Smart Cookies

by Adriana Brad Schanen

  “Wait, Grandpa Gooley, did you actually bring Freya back here?”

  I get on my tippy-toes, but I don’t see any zebra stripes in his pickup truck.

  “No, no,” says Grandpa Gooley. “Freya and Mr. McSoren are still living over in Milford. These chickens are new. They’ve got to get used to each other, and to Cha-Cha.”

  “You mean Cha-Cha and Walter. Walter thinks he’s a chicken, too,” I remind him.

  Walter the chicken-cat creeps toward the pickup truck now. Cha-Cha flaps over, too, and leaps onto Walter’s back and begins a screechy speech. BockbockbockbockBOCK.

  “Open the cage!” cries Piper. “Open it!”

  Cleo’s squealing in her stroller and Daddy leans over to calm her down. “Piper, girls, we don’t have time for this,” he says. “Quinny, you’ve got to get ready for soccer.”

  Oh. I love soccer. But I definitely don’t love it more than I love brand-new chickens. Luckily, I figure out just what to say. “My arm—Daddy, I can’t go to soccer with a sprain.”

  Daddy sighs. “You’ve both got homework, too.”

  Personally, I think homework stinks very much, and I know Piper does, too. They make us do enough school in school, I don’t see why we have to do more school at home.

  “Daddy, we need to meet our amazing new chickens first! Please be patient.”

  “Keep those cages shut for now,” says Mrs. Porridge. “Hopper, help me get Cha-Cha and Walter back onto the screened-in porch. Then we’ll get extra chicken wire from the shed and set up a separation pen in the coop so we can introduce these new chickens safely and properly.”

  I don’t know what Mrs. Porridge is talking about—a separation pen?

  She scoops up Walter, and Hopper picks up Cha-Cha, and they both walk away.

  “Grandpa Gooley, these chickens are just fantastic. Let’s get them out of the truck, because I think they’re a bit smushed in there, plus I can’t wait for them to meet Crescent.”

  “Who?” asks Grandpa Gooley.

  “My guinea pig, remember? He’s free right now. I’ll go get him!”

  Grandpa Gooley tugs my sleeve. “You know what, Quinny? These chickens have only been here a couple of minutes. Let’s take it slow.”

  He lifts the first cage out of the truck. It’s got a puffy, silly poodle chicken inside, with a shiny-gray feather-duster pouf covering her eyes. But I notice some feathers in her pouf are missing and a few feathers have been plucked off her bottom, too, and her head darts from side to side like she’s expecting trouble.

  “Wow, that is a very strange-looking poodle chicken.”

  Piper comes closer to the cage, and Daddy unclicks Cleo from her stroller to come see, too.

  “She’s called a Silkie,” says Grandpa Gooley. “She’s not your everyday chicken.”

  “She’s hopping around kind of funny in there,” I say. “Is she limping or dancing?”

  “A longhorn cow stepped on her. Nearly crushed her, and left her with a slight limp. Her flock on the farm started bullying her after that. That’s why some of her feathers are missing.”

  “Bullying her for getting hurt? Why?? Grandpa Gooley, just let that poor thing out of the cage so we can say hello, please. She looks so worried and trapped. If she was bullied before, she needs to know we’re her friends.”

  “Well…I suppose that’d be okay,” says Grandpa Gooley. “She seems gentle enough. But first let’s see who else we have here….” He unloads a second cage out of the truck.

  And inside is the most beautiful hen in the world—her feathers are orange, red, and caramel, she’s round and shiny like a pumpkin, plus her face is so happy and awake.

  “Let her out, too! She’s way too beautiful to be stuck in a cage.”

  “This one’s called a Buff Orpington,” says Grandpa Gooley. “They’re sweet birds.”

  Grandpa Gooley lets out both the silly poodle chicken and this beautiful pumpkin chicken, and they scurry out of their cages and peck the ground and look around the world.

  Buuup. Bip. Ooop. Erp. Bock.

  Cleo laughs and Piper gets down on the ground with them, practically eye to eye.

  But there’s one last cage on the truck and it’s so full of white feathers that I can’t tell how many chickens are squeezed in there, all wiggly and crowded. So while everyone is focused on the first two chickens, I reach up and open that third cage—just to give those poor, smushed chickens some air.

  But Grandpa Gooley isn’t even proud of me for this.

  “Quinny, no!” he says.

  But it’s too late. All those feathers burst out of the cage and a head pops out—just one head, because that big blob of feathers is actually just ONE HUGE CHICKEN.

  She’s white and fluffy and practically the size of a baby polar bear! Her eyeballs are as big as gumballs and she stomps around in a confused way. It looks like she’s got tall, feathery boots on her giant feet, and I can almost feel the earth shake with each stumble-stomp she takes.

  “Don’t be afraid, she’s just a chicken,” says Grandpa Gooley. “She’s a Brahma, and they do get kind of big.”

  I’m not afraid—I want to hug that huge, fluffy polar-bear chicken. But Cleo does not. She spits out her Binky and screams. Even though that chicken looks more terrified than terrifying.

  Then the gray poodle chicken limps over and grabs Cleo’s Binky from the ground.

  “No, drop it!” I chase after her, but she limp-runs off with the Binky in her mouth and spreads her wings and flutters up into Mrs. Porridge’s fig tree.

  That poodle chicken can definitely fly better than she can run.

  “Mine, mine, mine!” wails Cleo, reaching up toward the tree. “Binky, mine!”

  Piper climbs up into the tree and goes after that poodle chicken.

  “Piper, get down,” says Daddy, over Cleo’s wailing. “Guys, we really have to leave.”

  But I have a brilliant idea, instead. I go to the screened-in porch and open the door for Walter and Cha-Cha to come back outside.

  “Quinny, stop!” calls out Grandpa Gooley. “Mrs. Porridge said Cha-Cha and Walter should stay inside for now.”

  “But Walter is excellent at climbing trees, and he’ll help Piper catch that poodle chicken who stole Cleo’s Binky. Walter, go!”

  But Walter doesn’t run to the tree, like I told him to. He goes over to the other chickens, who are now having a teeny-tiny argument. That pumpkin chicken is pecking at the polar-bear chicken’s feathery boots. Walter zooms over to the pumpkin chicken and knocks her flat. Then he hisses at the polar-bear chicken, and she lowers her giant scaredy-bird head.

  “No Walter, forget about these chickens on the ground and go get the Binky back from that poodle chicken in the tree!”

  The poodle chicken keeps flapping-flying higher up with the Binky, and Piper climbs after her and Cha-Cha is clucking at them from the ground, but she can’t fly into the tree.

  “Piper, get down from that tree THIS MINUTE!” calls Daddy. He’s trying to wrestle crybaby Cleo back into her stroller, but she arches her back so he can’t buckle her in.

  “Binky Binky, mine mine!”

  The Binky thief keeps climbing and Piper keeps following her. I’ve never seen my sister climb so high up that fig tree, up to where the branches get really skinny.

  “Piper, stop, please!” Daddy yells, over Cleo’s wailing. His voice sounds scared now.

  I look around for Hopper. Piper listens to him better than anyone, but he went off with Mrs. Porridge to do something, I forget what exactly. I wish Hopper would hurry back, because I bet he could get Piper down from the tree.

  “Piper, Daddy will build you a tree house if you climb down from there,” I call out.

  Daddy’s head twists over to me. “I will?”

  “A tree house with bunk beds. And, he’ll let you go to school in your underpants.”

  “Quinny, please,” says Daddy.

  Cha-Cha loses interest in the poodle chicken up in the tree and runs over
to the pumpkin chicken, with her wings flapping and chest feathers all puffed. In one swoop, she slams that pumpkin chicken on her back.

  Swat!

  “Cha-Cha, no, you’re a dancer, not a fighter,” I tell her.

  All the chickens are freaking out and Cleo is wailing and Piper is climbing and Grandpa Gooley is running around in a confused squiggle trying to calm everything down.

  Then, without asking permission, that giant polar-bear chicken jumps into my arms!

  She knocks me down and clings to me so hard I can barely see past all her scared fluffy feathers.

  “It’s okay, sweetie.” I hug that enormous chicken back, even though her nails scratch me and her sneezy feathers tickle my nose. “I’ll keep you safe. But could you please move a little? You’re sort of crushing my left foot.”

  I can’t feel my foot and I can’t see past her feathers, but I can still hear—and what I hear next is the crackle-crunch of a tree branch breaking.

  There’s no chicken wire in the shed, so we go down to Mrs. Porridge’s basement.

  “Aha, there it is!” She finds a tall roll of prickly gray wire near her washing machine. “Why that grandfather of yours hid it down here is a mystery to me.”

  “Mrs. Porridge, why do we need more chicken wire?” The Chalet des Poulets, which Grandpa Gooley built, is already big enough for all the new chickens just the way it is.

  “Why indeed? I certainly have more important things to deal with than chickens. I was in the middle of my winter cleaning when that truckful of feathers so rudely interrupted me.”

  “Mrs. Porridge, it’s not winter yet. Winter doesn’t start until December twenty-first.”

  “Oh pish, close enough.”

  “Is winter cleaning like spring cleaning? My parents do that every year, and I help.”

  “Hopper, I never understood why people say spring cleaning. In the spring all I want is to be outside in the garden. Colder weather is the proper time to purge and clean….”

  Mrs. Porridge’s basement looks like it could use a good cleaning. There are boxes and piles of stuff everywhere. Some of those boxes are full of books, I notice—including the old-fashioned kind, with hard, faded library covers. The kind that smell old and good and something else, a smell that makes me feel both safe and curious.

  I look through one of the boxes and see a book called When It Rained Cats and Dogs. Under it are more ridiculous books: Letters from a Cat, Why Cats Paint, The School for Cats, Punky Dunk and the Mouse, Cat vs. Human, and Dancing with Cats—that last one has a lady on the cover with her hair sticking straight up, dancing with a cat jumping high in the air.

  “I may have had a slight obsession with silly cat books, a long time ago,” says Mrs. Porridge. “Been meaning to donate those. My shelves upstairs are all full.”

  These cat books make me think of Kaitlin from school.

  They also make me think of a new idea.

  I’m about to ask Mrs. Porridge a big question, but wailing from outside interrupts our conversation, and then some shrieking.

  “Oh dear,” says Mrs. Porridge. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  She walks up the basement steps and I follow her. We look out the kitchen window.

  Cleo is out there sobbing, pounding the ground with her fists. An orange chicken is fighting with Walter and Cha-Cha. Grandpa Gooley tries to break up the fight, but the orange chicken pecks his ankles. Quinny is out there, too, smothered beneath a huge pile of white feathers. Did a pillow explode? No, she’s talking to the feathers. Piper is high up in Mrs. Porridge’s fig tree, clinging to a swaying branch. Piper’s dad is waving and yelling for her to jump into his arms. A gray chicken in a weird puffy wig is even higher up in the tree, chewing something.

  “Five minutes, I’m gone just five minutes,” snaps Mrs. Porridge. She turns to me, sharply, like I did something bad, too. “You wonder why we need extra chicken wire? To build a separation pen. You’ve got to keep new chickens separated from each other at first.”

  “Why?”

  “Hopper, don’t you get it by now? Chickens are monsters.”

  “I thought they were dinosaurs.”

  Mrs. Porridge moves fast now. She grabs a spray bottle from a kitchen cabinet, fills it with water, and hands it to me.

  “The orange one,” she says. “Aim for between its eyes. Keep spraying and don’t stop until you’ve forced that creature back into its cage. Got it?”

  I nod. I’ve sprayed my big brothers with a water hose before. I can handle this.

  Next Mrs. Porridge sloshes a mop in some water. She hurries outside, waving that drippy mop like a weapon. I grab my spray bottle and follow her into battle.

  I aim for the orange chicken’s face, but just before I press the lever, I hear a—

  CRACK!

  I look up. It’s the tree branch with Piper on it.

  CRACK! RUSTLE-RUSTLE. CRACK!

  I push a bunch of white feathers out of my face and see Piper falling from the fig tree.

  Luckily, she lands on Daddy. She knocks him over just a bit, and they roll around in a pile and they almost roll onto that pumpkin chicken, who is fighting Cha-Cha and Walter, and guess what, Hopper is back, and he’s spraying the pumpkin chicken from a little spray bottle, but she dodges him and hops away and the water lands on Walter, who does a screechy-meow.

  “Hopper Hopper Hopper, you’re back! Can you help me get out from under this giant polar-bear chicken, please? But don’t scare her, because she’s already really scared.”

  Hopper comes over and sprays my giant chicken in the tushy.

  Errrrp!

  She jumps off of me, finally, but then the pumpkin chicken comes over and pecks at her feathery boots. Too bad that pumpkin chicken is only beautiful on the outside. Hopper sprays her with his water bottle again, and she backs off my polar-bear chicken. I definitely need to get one of those spray bottles to use on my little sisters.

  Mrs. Porridge is over by the fig tree shaking a wet mop up at the gray poodle chicken, and I laugh, because we’re all getting wet now, and it’s almost as awesome as the time over the summer when we blasted Hopper’s brothers with the water hose, except it’s November outside now, which means cold water feels a tiny bit colder than it did in July.

  The pumpkin chicken bops over to the tree and pecks Mrs. Porridge, but she jabs at it with the handle of her mop. “You’ve got some nerve, missy,” she snaps.

  That chicken scrambles away, shaking out her pretty feathers, all innocent, like Who me? I didn’t peck anybody’s ankles.

  “Don’t bother looking sweet, that doesn’t work on me,” adds Mrs. Porridge.

  Grandpa Gooley helps Daddy and Piper back up. The poodle chicken comes down from the tree, finally, like nothing crazy just happened. She drops the Binky, and Cleo grabs it.

  “No, Cleo!” I call out.

  But she sticks that dirty Binky back in her own mouth, without wiping it or anything.

  I guess my sister likes the taste of chicken.

  Daddy closes his eyes and shakes his head.

  “Daddy, relax,” I tell him. “The good news is, that’s not even the grossest thing Cleo has ever put in her mouth.”

  Mrs. Porridge shakes her wet mop at Grandpa Gooley now. “What were you thinking, letting these birds out of their cages before we were properly set up? And where on earth did you find them? I ask for a few quiet hens, you bring a bunch of violent, enormous freaks of nature.”

  “The big one’s a Brahma, but I call her a polar-bear chicken,” I inform Mrs. Porridge.

  “Her family didn’t like how large she grew, and didn’t want her anymore,” says Grandpa Gooley. “Isn’t that sad? Such a beautiful creature…”

  “Hmmmpt. And that ridiculous puffy gray one—a thief who can barely walk. Is it sick?”

  “No, she just got stepped on by a cow,” I explain. “And then her friends were mean to her because she hops around with a limp now, so Grandpa Gooley brought her to live here.”


  “Well, send her back. I don’t have time to take special care of an injured chicken.”

  “But Mrs. Porridge, look at her face. Look at how hard she’s trying to hop around and still be a chicken. And she flew up into that tree, so we know she has amazing wings! What if she also lays the most amazing eggs and we’ll never know because we didn’t give her a chance?”

  “That giant white one—you can send it back, too. Send them all back.”

  “Mrs. Porridge, every living creature deserves a chance. If I walked with a limp, would you send me away? Or if I grew into a giant?”

  “Bite your tongue, Eleanor Quinston Bumble. Of course not, don’t talk such nonsense.”

  “Quinny has a point,” says Grandpa Gooley. “Myrna, in your heart, I know you’re a sucker for helping an underdog—”

  “You bite your tongue, too,” snaps Myrna (aka Mrs. Porridge).

  “Or should I say under-chicken?” Grandpa Gooley smiles hopefully.

  Mrs. Porridge frowns.

  “Okay, this is all my fault for showing up a day early,” he says. “Although I did send you a text that the chickens were ready today.”

  “A text? You sent me a text?” Mrs. Porridge scoffs. “Do I look like the kind of person who constantly checks my texts? A phone call would’ve been the polite, sensible way to—”

  “My deepest apologies.” Grandpa Gooley hangs his head. “But don’t take it out on these poor confused chickens—they need a home. Let’s get the separation pens up in the coop and—”

  “What exactly is a separation pen?” I ask.

  “It’s the safest way to get a group of new chickens used to each other,” says Grandpa Gooley. “They’ll be able to see, but not bother each other, through the chicken wire. You leave it up for a few days…it helps the chickens relax, and start to establish a pecking order.”

  “But we don’t want them to peck at each other,” I point out.

  Grandpa Gooley chuckles. “No, Quinny, pecking order refers to how a flock decides on a chicken in charge, and where everyone fits into the group.”