Cracks in the Cone
Page 9
“Careful! It might bite you!” I said, clutching my hand to my chest. Despite being the child of two veterinarians, I am not a snake person.
But apparently, Isabel now was.
“It’s a corn snake. Corn snakes don’t bite,” she said confidently.
She pulled her hands out of the box, and in them sat an orange striped snake, coiled neatly into a pile of snakiness. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
“OMG. What is that disgusting thing doing here?” I said, jumping backward about four feet.
Isabel’s smile faded into its new usual scowl, and she turned her back on me, cradling the snake. “It lives here now,” she said quietly, but with a hint of pride in her voice. “With me. I adopted it.”
I realized I’d just made a major blunder when I’d called the snake disgusting. I knew I had to apologize, or this would escalate into a huge fight, like all our disagreements lately, and I needed Isa’s help to find the comic book. She is the only good finder in the family, and the odds were high that the book was in here, anyway. While her back was turned to me, I scanned every surface, but I didn’t see it—not that that meant anything. If Isa had the comic, it would be neatly alphabetized and filed away on her bookcase.
I sighed. “I’m sorry, Isa. It just scared me. I’m . . . I’m just not really a snake person.”
“Well, I am. Just because we’re identical doesn’t mean we’re identical!”
I put my hands up in surrender. “Jeez, sorry. I never thought we were.”
“Look, just don’t tell Mom and Dad, okay? I really want it, and, well, you know how they are about pets . . . .”
Our parents laid down the law about pets a long time ago. They are willing to foster animals briefly, and we have done so many times over the years. (Our most recent foster was a tiny, adorable Shih Tzu called Gizmo, who my friend Amber wound up adopting.) But despite the many, many times that Isa and I begged to keep the fostered animals, our parents always maintained that we did not need any permanent pets at home. They said it’d be too much work for them to take care of animals all day at their clinic and then come home and do it again at night. In a moment of weakness my mom once admitted that she’d made the rule early on because our dad was such a softie that our house would have looked like Noah’s ark if she’d let him start keeping animals.
“Do you really think you can have a secret pet? That seems like a bad idea,” I said.
Isabel’s eyes were huge and earnest. “Please, Sisi? Please let it be our secret?”
She hadn’t called me Sisi in ages. I melted. “I guess. I just think it’s a bad idea, but I won’t say anything. At least, not for now.”
Isabel released a breath she must’ve been holding for a while. “Thank you.”
Just then the doorbell rang downstairs. Isabel looked at me, alarmed, but then her face changed as she seemed to realize who it was.
“Could you please go get the door for me? It’s Francie—the girl I’m adopting the snake from. She has the tank and all the gear and stuff. I need to stay up here with the snake, just in case Mom and Dad randomly come home. I don’t want them to see Naga.”
I raised my eyebrows, which are thick and dark and make quite a statement when I use them like this.
“Please, Sierra? Answer the door?” Isabel begged, her own dark eyebrows knit together on her forehead.
This was practically the longest conversation we’d had in weeks, and I liked having Isabel need my help. Plus, if she felt like she owed me one, she’d probably help me look for my comic book.
“Okay,” I said, and I dashed downstairs.
I opened the door to find a redheaded girl I recognized from the grade above me at school.
“Hi,” I said.
The girl looked at me in confusion. I don’t look like exactly Isabel (at least, not anymore), but enough that people do a double-take the first time they see me.
I smiled. “I’m Sierra, Isabel’s twin. She sent me down because she’s busy with the . . . ah . . . snake . . . upstairs.” I whispered the word “snake” as if my parents had listening devices everywhere.
“Hi, I’m Francie. This is the gear for Naga.” In her arms were a big fish tank with a lamp and some other electrical equipment, plus a little bowl and a small cavelike shelter, and more.
“Ooh!” I said, spying a white cardboard Chinese take-out container in the tank. “Does Naga eat Chinese food?”
Francie looked perplexed and then she laughed. “No! Those are frozen baby mice. That’s what she likes to eat! Mice cream! Micecicles!”
Oh no. I actually almost gagged. “O-kaaaay . . . .”
Francie looked at me seriously. “Corn snakes are constrictors—they like to wrap around their prey and strangle it, then eat it. Pretty soon, Naga will have to be fed small live animals . . . .”
I felt weak. I think my jaw must’ve dropped open because Francie was suddenly eager to leave.
She thrust the gear into my arms. “Thanks so much for taking her. My parents just did not want a snake in the house, but they were really happy to hear she was coming to live with two vets.”
“Right,” I said. But the vets don’t know it yet, I added silently. “Well, thanks. Come back and visit anytime!”
Francie turned and walked down the path, waving as she went. She couldn’t get away fast enough—I think she was relieved to be done with the snake. She practically skipped down the sidewalk when she left.
“Hmmm,” I said, closing the front door with my foot. “I bet we won’t see her again.” I held the tank away from me at arm’s length. If I caught even one whiff of the “mice cream,” I would surely be sick.
Upstairs, Isabel startled when I came in.
“It’s just me, relax,” I said. I put the gear down on her bed. “Um, do you know what this critter eats?”
Isabel smiled. “Yup.”
I shuddered. “Are you going to keep it in the freezer, like, with all of our food?”
She nodded. “Uh-huh.”
I sighed. “It’s a good thing our parents are so messy. They’ll never notice.”
“I know. But they might notice the tank. I’m going to work to get this all set up before they come home. It’s going in my closet.”
“Well, at least they’re super-busy right now. That should buy you some extra time this afternoon,” I said. Our parents were in the middle of renovating one of their examining rooms and their lab area. Though they usually work seven days a week, things right now were crazier than ever, with the renovations going on after clinic hours, making their days really long.
“Mm-hmm,” agreed Isabel.
She put Naga back in the cardboard box, carefully closed it, and weighed down the top with a heavy book. Then she came over to the bed to assess what Francie had brought. I hovered in the doorway, unsure if I should stay or go. Isabel never hangs out with me or my friends anymore and her new friends are all kind of weird: either punk and goth and a little scary-looking or soccer-maniac boys from her all-boys travel team. (At first the coach didn’t want Isa on his team. But then she played so well he couldn’t say no.) We used to have so many little secrets and rituals—we were “Team P,” the Perez sisters. “Sisters for life,” we would always say, then we’d do a fist bump and pulse our hands away like jellyfish. But that had all dried up lately. It seemed like Team P was on permanent vacation.
I was enjoying feeling close again for the moment, so I tried to stretch it out. “Remember when we really wanted to keep that German shepherd puppy?” I said.
Isabel smiled briefly. “Roman. He was so handsome.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, remembering how much we’d loved snuggling with him on the sofa in front of the TV. “But he did have that peeing problem . . . .”
Isabel laughed, a quick, short laugh, but still a laugh. “And when he peed on Mom and Dad’s bed, they finally said they’d found him a new family! Funny timing, right?”
“I wish we had a pet,” I said wistfully.
“Well, now we do!” cheered Isabel.
“Humph. A snake’s not really a pet. I’ve always wanted something furry to snuggle with.”
“I think a snake’s a pet. I’ll snuggle with Naga,” said Isabel defiantly.
“Right. Sorry,” I agreed, thinking, Whatever, cuckoo! Things were starting to get a little dicey, so I figured I’d better strike while I still could. “Any chance you’d help me look for a comic book I lost? It’s called Ms. Marvel ous?”
Without even looking up, Isabel jerked her thumb at her bookcase. “Bottom shelf. Under the letter M for Marvelous. Sorry. I saw it in the living room and thought Mom had gotten it for me.”
Bingo! I went to her shelf and pulled it right out. While I was there, I noticed lots of books I’d never seen before.
“Hey! When did you get all into graphic novels?” I asked, fanning them out and showing them to Isabel.
Isabel shrugged. “I don’t know. My friends are into them.”
“Yuck!” I said, fanning the pages and seeing gore and more gore.
Isabel got annoyed then. “You know what? Just . . . can you just leave? I don’t need you in here being all Goody Two-shoes and judging my stuff. Okay? We’re not the same person anymore. So just skedaddle! Get out!” Isabel grabbed all the books from my hands, extracted my Ms. Marvelous comic and slapped it at me until I took it, and then said, “Shoo!”
I raised my hands in the air in surrender. “Sor-ry!” I said, leaving the room. “And I’m not a Goody Two-shoes!”
“Ha!” was the reply before the door slammed shut behind me.
And there I found myself standing alone again in the upstairs hall—but at least this time, I had the comic book in my hand.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
From cupcakes to ice cream! Having written more than thirty books about middle-school girls and cupcakes, COCO SIMON decided it was time for a change, so she’s switched her focus from cupcakes to her second-favorite sweet treat—ice cream. When she’s not daydreaming about yummy snacks, Coco edits children’s books and has written close to one hundred books for children, tweens, and young adults, which is a lot fewer than the number of cupcakes and ice cream cones she’s eaten. Sprinkle Sundays is the first time Coco has mixed her love of ice cream with writing.
SIMON SPOTLIGHT
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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This Simon Spotlight edition May 2018
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Text by Tracey West
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Designed by Hannah Frece
Cover illustrations by Alisa Coburn © 2018 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Cover design by Alisa Coburn and Hannah Frece
ISBN 978-1-5344-1750-2 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-5344-1749-6 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-5344-1751-9 (eBook)
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2018934108