The Kneebone Boy by Ellen Potter

on that bed, gazing up at her, was a young woman. She was dressed in a white T-shirt and black sweatpants, and she held a paperback book in her hands while a package of chocolate biscuits lay in her lap. Her hair was blond and cut very short, like a boy’s, and she was slim and slight and narrow-hipped. In fact, if you were nearsighted, you could easily have mistaken her for a self-possessed fourteen-year-old boy.
    “How did I get inside?” Lucia asked, looking around dazedly.
    “Through the window, of course.” The young woman nodded her small round chin toward a pair of curtains across from the bed. They were made of a heavy grey fabric. The sort of fabric that, on dark murky nights, probablylooked an awful lot like a solid block of stone wall. “Good thing it was open.”
    It was at this point that Lucia began to feel awkward. It’s one thing to ride a bike through someone’s window and helplessly dangle from their ceiling. But it’s quite another thing to have that somebody stare up at you nonchalantly, while eating chocolate biscuits in their bed, as though you were a funny circus act. In fact, the woman appeared to be waiting for Lucia’s next trick.
    “You might help me to get down,” Lucia said with annoyance.
    “You don’t need any help. Just jump,” the woman said. “You’ll land on the bed, unless you’re a total klutz.”
    Now Lucia began to suspect three things: one, that the woman was not British. She had a funny, nasally way of talking, which Lucia guessed was an American accent; two, that the woman probably had ridden on the bike herself more than once; and three, that Lucia had better jump onto the bed immediately or she would look like a yellow-bellied coward.
    So she jumped and landed pretty squarely in the center of the bed. The woman must have known that’s where she’d land, because she’d already bent her knees and pulled her legs back while protectively holding the package of biscuits up in one hand.
    “Well done,” the woman said. “Have an Oreo,” and she offered Lucia a chocolate biscuit. That seemed too much like a treat offered to a circus monkey, so Lucia declined, nostrils flared, then scooted off the bed.
    “You’re very uppity for someone who just broke into my home,” the woman said, taking a bite out of the Oreo that Lucia had refused.
    “I didn’t break in. We tried to get in the normal way but your bridge was up and we yelled and yelled—”
    “Oh, are there more of you?” The woman sat up a little straighter in bed as though the situation was getting more interesting by the minute. The fact that she was so unruffled by all this ruffled Lucia even more and she forgot to ask the most obvious question, which you are probably already asking in your own head.
    “There are three of us. Otto and Max are standing on the other side of the moat, waiting for me to let them in—”
    “Is that how you operate? One breaks in and then lets in the others? Clever. I’m guessing that one of your brothers is a big ugly bruiser who will smash me on the head with a shovel, while the other one, the rat-faced one with waxy ears, will rifle through all my stuff, looking for the valuables.”
    Lucia could only stare at this odd woman in confusion until she finally gathered up her wits to object: “They don’t have waxy ears or shovels or anything like that. They’re nice looking, for your information.”
    “Well, they would be. Your dad was good looking, as I remember. And your mom was always—” The woman stopped here. Suddenly, she looked a little uncomfortable. “Your mom was a peach.”
    Now Lucia thought of the question that she should have asked a few minutes ago, and the one that you havealready asked in your head: “You aren’t Great-aunt Haddie, are you?”
    “I am,” the woman replied.
    “But you’re too young,” Lucia said.
    “How good are you at math?”
    “Pretty good,” Lucia said. In fact she was appallingly bad at math.
    “Your