Page 55 of The Life and (Medieval) Times of Kit Sweetly

“Awake, alive, and telling me I should take his place as the Red Knight.”

“Glad to hear it,” says Jett. I can practically hear him grinning. “Can I come get you? My mom is making fancy grilled cheese.”

The bus pulls up as he says it, but it’s already crowded. It belches stinky smoke, and somehow the thought of riding the bus to my empty house, with its cooler full of melting ice and disgusting food, is just too much for me right now.

“I could eat grilled cheese.”

“Be there soon,” says Jett.

He pulls up in his mom’s minivan fifteen minutes later and honks twice, and I open the passenger door. “Thanks for the ride,” I say, pulling the door closed behind me. “Nice wheels.”

“Dad’s taking the bike out, so I got stuck with the van again.”

“Well, I appreciate the chance not to barf on your bike. Again.”

A pained look crosses his face. “You have a terrible sense of humor,” he says, and smiles. “You know that, right?”

“That’s what friends are for.” I laugh.

Which is apparently our new motto, and a great big fat lie.

JETT’S MOM LOOKS NOTHING LIKE MINE. WHEREAS MY MOM looks tired and crumpled, like a tissue that’s been used up and thrown away, Jett’s mom is still glamorous. She was a model before she went to college, and she’s tall and thin, and her hair always looks like she’s just come from a Brazilian blowout. Even when she’s wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and a cardigan with holes in the elbows.

She sits at their kitchen counter, a cup of tea in one hand and a book in the other.

“Hello, Kit,” she says as I walk in. She puts her book down and comes over to kiss me on both my cheeks, which makes her that much more glamorous and European. “I hope you are hungry.” She gestures to a plate piled high with grilled cheeses. White cheese flecked with herbs and peppers oozes out of them.

My stomach rumbles, reminding me I’ve not had more than coffee and cold pancakes today.

Jett takes my backpack and puts it on the living room couch.

“Be right back,” he says, taking the stairs two at a time. From upstairs there’s the thump of a kid jumping out of a bunk bed and then a bunch of feet pounding around.

Jett’s mom glances upstairs and smiles. She looks just like Jett when she does that. “‘Let’s have lots of kids,’ I said to my husband. ‘I want a houseful of naughty boys.’”

“Be careful what you wish for?” I say, smiling back.

“Always,” she says. “Come here. I want you to see this.”

I sit down next to her and she pushes the book she’s reading toward me. It’s as large as a coffee-table book and ragged at the edges. Pieces of paper are shoved into it, and they stick out of the top, bottom, and side. I open it and run my fingers over the handwritten Russian words. Kids in red and blue bell-shaped coats, Easter eggs, farm animals, and many other drawings cover the pages.

“What is this?”

“It’s a book of stories,” says Jett’s mom. She pushes her glasses up her nose and runs her hand over a page, caressing it lovingly. “In Russia, when I was growing up, there were not very many books. My mother would take me to the booksellers near Gorky Park. We would read what was there and then pass them on; but there were more kids who wanted to read than there were books. So we would share. My mother, like so many others, would copy stories into books like this. We’d pass these books around and draw pictures in them. This one came to me via a friend in Europe. Her mother gave it to her. I’m going to document it as part of a larger project I’m working on.”

“It’s so pretty.” I turn another page. “What’s this story about?”

“That is a fairy tale, about two children who find a house made of plums—”

“‘Hansel and Gretel’?”

“Something like that,” says Jett’s mom. She reads a few lines in Russian, the words lilting off her tongue. When she stops, I turn another page.

“Is it hard to be away from your family?” I say as I look at all the handwritten stories and pictures.

Jett doesn’t talk about the Russian side of his family. All I know is his mother went to Australia on a student visa and met his dad there, and they moved to America before Jett was born.

“There are not many of them left,” she says, wrapping both hands around her cup of tea. “My mother died when I was your age, and my father passed away when I was a university student.”