Today, I go to see Clementine. She lives with the storekeeper and is the slave to his daughter who is our age. The daughter is ugly, I think. She's chubby and got a fat pink face and her stringy blond hair is always hanging straight in her face down to her shoulders, with her bangs cut straight across her forehead and a big pink bow tying the back up. She also wears these gross puffy pink and white dresses.

Clementine is pretty, though. She's tall and thin, and even though she wears only raggy, bag-like dresses, I like her. She has smooth, dark skin, darker than mine by a bunch of shades, almost the color that Mama's was. Her hair is curly and fluffy and black, unlike mine. I guess I got Oliver's reddish hair put into me, and it's straight, too. Oliver's brothers, across the ocean have red hair, he says.

I picked her a flower on the way down, and I even saved her some of my old shoes from the attic. She's doing laundry with her mama but she runs over to me when I come up.

"Alphonse! How did you get away from your Master?" she asks me.

"I don't have one." I said. She looked at me confused. "I live with my dad and my brother, just outside of town."

"Are you one of those Kirkland boys?" she asks me, suddenly.

"Uh, yeah?" I say, confused.

"My mama says to stay away from them, especially their daddy." she says.

"I'm not so bad!" I tell her, smiling. I don't know why people think we should be stayed away from. We're good kids, and Oliver is so nice!


"Ollie!" I call out, and he's in the kitchen, chopping meat. He stops and turns towards me as I run up.

"What is it, love?" he asks me, turning with the blood from the animal still dripping off his knife.

"I went to go see Clementine, and she says that people are supposed to stay away from me and you and Jamie. Why's that?"

His eyes sort of darken and his face blanks all expression for a moment, and then he smiles at me and hands me a smaller version of his knife. I climb up onto a stool he had made for us boys to help him cook with and start cutting the fat off of the chunks of meat he gives me. The whole time I'm doing this I'm watching Oliver who's cutting the meat I hand back to him into little bits. Mincing, I think he told me that's called. We're probably having cottage pie tonight for supper. Yum. Ollie makes the best cottage pies. It's a meat pie with a potato mash all over it and baked in the oven. Finally, Oliver speaks, telling me why people think they should stay away from us.

"There are people who spread nasty rumors about me." he says, not looking up from the meat. "They say I'm a murderer, who kidnaps and kills children for my own gain."

He doesn't say anything else, so I keep cutting the white fat off of the meat chunks and handing them to him. Soon, I stop and look at him, busily chopping up the meat into little bits.

"Are you a murderer?" I ask, just because I'm curious. He stops dead and looks at me with a burning intensity in his eyes. I step back a little on my step-stool.

"Little boys should not ask such questions, don't you think, Alphonse?" he says, really calm, even though everything on his face says he's mad. Shaking a little, I nod and say really quietly,

"Yes, Ollie..."

Then we go back to preparing supper and he doesn't mention it ever again.