitting on the bench near the front door. Max had never thought to sit on this bench, which was used for papers, mail, and other things on their way into drawers or out the door. At the moment it was also home to a delicate bird of