Sheep
Page 9
“Toby? What did I tell you, young man?”
She was eight feet tall from where he stood at the base of the steps. “You mean, about the bike?”
“You know very well what I mean. Did I not say you were not to ride the bicycle until we could get you a helmet? Did you not hear me say that? Toby?” He hated the way her eyebrows pinched together in the middle when she was angry.
Once, when she’d been yelling at him just like this, a bubble of laughter had started up in his belly. Because her eyebrows looked exactly like two fighting caterpillars. He’d tried his hardest to swallow down the bubble, but it tickled right up his throat and jumped out. And then he just couldn’t stop. He laughed so hard he lost his breath and had to roll on the floor clutching his stomach. Which only made things worse. So now he had to not think about caterpillars, which only made him think about caterpillars.
“Yeah,” he said.
Her face came down over him, pinched and white-looking. “Pardon me?”
“I mean yes. Yes, Mother. I heard you.”
“Oh, Toby,” she said, sighing her sad sigh. She frowned at him for a while without saying anything at all, her arms crossed. Then she gathered her robe around her legs and sat down on the top step, where her face was even with his. “Don’t you get it, honey?” she said. “You’ve got to take better care of yourself. I can’t be watching you all the time.”
“I do take good care of myself.”
“You didn’t take the cell phone.”
“I forgot.”
“What about sunscreen? Did you at least put on sunscreen?”
Toby lied to his mother sometimes, more and more lately. It was the only way he could get her to leave him alone. But it always made him feel bad. Only weenies and bad people told lies, or so he thought before he began to tell them.
“Yup,” he said, and swallowed hard.
“The number thirty?”
“Uh huh.”
“All over?”
“All over.”
One of her caterpillar eyebrows arched its back. “Then you must have sweated it all off because I can’t smell it.”
This was when he could have said, “Right! I sweated it off,” or told her it was the unscented stuff. But the best liars knew when to keep their mouths shut. And they looked their mothers straight in the eye without flinching. Trouble was, their mothers didn’t flinch either.
It seemed like forever before his mother finally stood up and said, “Come on inside. I’m making crepes.”
The kitchen wasn’t much of a kitchen. It didn’t have a real stove for one thing. But he’d watched his mother make a ham and cheese omelet over a campfire once and knew she could cook anything, even on the little stove thing, which was just two burners that got plugged into the wall.
Butter sizzled in the frying pan. His mother tipped in the crepe batter so that it covered the bottom of the pan like a thin sheet of plastic. “Daddy called,” she said. “He might not be able to make it tomorrow.”
“Again?” Toby’s father was supposed to drive up on Friday nights and stay the weekend. That was the plan. His father would come and they would do stuff, hike, go out on the lake. Toby would learn how to fish. But in the three weeks he and his mother had stayed in the cabin, his father had come only once. He was “knocked out,” he’d said, and slept in the hammock all Saturday afternoon. Toby’s mother stuck tiny tomato plants into a patch of dug-up ground. Then she got up, dusted off her knees, and went inside to practice her cello. Toby sat on the porch reading Holes to the somber drone of Mozart. He would have been out riding the bike, but his father had forgotten to bring him a helmet. He felt like a prisoner, like Stanley Yelnats at Camp Green Lake.
Except that there really was a lake, and it was green. Sort of furry along the sides. Algae, his father said it was. Bacteria, his mother said. And that was the end of any ideas about swimming.
Toby smeared his crepe with strawberry jam, ate a couple of bites. Then a couple more because it was easier to chew and swallow than listen to a lecture.
“Don’t forget your pills,” his mother said, like she always said. A zillion tablets and capsules and vitamins. Red ones, green ones, yellow ones, round ones, ones too big to swallow that had to be chopped in half, capsules with powder inside or oily liquid, big ugly brown pills that smelled like barf. One half cup. It said so right there on the plastic measuring cup his mother put them in. “We don’t need you to get sick.”
I’m already sick, he could have said, but didn’t. It wasn’t something they talked about. It was something they did. He and his mother and his father, the way other families got ready for Disneyland or Hawaii, only different. No laughing or looking forward to. There really wasn’t any way to get ready for being sick. You just did it. Packed your clothes and books, your laptop. Tried not to think about the surgery and all the chemo that would come after. Three months at Children’s Hospital, where other kids like him got better or worse or just disappeared, their beds made up as if they’d never been there. Toby didn’t want to think about his time there now that it was over.
Only it wasn’t. On the third morning after they’d settled into the cabin, Toby had felt it again. It was in the same spot on his right side, a slippery marble. He’d jumped out of bed and hurried into his clothes, covering it up.
His mom had been standing at the little kitchen sink sipping her coffee. There were purple shadows under her eyes. “Sleep all right, honey?”
“Sure.”
She looked out the window. “It’s going to be hot today. Did you pack your trunks?”
“My trunks?” Was he hearing right? The lake was off-limits, wasn’t it?
“I thought you could help me for a while in the garden,” she said. “Then we could … Oh, I don’t know …” Her smile was lopsided, as if she was out of practice. “Run through the sprinkler to cool off! Or are you too old for that?”
“I’m eleven, Mom,” he said. “Jeez!” Run through the sprinkler? Was she nuts? And anyway, he did have his trunks. He just couldn’t wear them. Or she would see. Her eagle eyes would go straight to the marble and he would be back at Children’s Hospital in no time flat. She would call an ambulance. Or get a helicopter. Only he wasn’t going to do all that again. He wasn’t going to puke up his guts over and over while his mother held his head. He wasn’t going to miss school and lose what few friends he had left. He wasn’t going to make new friends with kids who disappeared. It would be the biggest lie he’d ever told, and he would tell it over and over again whenever she asked him how he was, no matter how bad it made him feel.
“Fine,” he’d tell her. “I’m fine.”
An Imprint of Macmillan
SHEEP. Copyright © 2006 by Valerie Hobbs. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America by
R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Harrisonburg, Virginia.
For information, address Square Fish, 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, NY 10010.
Square Fish and the Square Fish logo are trademarks of Macmillan and are used by Farrar Straus Giroux under license from Macmillan.
mackids.com
Square Fish logo designed by Filomena Tuosto
Designed by Robbin Gourley
eISBN 9781466817470
First eBook Edition : April 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hobbs, Valerie.
Sheep / Valerie Hobbs. p. cm.
Summary: After a fire destroys the farm where he was born, a young border collie acquires a series of owners and learns about life as he seeks a home and longs to fulfill his life’s purpose of shepherding sheep.
ISBN 978-0-312-56116-1
1. Border collie—Juvenile fiction. [1. Border collie—Fiction. 2. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 3. Dogs—Fiction. 4. Sheep—Fiction.] Title.
PZ10.3.H6463She 2006
[Fic]—dc22
2005046356
First published in the United Stat
es by Farrar Straus Giroux
First Square Fish Edition: April 2009