by
Rachel
t all started after I came home from school. As I was sitting down to my homework, (multiplying
fractions with unlike denominators) I noticed that all the carrots were gone from the small bowl on my desk.
Now there were only chips and the little cup of dip. I didn't think much of it then, though. But then, it happened again on Wednesday. This time, it was the apples, eaten right around the peanut butter. I decided to catch the culprit by asking my Mom for apples and carrots.On Thursday, Agent 209 rushed home from school and went straight upstairs to his room to meet an empty snack bowl! A faint trail of apple peels led me down the hall and into Mom's office, made a U-turn and a left heading right into Ben's room (he's my brother), jumping on his bed and from there onto his bookcase and back down, wound down the spiral staircase and through a door leading into the laundry room (which was only open a crack). A strange rasping noise came from behind the door and everybody else was upstairs. Who was it? I opened the door and the neighbour's cat blurred past me and bounded upstairs. She hadn't been eating the apples. I followed the strange coughing and I "HARRY!"
"What, Mom?" My detective work might be postponed a awhile.
"MAIL THAT CAT TO TIMBUKTU AND I'LL PAY FOR YOU TO GO TO COLLEGE!"
The apples would have to wait, I thought. I grabbed a broom and trudged up to my Mom's bedroom.***************************
Now, as I was saying, I followed the strange coughing and I found that there was, behind the dryer, a shaggy pony that had tried eating a bit of lint. I asked its name and it politely corrected me, telling me that HIS name was Charlie and that he was from New Brunswick and asking also if he might have some more apples. As you can imagine, I wanted to get him upstairs as quickly as possible, so I told him I had a few apples left in my room. I led him up the stairs and into my room shutting the door fast. I put the small snack bowl down on the floor and pulled off the apples' stems. Then I had an idea. Instead of slowly explaining to my parents and saying we'd be even for making me move into Jenny's room if I kept the pony, I decided to wait a while, since Mom's been so busy lately, and Dad's nervous about his new job so he won't be able to listen properly. I looked back at where Charlie had been sitting, but only saw the snack bowl, still rotating wavily. I hurried down to Mom's office, seeing the door open. Fortunately, Mom wasn't in the room. Unfortunately, it was only the cat again. I quickly shooed the cat out the door and the search was resumed.
I heard a loud clack, clack, clack sound and sprinted back upstairs to my Mom's office where the sound was coming from. I soon found, however, that the sound wasn't coming from my Mom's office, but from the big master bedroom's bathroom.Pushing the door open fast, I slipped and almost fell. When I had steadied myself, I saw that what I had slid on was soap bubbles and water ! Charlie was leaning over the bathtub watching the bubbles form and slide onto the floor. I carefully made my way across the room, reaching for towels, shower curtains and anything else I could grab. Charlie, sensing that he might be making bit of a mess, was trying to mop up the water near the bathroom door with a towel. Finally, I reached the bathtub and turned off the taps.
Just then, a door slammed somewhere downstairs. I stopped mopping a second to think of who it might be.
Mom. Of course. She said she was going to pick up dinner. MOM ?!?!!!!
I slid over to the towel shelf, yanked twelve off and tossed Charlie half of them, who knew what to do. Working speedily, we managed to clean up the floor and chuck the towels into the hamper before Mom had any ideas about coming upstairs.
***************************Next morning, I kicked off my blankets and tip-toed past Jenny's bed to our bathroom. I still had a problem. The night before I had convinced Charlie to stay in the bathroom until I woke up and let him out.
I couldn't keep him in there forever. Once Jenny had taken home a young sparrow and trained it to crawl up the back of her sweater and stay quiet when he heard Mom or Dad. But that had been a long time ago. Would she know what to do? I wasn't sure. But then, did I have a choice? Well, I couldn't count on her understanding, but I knew I couldn't keep the secret too long from someone sleeping in the same room as me. I slowly, cautiously turned the doorknob, careful not to make any noise.
I put my finger to my lips in the well known sign "shhhh" and closed the sliding door behind Charlie. I checked Jenny's clock to make sure it wasn't too early. It said eleven past eight. It was freezing cold and Charlie suggested we get him a blanket. I said he could. Trying to decide what to do next, I didn't notice when Charlie went around the side of Jenny's bed and started tugging on the sheets.
When I finally noticed what Charlie was doing, I tried to stop him but he had already pulled down her quilt and an extra blanket. It had hardly been four seconds when Jenny woke up. In a whisper, I explained everything to her and to my relief she said that she had a plan.***************************
Before long we had IT ready. I don't know if IT was going to work. But IT was worth a -- okay, I guess I can tell you. See, Jenny thinks, since Charlie has such a such a shaggy coat and plumy tail, we could pass him off as a -- well, a dog. With a light, breathing dog face mask Ben had bought last Halloween and four dog feet Jenny said she could make, you could hardly tell he was a horse. It wasn't quite right, though. It needed something. I asked Charlie to go get my pencil. Charlie pranced off, mane bobbing. A bobbing mane? That didn't sound right on a dog. I told Jenny how we had overlooked the mane and she called Charlie over. Taking hold of the mane she carefully intertwined the hairs through his matted coat.
Just then, we heard tired footsteps, dragging themselves up the stairs. Dad never came home until
four pm. I glanced at my watch and the hands pointed to 4:07. I made a dash for the old collar around Charlie's neck and gently but quickly pushed him onto my bed. I threw the covers over him and pretended to be making a tent with the blankets when Dad came in the room."Hey there, Harry-boy! Looks like I'm going to be free today to go fishing with y-" -- be-ee-ep, be-ee-ep, be-ee-ep...
"Hello? Hi." Saved by the bell.
"At the office? (sigh) All right."
Dad shrugged, pointed to the Sunday on my calendar and went downstairs. I collapsed on the closed door.
"That was close!" exclaimed Jenny. "Too close."
***************************
Racing home from school, I flew upstairs to my room. Jenny and I both started talking hurriedly. Once we realized this, we stopped, and I let Jenny go first. "Listen, it won't work for us to pretend Charlie is a dog, because I don't have enough money to buy the material for the feet or dog claws."
Then I began spilling out my brand new idea at too fast a pace for Jenny, until she caught hold of me and told me to start again, SLOWER. I took a deep breath and began . "We don't need to make the legs because I've got a better plan! I could ask Mom if I would be allowed to move to the basement and it would be perfect for Char -- "Slower!"-- for Charlie because the back door goes into our yard and our yard meets the little apple grove and continues into the meadow. Charlie could live out there and I could visit him any time bringing treats for him. What do you think?" \
"That's good, Harry! If we can pull this off for about half a year, maybe that will show Mom and Dad we can take care of pets without them having to help!"
I gulped. "HALF A YEAR! That's six months, twenty-five weeks, one hundred and eighty-nine days... four thousand five hundred and thirty-six hours!!!!"
"STOP! I know it's a pretty long time, but it would definitely prove to our parents that we could take care of him." It didn't look like I had many options. So I decided to go along with it.
***************************
Something's not right. I asked Mom for the room downstairs and all she said was "We'll see." She's been telling everybody how much she wished not so many people had rooms upstairs. There's Ben, and the baby needs her own room, Jenny and I share a room and of course Mom and Dad share a room, too. I thought she would have jumped at the chance. You see, she's been wanting to fix up Jenny's room really nice for her birthday which is coming up, but when the baby came, my room became the baby's room and I moved in with Jenny, Mom thought it would be too hard to work around my mess. I'm not that good at keeping my room clean. But there's no reason she wouldn't let me. But why am I thinking about that today? It's the first day of summer break, for crying out loud! I've got two and a half school-free months ahead of me! The world is mine, and I'm not letting a moment pass without living life to the fullest.
I wonder what's on T.V...***************************
I'm getting my stuff organized for moving downstairs. I've been down there and I've picked out where my bed and dresser are going to go. Oh, and if Mom and Dad want to come in, they have to knock for me so I can unlock the door, after secretly slipping Charlie out the back door. It's PERFECT. Period.
(GA-ASP!) "I'M LATE FOR SKATEBOARDING! The guys are going to kill me! I don't know what I'm gonna do, okay wait, relax, okay, 'Sorry guys, I was very busy...' no, no, no it's all wrong, I am not going to lie."***************************
Heh, heh, heh, heh... Oof, boy, am I tired. I'm getting some lemonade. ---aaah, that's better, now back to the shady, COLD yard. "Hi, Harry!"
"CHARLIE! What are you doing in the yard?! What if Mom comes back? Quick, get behind the bush, I think that's Mom now."
"Harry, Mom wants to talk to you." Phew -- just Jenny. "I think it's about the basement."
About the basem- Ohboyohboyohboyohboy, I hope I can move in tomorrow, or maybe even right after dinner! I ran upstairs as fast as I could and raced down the hall to Mom's room. As I burst through the door, I saw something. There was someone else in the room. I stopped, confused. "Harry, this is Lise Mearume. Lise, this is my son, Harry. Lise is going to be our new tenant, Harry. Isn't that wonderful?"
"Uh, yeah, wonderful."
Great. Now what? All that planning, and now all of our plans won't work. I went back to the bush and told Charlie how everything had changed and that instead of us moving to the basement, we had to live with a tenant now. I led him back to our room and told Jenny, too. "So now I guess we have to find a Plan C, eh, Jenny?"
"Yeah, I guess so. This sounds like it's been set up by our attention-loving goldfish, Copper, for us to have two plans (so far) turn into failures."
We've got to come up with a good plan to keep Charlie. But we can't think of a thing that would work. As someone, somewhere probably said at one time or another "The greatest discouragement is running out of ideas." Just then, I heard Mom call for dinner and felt a pang of hunger as I realized that I had forgotten about lunch and had just had a handful of dry cereal for breakfast. ***************************
Mom and Dad kept talking about strange smells coming from the room at dinner. I just kept quiet because I wouldn't know what to say after telling them that. I'm starting to worry that they might become suspicious. And I'm gonna have to get some more hay from one of the farmers, but Jenny might have to pitch in this time, because I'm one dollar and seventy-four cents short. Even when Mom told me that it's my turn to do the dishes, I was still deeply immersed (I heard that in a book) in the current issue of Charlie.
I trudged upstairs after the last pot was scrubbed. Charlie was waiting for me in my room. He looked sad. Very sad."We need to talk, Harry." This didn't sound good.
"It's about me being so hard to hide. So hard, you and Jenny have to sneak around, hiding me and even hiding yourselves at times. I really do appreciate the hard effort you two made trying to help me so that I can stay, but I think I better look for someone in the country with a nice, big farm and maybe another talking horse, if possible."
"Are you going back to New Brunswick?" Charlie looked down, and had an expression on his face that told me that he was probably thinking really hard.
"I might, if I can find someway to get there." Before I had time to feel anything but shock, the front door slammed, alerting me that Dad was home.
"Kent, I'm trying to study one room over."
"Sorry, dear."
We faintly heard their voices for a little while, then my Dad's infamous, loud whistle slowly getting closer. I told Charlie to get in the closet and he dove for the door, trying to forget that he would be going soon by acting tense and excited. Dad came and Mom quickly followed, with her face flushed in anticipation. "Harrison, we've decided you need to learn responsibility, so in a couple years, we'll be able to buy you your own pony! Now, the --"
"Uh, Mom, there's something you don't know. . ."
"-- only thing stopping us is the cost of the actual pony, but all other expenses are covered."
"You know, we don't have to . . ."
"-- and we've arranged for Jenny to take care of it when you're at camp. You understand, right?"
"Him."
My mom was still talking. "What's that, dear?"
"Not 'it', Mom. 'Him'."
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