Read The Children of Hamelin for Free Online

grunted. “Hi... uh... Tom?”
    “Right... Robin. We do remember each other’s names.”
    “Uh huh.”
    I stroked her hair. No effect. Her eyes were just a big as they had been the night before, but now they were just eyes. Something was missing.
    She looked around the room, orienting herself, I guess. Just the bed, an old dresser, a closet and a night-table with a phone, a clock and some odds and ends on it. She didn’t seem terribly impressed.
    I moved to cup her face in my hands, but she kind of pulled away. She kissed my left nipple—a dry, mechanical gesture—then kicked off the covers, rolled away from me.
    “I’m hungry, love,” she said. “Haven’t eaten since... whenever... .”
    And she bolted out of bed, just like that, stood in the clear space at the foot of the bed, obviously looking for something. The same naked body—nice, slim legs, flat belly, sweet ass and all—but somehow it just didn’t seem to add up to what it had the night before. Like something was gone.
    “Uh... where are my clothes?” she asked. “In the other room?”
    “All you had on was a coat and boots.”
    A blank look for a moment. Then an awful, flat “Oh WoW” that suddenly made her seem for an instant like a forty-year-old broad in a young girl’s body.
    I was really out of it. This just wasn’t the same chick. I had so much to ask her and no way to begin.
    So when she left the bedroom, I just got dressed in a bummer kind of daze and made for the bathroom, which was off the kitchen. She was standing there, between the plastic-topped metal table and the refrigerator, peering unhappily inside, still naked. She turned to me, and now she seemed like a pathetically shrewd sixteen-year-old war-waif.
    “Nothing in here but frozen food and a little milk and some jelly and uh... one egg...” she said in a small voice. “And I’m so damn hungry —”
    “Yeah, well we’ll go get some breakfast at Rappaport’s.”
    “Uh... I don’t have any bread right now... could you... er...?” In an awful kind of panhandling voice.
    My turn to say “Oh WoW.” I knew chivalry was dead, but this was too much!
    “What the hell do you think I am?” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ll stuff you silly. Lox and eggs and—”
    “Hey, you are a groovy cat!” she cried, throwing her arms around me, squeezing me briefly, then suddenly flitting past me into the bathroom, leaving me confused and touched and mildly pissed off all at once.
     
    Rappaport’s is a little kosher dairy restaurant half a flight below street-level; only a block further up Second Avenue is Ratner’s, a bigger, fancier place that serves exactly the same incomprehensible food. (Diary is supposed to mean no meat, but you can get fish, which I suppose they consider a vegetable or something.) So for decades, Rappaport’s has had to survive on Ratner’s drop-outs, and they’ve ended up as kind of the Viet Cong of the bagels and lox set. Once I went in there with three other dreadful-looking junkies to buy some pastries from the counter they have at the front of the place, and the old bird who waited on us refused to let us pay for them. As we left nibbling brownies, he was humming the Internationale. He thought we were the Downtrodden Proletariat, dig?
    So I wasn’t uptight about going in there with a girl dressed only in a coat and boots. The people who run the place are weirder than any of the customers.
    The place was pretty empty, so we sat down at one of the tables along the left wall, with the whole width of the medium-sized room between us and the other customers who were all seated along the right wall by the mirror for some reason.
    I forgot the confusion I had carried in with me as I recognized the balding waiter approaching us with two menus—ordering from this cat demanded total concentration.
    “Never mind the menus,” I said. “We know what we want.”
    “He knows what he wants!” the waiter sighed. “Listen, you maybe think you know what you