The Sword of Straw Read Online Free

didn’t tell Nathan about the boy she was keen on at school. When they got together on the weekends and during the holidays, they talked about music and television and lessons, and feuds or allegiances with their classmates, and how parents never understood what it was like to be a teenager, because it must have been different for them. Hazel’s bedroom had evolved into a kind of nest, lined with prints and posters, cushioned with discarded clothing, floored with chip packages and CDs, where she and Nathan could curl up and listen to her latest musical discovery—usually something twangy and foreign sounding and faintly bizarre—while she related how her father, who had left last year, wasn’t allowed to come home anymore because he’d tried to hit her mother again, and how her mother had a new boyfriend who was rather old and a bit dull but nice.
    “They met through an ad in the paper,” Hazel said. “Lots of people do that now. Has your mum tried it?”
    “I don’t think she’s too keen on dating,” Nathan said. “There was you-know-who last year—I’m not sure if he ever asked her for a date, exactly, but—well, obviously it didn’t work out.” He didn’t need to say any more. Hazel knew what he was alluding to.
    “She must’ve loved your dad a lot,” she remarked. Nathan’s father had died in a car accident before he was born, or so he had always been told. “I mean, she’s not forty yet and really pretty, but she hasn’t had a proper boyfriend for years, has she?”
    “No.”
    “You wouldn’t mind though, would you?” They’d been over this territory before, but Hazel thought it was worth checking.
    “Of course not—as long as he was kind, and loved her. What about your mum’s new man? Do you think it’s serious?”
    “ ’Spect so. He brings her flowers, and that’s always a sign, isn’t it? She says he’s dependable, which is what she wants, after Dad. He’d never knock her about, or get drunk, or anything. He’s sort of boring, but that’s okay for her. She likes boring.”
    “Have you talked to him much?” Nathan queried.
    “Not really. He asked me about my homework once, but when I showed it to him he couldn’t do it.”
    “If you haven’t talked to him,” Nathan said, “you don’t really know if he’s boring or not.”
    “You’re being reasonable,” Hazel said sharply. “You know I can’t stand it when you do that. He—he gives off boring, like a smell. BO. Boring Odor. He walks around in a little cloud of boringness. Please,
please
don’t start being open-minded and tolerant about things. It’s revolting.”
    “When you shut your mind,” Nathan retorted, “you shut yourself inside it. That’s silly. Besides, I just said, give him a chance. You think he’s nice, don’t you? So he might surprise you. He might be fun after all.”
    “Mum doesn’t need fun,” Hazel said obstinately. “She’s my mum, for God’s sake. I like him, okay? He’ll do. I don’t have to be thrilled by him.”
    “Okay.” Nathan grinned, a little mischievously. Sometimes he enjoyed provoking her. She was always too quick and too careless in judging people, and slow to alter her opinions, and he liked being the only person who could ruffle her certainties.
    When he had gone she took out the picture she never showed anyone, cut off from the end of a group shot taken at the school disco. It was a picture of a boy with a fair childish face, wavy hair worn rather long—hobbit hair, said his detractors—blue eyes crinkled against the flashbulb. He smiled less than his classmates and Hazel believed he nursed a secret sorrow, though she could only speculate what it might be. (Of course, he could have been merely sullen.) He rarely spoke to her, hardly seemed to notice her, but somehow that only made him more fascinating. He didn’t have Boring Odor, she reflected—beneath their lack of communication she sensed the wells of his soul were fathoms deep. She stared at the photo