Read Duck Boy for Free Online Page B

he got to the kitchen, he
found Aunt Shannon sitting in a chair with a cup of tea in her hand, reading
Steve’s mother’s journal. A stranger, a girl about Steve’s age, sat beside her.
    “Good morning, Steve,” Aunt Shannon said. “I’d like you to meet a friend of
mine. This is Lindsay Locket.”
    Lindsay shot Steve a cold, polite smile. She seemed smart. Maybe a tad
geeky. Long golden hair framed her face, with a piercing pair of azure eyes.
Braces, yes. Possibly. Hard to remember because her eyes were so distracting.
He realized that his housecoat hung loosely about his shoulders and his hair
was a greasy fireworks display, his face dotted with dried dots of toothpaste.
In a flash, he wrapped the lapels of the housecoat together, cinching the belt
tight around his waist with an impossible knot. His face glowed as red as a
pimple.
    “Ah… um… m-m-morning,” he stuttered as he pulled open a couple of cupboard
doors quickly, hiding his head behind them. “Do you have any cereal?”
    “You mean breakfast cereal? No, we have porridge for breakfast. I made some
for you this morning and left it on the stove there.” She pointed to a battered
pot blurping on the stove. “Lindsay is keen on learning the alchemist
tradition, too, Steve. She can’t stay very long this morning, but she just
lives across the street.”
    “Oh.” Steve’s voice echoed off the back of the cupboard.
    Duck Boy. Duck Boy.
    “I really have to be going now, Aunt Shannon,” Lindsay said smoothly. “Maybe…
ah… I’ll see you tomorrow.”
    “See you then, dear,” Aunt Shannon said in an overly sweet tone. “Aren’t you
going to say goodbye to our guest, Steve?”
    “Bye,” Steve grunted to the back of the cupboard, as Lindsay walked to the
front hall.
    Steve groaned quietly into a group of porcelain figurines in front of his
nose. He heard the girl’s feet thump gently down the short set of stairs, and
the front door open and close.
    Great—a surprise visit from a girl while I look like a
serial killer.
    He backed out of the cupboard doors and headed to the porridge pot on the
stove, catching his own reflection in the pot’s lid. His face ballooned and
twisted in the reflection of the dented chrome lid. The lid seemed to say it
all.
    And porridge is such a drag.
    “You didn’t have to be rude,” Aunt Shannon said when she returned to the
kitchen. “It’s quite impolite to hide from guests.”
    “Well, you could have warned me you planned to have company,” Steve
answered.
    “You always need to be prepared for surprises, Steve.”
    Aunt Shannon crossed the kitchen to peer out a window into the morning’s
frosty face.
    “It’s sunny, but a biting frost in the air,” she muttered. “Too cold for my
old bones.” Her gaze rose from the landscape toward the sky. “Edward, are we
having trouble with our phones again?” she asked.
    “Dunno,” Edward replied from somewhere else in the house.
    “Someone is working on the lines again,” she said thoughtfully. She stood
and mused for a moment, letting the morning sun warm her hands and face.
    While his aunt and uncle talked, Steve had been working his way through each
of the cupboards, looking for a bowl for his porridge.
    “Bowls are in that cupboard, there,” Aunt Shannon said cheerily, with a
finger pointed towards a bottom cupboard next to the fridge. Steve opened it
and found several hundred vinyl records stacked in piles in the same cupboard.
“You’ll find the bowls in behind the Country and Western albums.”
    Records. How retro.
    “All right,” Steve grunted. He reached behind the stack of records—the album
on the top featured a picture of a horse and a woman swinging a lasso. His hand
found a small stack of bowls and pulled one out of the pile.
    “Why are the bowls behind your records?” Steve asked.
    “Because music is more important than food, dear. I can skip breakfast once
in a while, but I simply cannot live without music. Spoons are in the