“No,” I say. “I mean—Baz. Basil didn’t come back.”
“Ah,” she says. “Young Master Pitch. Surely he’ll be back. His mother did so value education.”
“That’s what I said!”
“Well, you know him best,” she says.
“That’s what I said, too!”
Ebb nods and pets the goat. “To think you used to be at each other’s throats.”
“We’re still at each other’s throats.”
She looks up at me doubtfully. She has narrow blue eyes, bright blue—brighter somehow because her face is so dirty.
“Ebb,” I insist, “he tried to kill me.”
“Not successfully.” She shrugs. “Not recently.”
“He’s tried to kill me three times! That I know of! It doesn’t actually matter whether it worked.”
“It matters a bit,” she says. “’Sides, how old was he the first time, eleven? Twelve? That hardly counts.”
“It counts with me,” I say.
“Does it.”
I huff. “Yes. Ebb. It does. He hated me before he even met me.”
“Exactly,” she says.
“Exactly!”
“I’m just saying—been a long time since I had to spell you two apart.”
“Well, there’s no point in throwing down all the time,” I say. “Doesn’t get us anywhere. And it hurts. I suspect we’re saving up.”
“For what?” she asks.
“The end.”
“The end of school?”
“The end of the end,” I say. “The big fight.”
“So you were saving it, and then he didn’t come back for it?”
“Exactly!”
“Well, I wouldn’t lose hope,” Ebb says. “I think he’ll be back. His mother always valued a good education. I miss her this time a’year…”
She wipes her eyes on her sleeve. I sigh. Sometimes, with Ebb, you’re better off just enjoying the silence. And the goats.
***
Three weeks pass. Four, five, six.
I stop looking for Baz anywhere where he’s supposed to be.
