The Wild Things - By Dave Eggers Page 0,3

knock her flat.

“Anyone here?” he asked, hoping only for his sister. Gary, his mom’s boyfriend with a chin as soft as cake, sometimes came over early after work and napped on the couch. He stained any room he spilled himself into.

“Claire?”

Max looked in the kitchen, the living room, the basement. No sign of Claire. He walked upstairs and finally heard her.

“I didn’t show him. That’s the point,” she was saying.

She was on the phone when Max entered her room, the first words of his story about to leave his mouth. Before he could begin, though, she fixed him with a look of great venom. He tiptoed out quickly.

“But why would she say that? She’s totally lying!”

He waited outside her door. When she was finished, he’d tell her all about Mrs. Mahoney, his triumph, and together they’d plan some kind of prank on the loony lady.

But then again, why wait? Max knew Claire would want to hear this right away, and would thank him — for saving her from that troublesome conversation and delivering her into a much better one — just as soon as she heard Max’s tale. He walked back into her room and—

“Get out, goddammit!” she screamed.

He stood for a moment, so shocked he couldn’t move or speak. This wasn’t at all the way he’d pictured things happening.

“Get out!” she screamed again, twice as loud as before, and kicked the door closed in his face.

His rage was fathomless, and was directed, with all its awesome power, at Claire. What had he done? He’d walked into her room. He’d wanted to talk to her. It wasn’t right or fair for her to treat him like she did, and she knew it.

And now she was going to pay the price.

There was still enough snow for effective construction, so he decided to carve a fort, state of the art, out of the snowbank across the street. And when her friends showed up, Max would be ready, and all would be avenged. It would be ugly, but she’d asked for it.

He put on his snow clothes and ran across the street. Using his mom’s gardening trowel, he dug and dug into the snowmass, soon finishing the main inner chamber. It was big enough to fit him and maybe one other person his size, and with a roof high enough that he could sit up inside. With the trowel, he carved a long deep shelf in the inner wall of the cave, to hold snowballs and maybe food or books. If he could get an extension cord long and sturdy enough, he figured, he could set up a TV. But that would have to wait until later.

Into the wall facing his house he dug a narrow peephole. Now he had a perfect view of the driveway and the front door of his house. He would be ready when Claire’s friends showed up and did their usual thing of standing in the driveway, talking and pretending to know how to chew tobacco and then spitting and drooling the brown juice into the grey snow.

Max looked at his watch, noting that it was 4:15, which meant that he probably had another fifteen minutes before they arrived. Claire’s friends showed up — when they did show up, because sometimes they didn’t, though they said they would — at 4:30 or so every day, because one of the boys who always came, bed-headed and called Finn, had to do after-school detention every day of the year. Who would pick a guy like that up from detention just to enjoy his company? Claire and her idiot friends. They all waited at school for the fumbler named Finn, then came to Max’s house for some reason.

Max used the time to amass a vast arsenal. The snow was a perfect texture, just wet enough to be sticky. All he needed to do was grab a handful and it was already a snowball — snowballs that almost made themselves. Each one he would pack tight from all sides, smooth over, pack again, smooth over again, and then put on the shelf. In ten minutes he had packed thirty-one snowballs and had run out of room on his shelf.

So he built another shelf.

With the remaining five minutes, Max decided he needed a flag on top of his fort, so he left the cave and stood and searched around the surrounding woods for a stick, and found one about four feet tall and as straight as a flagpole. He stuck it into the