“Look!” I say to Pablo.
He chuckles. “I knew I saw it!”
“This isn’t a mini-mall, though.”
“It’s the size of one.”
We walk up and stare at the glowing red sign. Fido barks.
“I remember we stopped here to use the bathrooms,” Pablo says. “Bianca had to go.”
“Whoever heard of a pet store at a truck stop?” I ask.
I look back at Mom. She’s standing by the car, pumping the gas, but she’s looking at us. And smiling ear to ear. She sees the sign, too.
“Go on in!” she calls. “I’ll catch up!”
Fido tugs us toward the doors. Maybe she wasn’t whining because she had to go out. Maybe she knew we were close. Maybe she heard other guinea pigs.
Or guinea dogs.
20. Truckers must get lonely on the wide-open road.
Driving those big rigs day after day, night after night. All alone.
The store is like a mall for truck drivers. Not only does it have shower rooms and laundry facilities, it has a game room, a food court, a gift shop, an electronics store … and one tiny pet shop. Fido led us right to it. There’s another red neon sign hanging in its window.
I almost can’t believe I’m reading it correctly. Dad searched after Petopia disappeared, and said there wasn’t a pet store with that name anywhere in our whole state. And here one is, in our state, just a few miles from where we’re camping, in fact. I feel an eerie chill at the back of my neck.
“I don’t see any fish,” Pablo says disappointedly. “But I doubt it would be a good idea for a trucker to keep an aquarium in his rig.”
“I guess a snake would work better,” I say, pointing at a fat boa constrictor that’s hugging a branch in a terrarium.
Fido tries frantically to crawl up my pant leg, but I’m wearing shorts, so instead she crawls up my skin. Which really hurts.
“Ow!” I howl, and pry her off my leg. Just as I suspected: blood. Not enough to call 911, but still …
“She doesn’t like snakes?” Pablo asks.
“Apparently not.” I scowl at Fido, who has scurried up my shirt and now sits trembling on my shoulder. This is not exactly dog behavior.
A bird squawks. It’s a blue and orange parrot resting on a perch in a cage in the corner.
“That might be a good pet for a trucker,” I say. “Someone to talk to who might actually talk back.”
We walk over. It has a white face with zebra stripes around its eyes.
“You think it talks?” Pablo asks.
The bird squawks again. Its tongue is gray.
“Doesn’t seem to,” I say.
It squawks again. This time it sounds like “No more!”
“You fellas teasing that macaw?” a deep voice asks.
It’s a man wearing a bright red shirt and a name tag that says the name of the gas station and, under it, in capital letters, the word VERNE. I guess it’s his name. He has gray whiskers along his jaw that turn into a beard at his chin and so many tattoos I can’t make out what any of them are. His eyes are beady enough to be a little scary.
“Aw, I’m just kidding you,” he says, then smiles. His eyes soften. “That’s Captain Nemo. He’s over thirty years old. And plenty smart. Aren’t you, Nemo?”
“NEE-mo!” the bird says in its squawky voice.
So not “No more”—“Nemo.”
“Like in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” Pablo says.
“That’s right!” Verne says. “You’re plenty smart, too, boy. Have you read that book?”
“I’m reading it now, actually. Almost finished.”
“That was my old man’s favorite book. He named me after the author.” He taps his name tag. Even his fingers have tattoos. “Verne. After …”
“… Jules Verne,” Pablo says. He smiles.
Verne smiles.
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do.
“I’m afraid he’s not for sale,” Verne finally says. “On account of he’s mine, I mean. I don’t like leaving Nemo at home all day.”
“NEE-mo!” the bird says.
“Maybe you want a friend for your little pal there,” Verne says, sticking a finger out to Fido. Fido licks it. “He’s a friendly little fella.”
“She’s female,” Pablo says.
“Well, I’m not sure you’ll want a male, then,” Verne says with a laugh. “You’d have guinea pigs all over the place if you did that.”
Hmm. That could solve some problems for me.…
“I think we do have a guinea pig around here somewhere,” Verne says. “Over here … yeah, here it is!”
He leads us to a terrarium. There are fake plants and rocks and a little fake cave inside it, all beside a little pool of water. You’d think the terrarium would be for turtles, but inside there’s a guinea pig, soaking in the water.
Verne laughs. “He’s always in the water like that. Really likes being wet. Funny little fella. Does yours like being wet?”
“Actually, she does,” I say.
“Rufus!” my mom says, rushing up to us. “My goodness, what a big place! Whew! I’m out of breath. Hello, there”—she peeks at Verne’s name tag—“Verne.” She eyes his tattoos.
“These must be your boys,” Verne says. “They sure are polite.”
“Well, this one’s mine,” Mom says, setting her hand on my head. I can’t wait to grow taller. “This is his friend.” She sets her hand on Pablo’s shoulder.
“I see,” says Verne. “Best buddies, then.”
Pablo and I shrug. How embarrassing.
“So this is it,” Mom says, looking around. “Petopia. It’s smaller than the other one. Strange that it’s in a truck stop.…”
“NEE-mo!” Captain Nemo squawks.
“That’s my macaw,” Verne says. “He’s not for sale. The boys were looking at that guinea pig right there. The soggy one.”
She leans in and looks at it. She smiles.
Here we go again.
21. Why does Mom think a guinea pig is the answer to everything?
We drive back to the campground with two of them, Fido and the soggy one from the terrarium. Pablo holds the new one in his lap on a beach towel Mom found in the trunk. It’s a chocolate brown guinea pig with tan fur under its very whiskery chin and on its belly. Its paws are nearly black. It’s been making this tiny growly, huffing sound since we left the truck stop, though every once in a while it peeps like a finch.
Fido spends the trip in my lap as well, growling at the new animal.
“I’m going to name it Snapper, after the snapping alligator turtle Dmitri lied about,” Pablo says. “Snapper kind of acted like a turtle, you know, lying in that water.”
“Isn’t a snapper a fish?” I ask.
“That makes it even better!”
He’s acting as though the guinea pig is his when I was under the impression we’d gotten it for Murphy. I mean, what if it’s a guinea dog? If it is, it’s Murphy’s. Period. Sure, then he’d own both a guinea dog and the world’s most perfect dog, which hardly seems fair, but Murph deserves it.
“Do you know how to tell a guinea pig’s sex?” Pablo asks me.
“No. But Lurena does.”
“Right. The rodent expert.”
Lurena will probably want the new guinea pig, too, but I don’t consider her a candidate. She got Fido’s pup. Plus, she already has a chinchilla and a hamster. She’s got plenty of rodents. She doesn’t get this one.
“So you want to hide Snapper from Dmitri, right?” Pablo asks.
Ack! This is getting as complicated as it was when Queen Girly was born. I don’t want the responsibility again of having to decide who gets the new guinea creature. Technically, since it was my mom who purchased the animal, it belongs to our family, but that doesn’t make it my responsibility, does it? Why shouldn’t Mom have to choose who gets it?
“It’s probably a good idea,” I say to Pablo. “Dmitri’s going to be all over it, and wh
en he wants something, he doesn’t give up till he gets it.”
“He didn’t get Queen Girly. How did you get him to give up? What did you do?”
Remembering what I did makes me feel better. Less nervous.
“I said no,” I say.
Pablo smiles. “So do that again.”
I smile back. “You know what? I will.”
Dad walks over to the car the second we drive up to the campsite. He pokes his head through the passenger-side window of the car.
“So where did you go?” he asks.
Fido barks. Dad looks into the backseat. His face falls. His shoulders, too.
“You bought another guinea pig,” he says to Mom. “How on earth … where on earth … why on earth?”
“We found a Petopia outlet,” Mom says in a chipper voice. “In a truck stop. Isn’t that incredible!”
Dad looks stunned, confused, frustrated, and angry. Too stunned, confused, frustrated, and angry to find any words to yell, which, for Dad, is pretty darned stunned, confused, frustrated, and angry.
So Mom gets out of the car and walks around to his side. She takes his arm. “Have you started marinating vegetables for dinner yet?”
“N–no,” he says. “I haven’t had … Now listen, Raquel …”
“You’d better get started, then,” she says, and starts leading him away.
“Your mom’s good,” Pablo says.
My mom’s a lot of things. Embarrassing. Inconsiderate. Pushy. Way too chipper. Clueless. But, yeah, Pablo’s right: she’s not bad. I’m particularly happy that she didn’t say the guinea pig was Pablo’s.
I nod. “Let’s get out of here while we can.”
“Where to?”
“I want to avoid Dad, Dmitri, and Lurena.”
“Should we go to my RV?” Pablo asks.
If we do, it will seem as if it’s his guinea pig even more than it already does.
“No, let’s find Murph.”
22. “Cowamundi!”
This is Dmitri saying Coatimundi! wrong again as he jumps off the rope swing. Murph is in the water.
“What do we do?” Pablo asks, cradling the squirming, growling guinea pig that we’ve wrapped inside the beach towel. The poor thing doesn’t seem to like being wrapped in a beach towel, but then what guinea pig would?
“We have to get rid of Dmitri,” I say.
“How?”
“You stay here behind this tree, out of sight. I’ll call you when he’s gone.”
“What are you going to do?” Pablo asks.
“I don’t know. Maybe a brilliant idea will come to me as I’m walking over there. You just keep the guinea pig hidden. Don’t let it get away. I’ll take Fido with me so she won’t give you away.”
Fido has growled and snarled and barked at the new guinea pig since we bought it. That’s how she usually treats rodents: China C., Sharmet … Not Queen Girly, of course.
“Okay, but hurry,” Pablo says. “He’s sick of being wrapped up in this towel.”
“I know,” I say. I know I need to hurry. Pressure isn’t going to help me think of a way to get rid of Dmitri.
Here are the ideas I come up with on the way over:
• I could tell him his dad has a new, expensive gadget for him.
• I could tell him I saw a wild guinea dog running through some bushes very, very far from here.
• I could tie him up with the rope swing.
• I could wait till it’s his turn to jump, then, when he’s underwater, grab Murph and tell him I have a surprise for him.
I decide the last one is best, though tying Dmitri up with the rope is tempting.
Unfortunately, he always lets Murph go on the swing first, then follows right after him, then climbs out of the water with him. The guy is like Murphy’s shadow.
“Roof!” Murph yells from the water when he sees me.
Dmitri grumbles under his breath.
Fido runs up to Buddy and Mars, and they start tearing around in circles, Fido nipping at the bigger dogs’ heels.
“Where you been?” Murph asks, swimming toward the shore. “I was looking everywhere for you. You were gone an eon.”
“I was with Pablo.”
“Oh, with Pablo,” Dmitri says. “Guess Doofus has a new best buddy.”
The rope idea gets more attractive all the time.
“Come on, Roof,” Murph says. “Dive in with us.”
“Uh …” I start to glance over to where Pablo is hiding but stop myself. I don’t want Murph or especially Dmitri to catch me. “Okay.”
I pull off my T-shirt (technically, it’s Pablo’s shirt) and walk over to the rope. It’s nice and strong. With a few good knots and Pablo’s T-shirt for a gag, Dmitri would be out of commission for quite some time.…
Dmitri steps out of the water, stomps over to me, and snatches the rope out of my hand.
“Murph first!” he yells in my face, so loud I taste his lunch. Yuck.
“That’s not necessary,” Murph says. “Roof can go ahead of me.”
Dmitri snorts like a bull. “No, you go, Murph. Then me. Then Rufus.”
“I wouldn’t think of it,” Murph says, going into his proper-English-gentleman routine again. “After you, Rufus, my good man.”
I get an idea.
“After you, Dmitri, my …” I can’t say “my good man” to Dmitri. It’s not possible. I consider saying the opposite, but instead finish my sentence by adding, “my, isn’t it a beautiful day?” I try doing it with a British accent but come nowhere close.
Dmitri glares at me, then turns to Murph, who gives him a gentlemanly bow.
“Oh, all right!” Dmitri grunts, then runs backward with the rope in his hands. “Watch this, Murph—a backflip with a half turn!”
He leaps up, wraps his legs around the rope, then swings out over the water, where he releases the rope and does a feeble half backflip, without a turn. The second he hits the water, I grab Murphy and start dragging him away.
“Hey, now!” he says. “What’s all this, then?”
“I have to show you something. Come on. I don’t want Dmitri to see.”
“What is it, pray tell?” he asks, putting up a mild fight. “What the dickens has gotten into you, man?”
“Knock it off, Sherlock, and come on. Look, Dmitri sees us.”
Dmitri is slogging through the water to the shore, bellowing, “Hey! What’s up? Where you guys going?”
I answer, “Your dad got a new … uh …” That’s no good. I’m stuck. I can never come up with stories on the spot.
Murphy, on the other hand …
“Jeepers! Your father’s kayak has overturned!” he says, pointing out at the lake. “See it? Oh, drat! It’s sunk! I do hope he’s all right!”
This would be a lot easier to sell without Jeepers! and drat!
Dmitri squints out to where Murph is pointing. “I don’t see him.”
“What’s all the excitement about?” Lurena asks, walking up behind us with her cages.
Pablo is standing beside her. The beach towel is slung around his neck. I give him a fierce where-is-it? look. He points with his eyes at one of Lurena’s cages. Sure enough, the new guinea pig is in one with Queen Girly, huffing and growling. China C. and Sharmet are sharing the other.
Fido runs over and starts growling and barking angrily at the new rodent through the bars. She doesn’t like it being in there with her daughter.
“Quiet, Fido!” I say. “Sit!”
She sits and stops barking, but she continues to growl.
Fido has noticed there’s a spare rodent in her daughter’s cage, but neither Murphy nor Dmitri has.
“Wait! There’s my dad!” Dmitri says, pointing to camp.
His dad is by the fire, chatting with my dad, who is marinating his vegetables.
“My bad,” says Murph. “Must have been someone else tumbling out of a kayak.” He claps his hands together. “Looks like dinnertime. Let’s eat!”
“Yes, I
hear we’re having vegetable shish kebabs tonight,” I say. Oh, joy.
The trick during dinner will be keeping Dad from mentioning the new rodent.
23. Most fireflies fly higher than guinea dogs.
Fido ran around the campground, snapping at them, then gagging on the few she caught and coughing them back out.
While this went on, we ate dinner. Once again, Murph saved me from my dad’s insane idea of camp cuisine, this time with good old-fashioned cheeseburgers. I was able somehow to keep Dmitri away from Dad’s big mouth, mostly because Dad was too busy talking about his precious shish kebabs to notice us.
I’ve been trying to concoct some scheme to get Dmitri out of the way so I can tell Murphy about the guinea pig. The quicker I give it to Murphy, the better. Dad can’t be angry that we bought one for Murph. Dmitri will get angry at me for giving it to Murph, but he can’t make much of a fuss about it. That would look like he doesn’t want Murph to get the guinea pig, and he wouldn’t want that.
Will Pablo be upset? Maybe, but he’s got his fish, right? And he lives far away, right? So I don’t have to worry about him being mad for long, right?
This will all work out beautifully, if only I can ditch Dmitri.
“So you’ve never been swimming?” he asks Pablo with a strong hint of mockery.
“My parents say I tried it when I was little, but I hated it.”
“And his parents don’t swim,” I add, trying to bail him out. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t swim. If they never learned, they couldn’t teach him. Of course, they could have gotten him lessons.…
“Why didn’t you take swimming lessons?” Dmitri asks.
It sort of scares me when we think alike.
“They say I would always throw a really big fit—a total meltdown, yelling and screaming—every time they put me in the water. So they stopped trying.”
“Then why the heck do they take you to a lake for your vacation?” Dmitri asks.
Pablo shrugs. “We actually live by a lake. Lake Black Gut. So there’s nothing weird about it to us. We like being near water. Not everybody who goes to a lake swims in it.”
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