Dead Possums Are Fair Game

by Taryn Souders

  I stuffed in a couple more mouthfuls of mac and cheese. Half the meatloaf was still on my plate. I figured Chewy could handle what was left in a single swallow. The question was how to get such a large bite to him without being caught. Desperate times called for desperate measures. I knocked my water glass over, sending a pool of liquid across the table toward Mom.

  “Oops!” I grabbed my glass and stood it upright.

  “It’s okay. I’ll grab a towel.” Mom pushed her chair back and went to the kitchen. Dad mopped up water as best he could with his napkin. I looked at Aunt Willa. She dropped her napkin again. Poor thing.

  I quickly grabbed the remaining chunk of meatloaf and shoved it under the table. With a slurp and a lick, it was gone. Chewy’s soft tongue cleaned every drop of ketchupy sauce off my hand.

  Mom came back from the kitchen with the towel.

  “Thanks, Mom. I guess I’m not used to this cast yet.” I took the towel from her and cleaned up the remaining water. “I’m going to grab something to drink.”

  Aunt Willa pushed back her chair. “I’ll come with you. I need some more, too.”

  She followed me to the kitchen. “I’ve always referred to your mom’s meatloaf as ‘the mystery meatbrick’!” she whispered over my shoulder as I turned on the faucet.

  I busted out laughing. “That’s perfect! That’s what I’m going to call it from now on.”

  “Of all the foods I miss when I travel, meatloaf never makes the list. I just didn’t want to tell your mom. She and your dad are so fond of it.”

  So was Chewy, apparently.

  “And now we get to have it every Sunday night,” I muttered. “Yippee.”

  “Well, at least Chewy liked it.”

  I winced. “You saw me?”

  “Saw you? I was talking about me.”

  My mouth dropped open. “You fed yours to Chewy, too?”

  She giggled and nodded. “Why do you think I kept dropping my napkin?”

  “Oh man. I thought only kids snuck food to dogs under the table.”

  “Well, maybe I’m a kid at heart.” She winked and walked back to the dining room.

  I smiled and shook my head. We weren’t having girl talk exactly, but she was my partner in crime when it came to getting rid of meatloaf, and that was worth something. I was going to have to give Aunt Willa another chance.

  Later that night, I draped my favorite pair of jeans over my desk chair for school the next morning and went to Mom to have her wrap my arm in a plastic bag so I could take a shower. The doctor had said the cast couldn’t get wet for the next six weeks. I came back thirty minutes later with a towel wrapped around my head and another around my body.

  Chewy stood on my mattress with his jaws clamped down on my jeans, growling and whipping his head side to side.

  “No, Chewy!” I held my towel in place with my cast and grabbed a book from my desk with the other hand. I whacked the book several times on the desk, hoping it would startle him into dropping the pants. “Let go!”

  He struck a playful pose. I grabbed at the jeans and yanked. “I’m not playing with you, you dumb dog. Let go of them!”

  Aunt Willa rushed into the room. “Chewy! Drop it!”

  Chewy sat and lowered his head, dropping my jeans. But before I could yank them away, he made a hacking sound and up came two helpings of meatloaf.

  I felt my eyes widen in horror as I backed into Aunt Willa. “Oh no! Not on my jeans!” I moaned.

  “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry,” Aunt Willa said, looking at the jeans. “I’ll wash them right now. Maybe they won’t stain.”

  She gathered them up so the vomit wouldn’t slide off and carefully carried them out of the room. Chewy whined and wobbled over to my mattress. It was hard to feel sorry for that brute after he barfed all over my favorite pair of jeans, but he did look pretty pitiful lying there. Mom’s meatloaf had struck again.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CONVERT

  con·vert

  verb kǒn-vurt

  —to change from one form or character or use to another

  The math fair was scheduled for the end of the week. The preparations took up our entire math time on Monday and even a little bit of our art class since the art teacher helped us with poster designs. That afternoon, Jonathan and Lucille stayed in the classroom to discuss the layout for our booth. Ms. Carpenter gave Jolina and me permission to go to the library to finish doing research on our animals.

  I discovered that while Galapagos land tortoises are related to turtles, they’re not small. They’re the size of a dishwasher. Okay, maybe not that big, but close. And it turned out both the box turtle and the tortoise could live well over a hundred years!

  Mega-disappointing.

  Thank goodness black widows ate each other and didn’t live long. I looked at my paper. The average black widow lived about one year.

  Jonathan had made charts for each of us to fill out for every animal. It had spaces for writing in how many years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds the animal lived. I gripped my pencil the best I could and felt like a kindergartener learning how to write for the first time. The cast made my usually tidy and precise writing look like scribble-scrabble.

  I sloppily wrote a 1 in the year column, a 12 in the months, 52 in the weeks, and then 365 for the days. After that, I stopped and turned to Jolina. “That part was easy—but now I’ve got to convert the days to hours and stuff. How do I do that?”

  “Did you bring your calculator?” she said. “You’re going to need it. These numbers get big fast, and it’s really hard for people to do this in their heads.”

  I reached into my backpack and dug out my calculator.

  “Okay,” said Jolina, pushing her own animal calculations aside. She looked at my printout. “You know a black widow lives for three hundred and sixty-five days. How many hours are in one day?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “Right, so if twenty-four hours are in one day, and you have three hundred and sixty-five days, what should you do?”

  “I multiply them?”

  “Yep,” Jolina said. “If you have three hundred and sixty-five sets of twenty-four hours, you have how many hours?”

  I plugged the numbers into my calculator as Jolina watched. “A black widow lives for eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours.”

  “You got it. Now to solve for minutes, it’s the same process. How many minutes are in one hour?”

  “Sixty.”

  “Umm-hmm. So if you have eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours and you know that sixty minutes are in one hour …” She didn’t finish her sentence; instead, she looked at me with her eyebrows raised.

  “I multiply eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours by sixty minutes?”

  “See. You know what you’re doing.”

  “Hold up—we aren’t done yet,” I said, punching those numbers in. “It’s five hundred and twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes in all.”

  Jolina moved her papers back in front of her and picked up her pencil. “I think you know what you’re doing. You just have to figure out the seconds now.”

  “So I would multiply the minutes by sixty again, because there are sixty seconds in a minute, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I can see why we celebrate years on birthday cakes instead of minutes. Can you imagine trying to light five hundred and twenty-five thousand, six hundred candles?” I said, imagining my mom running around the kitchen armed with a fire extinguisher.

  Last year, Mom had bought trick candles for Dad’s birthday cake—the kind that you can’t blow out. She forgot to dip them in water afterward and one lit up again, re-igniting the others. Luckily, Dad saw what happened and threw the plate of burning candles into the sink, but not before the roll of paper towels went up in flames. After that, Mom kept a fire extinguisher under the sink.

  “Mom would need to whip out her fire extinguisher if we put candles on our cakes for every minute w
e lived instead of every year. Our whole house would catch fire.”

  Jolina snickered. “It’d be just one more disaster in a long line of them at your house, huh?” I’d already filled her in on how Chewy was leaving a path of destruction that was wider than Lucille’s little brother Charlie was even capable of.

  She raised her eyebrows and nodded. Like me, Jolina liked things clean and organized. She understood the frustration I was feeling because of Aunt Willa and Chewy.

  Mrs. Gottry, the media specialist, walked to our table and leaned over us. We were the only ones in the library, but she still whispered—I don’t think she knew how to talk otherwise. “Do you girls have everything you need? Is your project coming along well?”

  Jolina looked up. “Yes, ma’am—we’re just working on some conversions now.”

  I quickly punched numbers into my calculator. “Did you know a black widow can live for thirty-one million, five hundred and thirty-six thousand seconds?” I said to Mrs. Gottry.

  She peered over her glasses. “Can it now? Well, I must admit I didn’t know that. Quite fascinating. What other animals do you have, dear?”

  I set the black widow sheet aside and picked up my other two. “I have a box turtle and the Galapagos land tortoise.”

  “Oh my—those live for ages. You’ll have fun with those calculations.”

  “How is it everyone except me knew that turtles and tortoises lived forever?” I asked once she’d walked away.

  Jolina shrugged. “We tried to tell you.”

  Oddly enough, at the end of the day I didn’t feel so anxious about all the math that was necessary for our project. Maybe Mom’s advice about viewing math through the eyes of a scientist worked after all. In this particular case, all my math problems really were science-related, and I actually was looking forward to working on them. That would never have happened if not for Morty.

  At least his death was not in vain.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CLOSE SHAVE

  close shave

  noun klohz shayv

  —something achieved (or escaped) by a narrow margin

  After school on Tuesday, Jonathan, Lucille, Jolina, and I met once more, this time at Jonathan’s house, to finalize plans for our display and to divide out jobs for getting everything done.

  “I have a special prop I’ll bring in on Thursday,” said Jolina.

  “What is it?” said Jonathan.

  “It’s a secret. But I know you’re gonna love it!”

  “I want to do the display layout,” Lucille said, bouncing on her toes. “I love doing artsy stuff. Just give me the spreadsheets and photographs and I’ll put everything together.”

  A wave of panic flooded over me. The thought of Lucille putting our display together made me break out in a cold sweat. Her artwork was not a lot better than her work with eye shadow. And she wasn’t exactly what I would call the world’s greatest speller. She’d even misspelled the word “spelling” on our last vocab test. Plus, if I was crazy clean and organized, she was the polar opposite: crazy sloppy and cluttered. I knew this was supposed to be a group project, but I couldn’t see how letting Lucille misspell half the words on our display board would be helpful to anyone—especially me. My math grade and summer depended on a perfect display.

  I looked over at Jolina and Jonathan, pleading with my eyes for them to realize the danger in handing over the poster to Lucille, but they seemed oblivious to the fact that she could destroy everything we’d worked so hard on.

  I would need to talk to Lucille later.

  Jolina picked up the calculations we’d all done for the animal life spans and looked at Jonathan and me. “We need these turned into spreadsheets and we also need pictures of the different animals to place near each one.”

  “I’ll print out the pictures,” Jonathan and I said at the same time. We looked at each other.

  “Rock, Paper, Scissors?” he said.

  “No way. I’m the world’s biggest loser with Rock, Paper, Scissors. I’m sure not about to gamble with that game.”

  “I’ll shoot ya for it,” Jonathan said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Basketball,” he said. “I challenge you to a game of HORSE. The loser has to do the spreadsheets.”

  “Come on! Her arm’s in a cast—she can’t play basketball,” Lucille said.

  Like heck I couldn’t.

  I narrowed my eyes and looked at him. “Are you good at basketball?”

  He grinned. “Maybe.”

  I thought back to when we first went to his house. I’d passed his room on my way to the bathroom and poked my head in to see what a boy’s room looked like—not having any siblings, I was curious. I remembered a large GO ARMY flag was pinned above his bed and his walls were plastered with all kinds of basketball posters. He also had a basketball laundry hamper—the kind where you shoot your dirty clothes through a hoop and into the basket. There were clothes all over the floor, so he was either really sloppy or a really bad basketball player. Considering he was part of a military family, I couldn’t see him being sloppy.

  While I wasn’t the greatest athlete, my dad and I had shot hoops since I could walk. True, I did have a cast on and my shots might look ugly, but if I could avoid doing the math spreadsheets, it would be worth any potential humiliation on the court. “You’re on.”

  “You sure?” Jonathan asked. “I was partly kidding … I don’t want you to hurt your arm or anything.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said.

  “I’ll referee,” Lucille offered.

  We finished off a bag of cheese puffs and went outside. By the time Jolina had to go home, I had H, O, and R. Jonathan had H, O, R, and S. The funny thing was that I was actually shooting better than I normally did. Because my right arm was in a cast, I was forced to really concentrate and slow down before each shot.

  “Get him out, Ella!” Jolina called over her shoulder as she left.

  “Not likely,” said Jonathan, squaring off for a shot. He lobbed the ball high and swooshed it through the net. “I’m planning on getting a basketball scholarship.”

  “No problem,” I sneered, dribbling the ball back to where he’d shot from.

  I missed.

  “Ha!” Jonathan said. “We’re tied. Now, who’s going down first?”

  I tossed him the ball. “Take your best shot, Johnny-basketball.”

  He walked to the end of his driveway and stood next to his mailbox. “You have to shoot from back here.”

  “Only if you make it,” I reminded him.

  “Oh, I’ll make it.” He judged the distance and heaved the ball through the air. It ricocheted off the backboard and flew into Lucille’s yard.

  Lucille and I turned and busted out laughing as Jonathan ran to retrieve his ball. He came back smiling and tossed it to me. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Like I always say, desperate times called for desperate measures. It looked as though I would have to pull out the “hop n’ hook it.” Whenever Dad and I needed a break from “real” basketball, we’d make up silly shots. I knew I’d risk looking ridiculous in front of Jonathan doing it, but hopefully I could get him out.

  “Okay. You have to hop in a circle three times on one foot and then throw a left handed hook shot.” I began bouncing on my right foot.

  “What kind of shot is that?” Jonathan taunted.

  “A you-can’t-make-it kind,” I replied as I released the ball into the air. It circled around the rim and dropped through the net.

  Jonathan’s head tipped back. “Aww, man!” He dribbled the ball a couple times and wobbled on one foot. He bounced awkwardly around in a circle three times and tossed the ball toward the hoop. At least I assumed that’s what he was aiming for since it hit nothing but air.

  Lucille jumped up and cheered. I slapped her a high-five. Jonathan walked over with the ball tucked under his arm. “I can’t believe I just got beat in basketball by a girl with a broken arm.” He grinned and shook his hea
d. “I’ll have to try to take my dad out using that shot. I’m pretty sure he’s never bounced on one foot in a circle before shooting.”

  Lucille’s mom poked her head out of her front door. “Lucille, time to come in. We have to leave for your sister’s piano recital soon.”

  “I better head home, too,” I said. “Have fun with those spreadsheets, Jonathan!”

  He pretended to belly laugh and slapped his knee. “Haha—you’re so funny. Just make sure everyone has their calculations to me by tomorrow.”

  “I’ll do you a favor—I’ll call Jolina and Lucille to tell them. I love being helpful,” I joked.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  SPREADSHEET

  spread·sheet

  noun spred-sheet

  —a computer program that calculates numbers and organizes information in columns and rows

  Just before school let out on Wednesday, we all gave Jonathan our life span calculations so he could create the spreadsheets.

  Around four o’clock, the phone rang at home. It was Jonathan. “You’re not gonna believe this.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Our computer just crashed. Blue screen of death and all.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “I’m dead serious. My mom’s on the phone with tech support right now, but I’m pretty sure it’s trashed.”

  “Oh no. That’s terrible.”

  “Yeah, it’s not the greatest timing. My dad’s got this military dinner thing we have to go to, and I really need to get this done before we leave. I ran over to Lucille’s to see if I could use their computer, but no one was home.”

  “Yeah—she has Girl Scouts on Wednesday. Let me check with Mom, but I’m sure you can come on over to my house and use ours.” I cupped my hand over the receiver and told Mom about Jonathan’s computer. “She said to come on over.”

  “Great, thanks! I’ll be there in a few minutes,” Jonathan said.

  He arrived with his backpack swung over one shoulder just as I finished printing out the last of the animal photos. “I’m going to grab some construction paper to glue these to. The laptop is in the living room on the coffee table—I’ll meet you there in a second.”