Five Minutes in Heaven by Lisa Alther Page A

Life Saver after you’d sucked it for a long time. Gazing into the black pupils, Jude felt suddenly dizzy, as though she were spiraling down the funnel of a whirlpool.
    They smiled gravely and patted each other’s shoulders, chanting in unison, “Best friend. Buddy of mine. Pal of pals.”
    After changing from school jeans to play jeans, Jude sat at Molly’s kitchen table, spinning a marble around the lazy Susan, pretending it was a Las Vegas roulette wheel. Molly had been mixing them cocktails from several liquids they both liked to smell—vanilla extract, Pine Sol, cherry cough syrup. But each had tasted worse than the last. Now Molly was telling a story her teacher had read that afternoon about an orphan boy who was raised by wolves and had never learned to speak. He was discovered by hunters and taken to live in a cottage on the edge of the forest.
    Molly and Jude spent the rest of the afternoon prowling through Molly’s house. Their vocabulary consisted of hand gestures and facial expressions. In the bathroom, Jude seized a comb and displayed it to a mystified Molly, who manipulated it in various ways, trying to discover its function.
    â€œWhat are you two up to now?” asked Molly’s aproned mother, lounging in the doorway in her neat blond pageboy, arms folded across her stomach. Startled, the girls stared at her with wide-open eyes.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” She gave a perplexed laugh. They dashed from the bathroom to seek shelter behind the sofa in the knotty pine den, which enclosed them much as the wolves’ lair had.
    Jude was so enchanted with this game that she continued it at supper that night, marveling over the unknown delicacies served her on a round disk by a black creature in a white uniform with a red scarf wound around her head. It was wonderful to be handed food after a lifetime of chasing moles in the forest.
    â€œSo how was your first day of school?” asked a large, pale, hairless one at the head of the gleaming wooden table.
    Jude gazed at him as she ate with a bizarre silver twig, unable to comprehend the howls coming from his mouth.
    â€œWhat’s wrong, baby? Cat got your tongue?”
    The dark one led Jude up some steps to a pool of water and removed her soiled fur. Jude dipped her toe into the pool. The water was hot! She had known only icy forest ponds and streams. She climbed in. How delicious to float in the warm liquid while the friendly black one rubbed a small slippery stone that smelled like dried rose petals across her coat.
    â€œHow you like school, Miss Judith?”
    Jude looked quickly at the dark one, whose mouth was making strange sounds.
    â€œYou ain’t telling, huh?”
    â€œW HAT A NICE DOG ,” said Mrs. Murdoch as she strolled down the aisle and peered at the picture Jude had just drawn. “I think we need to hang this one on our bulletin board up front, Jude.”
    â€œIt’s not a dog,” said Jude, not looking up. “It’s a wolf.” The wolf was sitting in its cave in the forest, sniffing the morning air.
    â€œSpeak up, young lady. I can’t hear you.”
    â€œI said it’s not a dog; it’s a wolf.”
    â€œA wolf? What an idea! Why is it a wolf?”
    â€œâ€™Cause I like wolves. I think they’re nice.” Jude finally looked up. Mrs. Murdoch’s bright red lipstick covered an area much larger than her actual lips, and her eyebrows had been plucked out and redrawn as crooked black arches. She looked like a messy clown.
    Mrs. Murdoch laughed, chin nearly touching her nose. “You may like wolves, young lady, but they are definitely not nice. They are vicious wild animals. Think about the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood for just a moment.”
    Jude said nothing. She was thinking about the boy who got spanked in the cloakroom.
    â€œWell, Jude?” “Yessum.”
    â€œSo you agree that wolves are vicious wild