The Real Boy Read Online Free Page A

in the head. Caleb and I have taken him under our care.”
    Oscar gritted his teeth. “You have not—”
    “Anyway, Oscar,” Wolf interrupted, voice puffed out like a cloud, “something urgent has come up. Bonnie and I have very important business deep in the forest.”
    The new apprentice grinned and flipped her hair.
    “Now?” Oscar said.
    “Yes, now.” Wolf held up a hand. “With Caleb gone it is my job to act in the magician’s stead. I’m afraid we will be out all day.”
    Oscar’s breath caught. “You can’t close the shop! Master Caleb said—”
    “I know what Master Caleb said. We can’t close the shop.” Wolf waved an arm toward the shop’s license. “But I have very important business, you see. Magician business. So you’ll have to mind the shop.”
    “I’ll . . . what?”
    Wolf stretched a long arm out and put it around Oscar’s shoulder. “There’s nothing to fear, my lad. Remember how special you are? You can read; you can even grind up plants into tiny bits. I’m sure you’ll have no trouble running the shop for a day.”
    “But—”
    “And I’ll talk to the customers and tell Master Caleb all about how well you did.” Wolf’s bony hand squeezed Oscar’s shoulder. “Then he’ll see how capable you really are.”
    “You can’t—”
    Wolf squeezed his hand, tight enough to make Oscar yelp. “Have fun!” he said. And then in a swirl of cloaks the two apprentices were gone.
    Oscar stood. And stared. The red of the cloaks flashed behind his eyes. His gaze went from the shop license to the clock. His heart sped up.
    And then the front door opened.
    Oscar took a step back, gripping the counter tightly with one hand.
    A woman and a girl walked in, both dressed in loose white shirts, long brown skirts, and cloaks: gray for the woman, red for the girl. The woman—Madame Mariel, the Barrow healer—stood in the middle of the shop and squinted at Oscar. The girl, who was made of vines of curly black hair and darting eyes, was her apprentice, Callie. Callie was a couple years older than Oscar and never seemed to speak much. Though even Caleb did not speak much around Madame Mariel.
    Madame Mariel cleared her throat and looked around the room. “Where is everyone?”
    Oscar froze. She seemed to be asking him. His eyes darted to Mariel’s left boot. “Um,” he began carefully, “Master Caleb had to go to the continent, and Wolf had very important business deep in the forest with Master Robin’s new apprentice, and everyone else . . . is somewhere else.”
    He winced. He could feel Madame Mariel’s eyes on him.
    “What are you doing here? Who are you?”
    “I am minding the shop today,” he said, keeping his eyes on her left boot. “I am Oscar.”
    “Oh,” Madame Mariel said, “you’re that odd little hand Caleb has.” Oscar blinked and dared a glance up as high as Madame Mariel’s stomach. Why did she ask who he was if she already knew?
    Out of the corner of his eye he saw Callie, who was standing right behind the healer, raise her eyebrows at him. It probably meant something. It would’ve been nice to know what.
    For the last five years, most of Oscar’s non-cat interactions had been with Master Caleb and Wolf. And so he had learned them, learned the ways their faces moved around, learned how their voices rose and fell, thickened and thinned, learned the way their bodies spoke. But when he went out into the marketplace and tried to apply what he’d learned to other people, their faces all moved in different ways and their voices did all different things, their bodies were all over the place, and nothing meant anything from one person to the next. They said words they did not mean, and their conversations seemed to follow all kinds of rules—rules that no one had ever explained to Oscar. And if that weren’t enough, people talked in other ways, too, ways that had nothing to do with the things coming out of their mouths.
    Like raising their