by Orr, Wendy
It’s hard to be mad when you’re holding a fat, furry guinea pig.
And it’s hard not to laugh when that fat, furry guinea pig tickles your neck.
Sam went to get an apple from the fridge, shutting her bedroom door behind her. When she came back Henry had disappeared.
‘Henry!’ Sam called softly. ‘Henry, where are you?’ She wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be loose in her bedroom, and she didn’t want her mum to know that she couldn’t find him.
After a moment she heard a rustling under her bed. Sam lay down on the floor and looked into a pair of bright eyes.
‘Hey there,’ she whispered.
Henry stared back.
Sam rolled the red apple over to the bed. Henry came closer. Sam pushed it gently towards him till the apple was nearly touching the guinea pig’s nose.
Henry crept forward. He tried to bite the apple, and the apple rolled back out from under the bed. Nudge by nudge and nibble by nibble, Henry rolled the apple to the middle of the room. Sam sat quietly and watched him. When the apple rolled towards her she pushed it gently back.
By the time her mum called her for dinner, the apple had rolled back and forth and around the room five times. Now it was resting against her desk and Henry was nibbling white chunks out of its red skin. Sam moved slowly towards him, and picked him up.
‘Thank you, Henry,’ she whispered, because she’d been a bit worried she mightn’t have been able to catch him. She snuggled him close for a second, and put him back in his cage.
‘Samantha!’ her mother called again.
Sam got a tissue and quickly picked up a few little black pellets from the floor. She flushed them down the toilet, washed her hands, and raced to the kitchen.
Her mum was already sitting at the table, but Sam threw her arms around her and hugged her tight. ‘Henry’s the best present I ever got,’ she said.
‘I’m glad,’ said her dad, and Sam hugged him too.
‘I love Henry,’ said Liam, and Sam couldn’t be cross at him anymore.
She brought Henry out of his cage again after dinner and let Liam hold him.
CHAPTER 7
ometimes Sam wished she could let Liam take Henry to school, because holding the guinea pig made her feel good, no matter what else was wrong, and she knew he made Liam happy too. But even if guinea pigs were allowed to go to school, Henry wouldn’t like being in the middle of a bunch of noisy kids any more than Liam did.
On Friday evening the Ballart family went to the beach. Sam almost didn’t want to go, because she’d been away from Henry all day at school, and it seemed mean to leave him alone again now.
‘Come on, Sam!’ called her dad. ‘You can’t stay home on your own!’
‘Give Henry a bit of fresh hay and he’ll be fine!’ said her mum.
The guinea pig’s whiskery black face stared at her. She knew he was saying, ‘It’s time for me to have a play outside the cage!’
‘We’ll have the apple game when I get back,’ Sam promised.
It was so hot that even Mr Ballart went for a swim. Liam splashed and their mum swam back and forth between the flags, but Sam stayed in the water the longest, jumping over the little waves and catching the bigger ones on her boogie board until she was shivery and tired.
Liam was already wrapped in his towel when she came out.
‘Look!’ he shouted suddenly.
Mona and Nelly were splashing along the water’s edge.
Liam raced across the sand and threw his arms around the little brown-and-white dog. Nelly licked his face. Mr and Mrs Ballart came over to get Liam, and Mona laughed.
‘How’s the guinea pig?’ she asked Sam.
‘He whistles a lot,’ said Sam, ‘and he jumps around his cage.’
‘Then he’s happy,’ said Mona.
Sam felt so warm inside she stopped shivering under her towel. If Mona said he was happy, Sam didn’t have to feel guilty that he didn’t have a guinea pig friend.
‘I can read, too!’ Liam was telling Nelly. ‘Do you want me to tell you the story?’
The little dog snuggled against him as if she was saying yes, and Liam told her the story from his latest reader.
‘Why doesn’t he do that at school?’ Sam asked her dad. ‘It’s so easy for him!’
‘It doesn’t matter how good people are at things,’ said her dad, ‘they still have to get up the nerve to do them. Not everyone’s as brave as you.’
Sam knew he was joking, because she wasn’t brave at all. She just did what she wanted to do, even things that were hard for her, because that was better than not doing them at all.
‘That’s what brave means,’ whispered her dad, as if he knew what she was thinking.
Liam was still talking to Nelly. ‘Time to go home,’ his mum said gently, but the little round dog rolled on her back, waving her paws for Liam to rub her speckly pink tummy.
‘Nelly does love talking to kids!’ Mona laughed. ‘I bet she wishes she could go to school with you!’
Everyone laughed, but at the back of Sam’s mind, an idea started to grow.
Early Saturday morning, a young man turned up at the Rainbow Street Shelter holding a small tan-and-white guinea pig.
‘I found this under a bush when I took my dog out for a run!’ he said. ‘It was lucky the dog was on a leash, because she saw it before I did.’
Nelly trotted out from behind the desk and sniffed the man’s legs, looking up at the animal he was holding. The man held the guinea pig higher.
‘It’s okay,’ said Mona. ‘Nelly welcomes all the animals. They seem to know she wants to help them.’
The man looked surprised, but held the guinea pig lower so Nelly could sniff it. The guinea pig wiggled out of his hands to the floor.
‘Oh, no!’ shouted the man.
‘No problem!’ screeched Gulliver.
The grey cat on the windowsill stopped halfway through combing the top of his head with his paws.
Mona shut the door. ‘It’s okay,’ she said again, because Nelly had curled herself around the guinea pig, nuzzling and licking it till the frightened animal stopped quivering.
‘Have you got any idea where he might have escaped from?’ Mona asked.
The man shook his head. ‘I asked everyone I saw. They all thought I was joking when I asked if they’d lost a guinea pig!’
‘They can go further than you’d think, once they get loose,’ Mona said. ‘Now we just have to hope his owners think of looking for him here!’
‘What happens if they don’t?’ asked the man.
‘I’m sure we’ll be able to find him a new home,’ said Mona. ‘But we’ll wait for a week to give his owners a chance to find him first.’
‘Good luck, Piggie!’ said the man, and left.
Mona filled a small water dish and put it in front of the guinea pig. Then she got a cage ready, with clean hay and a little house for the guinea pig to hide in when he wanted.
‘You can’t stay out here in the waiting room,’ she told him as she picked him up. ‘You never know what big dog or cat might come in – and they’re not all as nice as Nelly!’
She checked him over. He wasn’t a baby, but he wasn’t quite grown up yet.
‘Poor lost little boy!’ Mona murmured. ‘You’re a bit thin, too – I think you might have been loose for a while.’ But she couldn’t find any cuts or sores; his eyes and ears looked healthy and so did his teeth. ‘I think you’ll be okay when you stop being so scared.’ Mona placed him gently in the cage in the SMALL ANIMAL ROOM.
Nelly curled up beside it. The guinea pig stayed right where Mona had put him, just inside the cage door.
‘Okay,’ said Mona. ‘If that’s what you both want!’
She opened the cage again, and the little guinea pig nestled up to Nelly as if he was going home to his mother.
CHAPTER 8
iam’s teacher was new; Sam had seen her when she went to his classroom to go home from school, but she hadn’t talked to
her yet.
Sam always worried more about her words coming out wrong when she talked to someone for the first time. Especially when she was going to tell them a crazy idea.
But maybe she wouldn’t need to. Maybe Liam would be so happy this week that Sam could drop her crazy idea before she even had to explain it to anyone.
The teacher smiled at her when she went to meet Liam on Monday afternoon.
‘My brother’s getting good at reading, isn’t he?’ Sam said.
She was hoping the teacher would say, ‘Yes, he is!’ or ‘You must have given him lots of help for him to read so well already!’
But the teacher said, ‘Don’t worry. Lots of the kids are too shy to read out loud at the start of the year. It just takes them a while to warm up.’
‘He’s not so shy when he talks to dogs,’ said Sam.
The teacher laughed, as if Sam was joking. ‘I’ll remember that if I find a dog in my classroom one day!’
Sam decided she’d tell Mona her idea before she talked to the teacher – and first of all, she had to ask her parents.
She waited till Liam had gone to bed, and it was just her, alone with her mum and dad, then she told them her idea. ‘I know it sounds crazy,’ she said, ‘but you know how much Liam loves telling Nelly stories!’
‘But …’ said her mother.
‘The teacher said lots of the kids are shy,’ Sam rushed on, before her mum could think exactly what the ‘But’ was going to be. ‘So it would help all of them, not just Liam.’
‘Why do you want to do this so badly?’ asked her dad.
Sam didn’t know how to answer. Liam was her little brother and she wanted him to be happy at school – but she didn’t know exactly why it was so important that he should do well at the things she knew he could do.
‘School wasn’t very easy for you at the start, was it, Sam?’ asked her mum.
Sam shook her head. ‘No.’
‘You never told us,’ said her dad, ‘but we knew.’
‘I’d just like it to be nicer for Liam,’ said Sam.
‘We’d have liked it to be nicer for you,’ said her dad.
‘It’s good now,’ said Sam.
‘Okay,’ said her mum. ‘We’ll go to see Mona tomorrow when I pick you up after school.’
Mona was surprised when Mrs Ballart, Sam and Liam turned up at Rainbow Street again the next day. Liam rushed to Nelly and threw himself down on the floor beside her.
‘Is there a problem with Henry?’ Mona asked.
‘Henry’s fine,’ said Sam. ‘Except he’s probably a bit cross because I haven’t let him out of his cage yet this afternoon.’
Mona smiled. ‘We’ve got one now who got out of his cage and into the big wide world! Luckily someone found him and brought him in here. He’s been eating all weekend, and he’s already not quite so thin. He’s not so nervous, either, and Nelly doesn’t think he needs her there all the time anymore. This morning she just stayed with him for an hour or so, before she came back to the waiting room. But unfortunately nobody’s phoned about a runaway guinea pig.’
She showed Sam the little tan-and-white guinea pig. He was much smaller than Henry, and he still looked lost and lonely. Sam patted him while she waited for her mum to tell Mona why they were there.
‘Tell Mona your idea, Sam,’ said Mum.
Liam had opened his school bag and was showing his reader to Nelly. It was the perfect way to explain what she meant. Sam took a deep breath.
‘I wondered if Nelly could be a reader dog,’ she said.
‘Sorry, but no!’ said Mona.
Sam felt her brilliant idea shrivel and die.
‘Nelly’s not for adoption,’ Mona went on. ‘She’s mine, and the shelter’s. She belongs here.’
‘I didn’t mean to adopt!’ Sam protested, imagining how she’d feel if someone wanted to take Henry away. ‘I just wondered if you’d like to bring Nelly to visit Liam’s class so they could read to her.’
‘And that’s the end of the story,’ Liam said to Nelly, and closed his book. Nelly licked him and rolled on her back.
Mona smiled. ‘Sam, that’s a really wonderful idea,’ she said.
All the next morning, no matter what Sam’s teacher was saying in class, Sam was wondering what Liam’s teacher would say that afternoon.
She might think Sam was crazy. She might laugh. She might hate dogs – or just say that it was against the rules.
At lunchtime, Hannah told Sam about the puppies at the Rainbow Street Animal Shelter. ‘After school I’m taking them into the playground, so they get used to playing with kids.’
‘That sounds so fun!’
‘How’s your guinea pig?’ Hannah asked, as if she’d suddenly remembered that dogs weren’t the only pets in the world.
‘He whistles when I come into the room,’ said Sam. ‘You can come and see him sometime if you want.’ And then Sam told Hannah her idea.
‘How did you come up with such an amazing plan?’ said Hannah.
‘The teacher mightn’t think it is,’ Sam pointed out.
‘Well, at first Mona and my parents thought I was too young to be a volunteer at the shelter,’ Hannah said. ‘But Bert said he was probably too old, and if you added our ages up we were both just right. So everybody gave in.’
Sam laughed. Still, she wished she could be as brave as Hannah when she went to see Liam’s teacher.
‘A reading dog?’ repeated Liam’s teacher when Sam told her. ‘What a fantastic idea!’
Sam beamed. She’d never thought it would be this easy!
‘Of course it’s not up to me,’ the teacher added. ‘You’ll have to talk to the principal. It’s too bad she’s allergic to dogs.’
Sam didn’t want to go to see the principal one little bit. She was wishing she’d never thought of this stupid idea. Why did it even matter if her little brother wasn’t brave when he’d just started school?
‘Do you want me to go with you?’ her mum asked.
Maybe the whole idea won’t sound nearly so crazy if Mum explains it, Sam thought. But she said, ‘No, thanks. I’ll do it myself.’
So she started getting ready.
She looked up ‘reading dogs’ online, and found out that maybe her idea wasn’t so crazy after all. She printed out three articles, and made a poster with a picture her mum had taken of Liam and Nelly. Across the top she wrote in great big letters:
NELLY: THE READING DOG FOR OUR SCHOOL!
Then she lay on the rug in her bedroom, watching Henry roll a cardboard tube across the floor. She didn’t know if he was trying to roll it or if he was trying to chew it and it was rolling away. It didn’t matter: he was having fun, and she was having fun watching him.
And the longer she watched him, and especially when she held him against her cheek before putting him back in his cage for the night, the happier she felt. Suddenly a little voice in her head said that maybe there was a simpler way to make Liam happier and braver.
Sam didn’t want to listen to that little voice. Liam could do lots of things; having a guinea pig was a special thing that was just hers. She didn’t want to share it.
CHAPTER 9
t was a busy morning at the Rainbow Street Shelter. Mona unlocked the front door with one hand and answered her phone with the other.
‘I can hear a kitten mewing in the garden,’ said an anxious woman, before Mona could even say hello. ‘But I can’t find it – and I’ve got to leave for work soon.’
‘I’ll be there as soon as I can,’ said Mona, opening the door. Minke was stepping out of his basket under the desk, meowing and stretching. Nelly rushed in to greet him, then into the SMALL ANIMAL ROOM to check her guinea pig, and finally into the hospital room to see a dog who’d come in with a broken leg the day before.
‘Can I help you?’ Gulliver was screeching from his perch above the desk.
Mona checked the hospital animals and gave the dog a needle to stop the broken leg from hurting. Nelly licked the dog
’s face while Mona gave him the injection.
‘G’day, mate!’ Gulliver shrieked, and Bert came in.
‘I think Nelly helps as much as the medicine!’ he said, rubbing the little dog’s head.
‘I’ll take her with me now,’ said Mona. ‘I have to go and find a lost kitten.’
Mona drove out to the woman’s house and Nelly helped her search the garden. It didn’t take her long to find five tiny kittens. They were so new their eyes were still shut, and they were chilly and weak. Nelly started licking them right away – she knew that if they didn’t get warm soon they could die.
‘You’re right, Nelly,’ said Mona, as she nestled the kittens into a soft towel in the bottom of a cat-carry cage. ‘I don’t know what happened to their mum, but these babies are really missing her!’
‘What if the mother comes back?’ asked the woman who’d phoned.
‘Call us right away,’ said Mona. ‘But it looks as though they’ve been on their own for a while. The most important thing now is to get some milk into them.’
The woman touched one of the tiny heads with her finger. ‘I really don’t want a cat,’ she said, but she didn’t sound very sure, and when she rushed away to work she had tears in her eyes.
‘Wouldn’t surprise me if you see her again when you’re bigger,’ Mona told the kittens, and put the carry cage gently into the back of her car.
When they got back to the shelter, Bert and Mona fed the kittens with a special kitty bottle, and then put them into a box where Nelly licked them clean. The abandoned kittens nestled up against her, purring gently.
At lunchtime, when everyone else was going out to play, Sam went to see the principal. Her stomach was a tight knot and she was afraid her tongue might be too. Her hand didn’t want to knock on the office door.
But somehow it did, and when Mrs Stevens told her to come in, her legs did what they were told – and then there was nothing she could do but explain her idea.
‘You know how some little kids don’t like reading out loud because they think people are going to laugh at them?’
