Amphibian Read Free Page B

name he’d understand. If Lyle was in a pit of brain suckers, and he was the only food they had in months, those brain suckers would starve to death. I really wished right then that I was a stinkpot turtle that releases a foul scent when its predator attacks. But the only thing that stank right then was Lyle.
    Lyle ran to Mrs. Wardman. I watched him as he talked to her, and I knew he was snitching. Mrs. Wardman listened to him, and then she looked over at me and made a motion with her hand for me to come over. As I walked over to her, I had seventeen thoughts go through my brain. Then I had a thought about there being seventeen thoughts, and that made it eighteen.
    Mrs. Wardman said, ‘Lyle says you called him a rude name. I don’t know what it was and I’m not even going to ask you, because saying it once is enough. I don’t want you to call names again, is that clear, Phin?’
    I nodded my head, but I was really, really mad. I hadn’t told on Lyle for pushing me, so why did he tell on me for calling him a name? He does it all the time, and not behind my back like some of the other kids. Lyle’s the biggest front-stabber there is. I said ‘Whatever’ to Mrs. Wardman, but I said it really low so that she could hear me only in her unconscious.
    I wished really hard that red fire ants would swarm Lyle. Their sting hurts as much as wasp stings. The problem is there aren’t many red fire ants around here. They’re usually where it’s warmer. Then I started thinking that maybe with global warming, they would begin a giant march north and eventually end up here.
    This made me think about climate change and how the earth is heating up. Scientists say that if it heats up by more than two degrees, we’ll all be in big trouble, and it’s heating up even faster than anyone thought. Thinking this made me feel shivery inside. When I told Bird I was feeling worried, he tried to distract me by getting me to pretend the teachers could shoot laser rays out of their eyes and we should dodge them. But I just didn’t feel like it.
    I tried putting a stick between my teeth to make my mouth into a smile, but it didn’t work. Bird said I looked like a jack o’ lantern, and then he put a stick between his teeth too. When he did that, I saw something black crawling toward his mouth.
    I said, ‘Umm, Bird, I think you should take that stick out of your mouth.’
    He said, ‘Why?’ but it sounded more like
Eiiii
.
    Then I said, ‘Because there’s something about to crawl into your mouth, and it’s something that people might eat in Cambodia but we don’t eat them here.’ Actually, 80 percent of the world’s people eat insects of some kind, which means they can’t be all that bad for you, but just as I was about to mention that to Bird, he saw the beetle too. He flung the stick really far, and it hit a Grade 5 kid on the back. That kid turned around and pushed the kid behind him, who must have been confused. Bird started dancing around and shivering. He was still shivering and saying, ‘Gross, gross, gross,’ when the bell rang. That made me smile a little bit for real.
    We mostly did boring stuff the rest of the day, so to keep myself from falling asleep, I made up a game to play each time Mrs. Wardman told us to take a Duo-Tang out of our desk. The game was if I reached in with my eyes closed and pulled out the right one on the very first try, I got fifteen points. If I got it on the second try, I got ten points. Third try was worth five points and fourth try got a big fat zero. The goal was to get at least fifty points by the end of the day. I only got to forty-five.
    The only good part of the afternoon was silent reading, when I got to read a book about dolphins. I learned that a dolphin mother sometimes has a dolphin midwife with her when she gives birth. The midwife pushes the baby up to the surface as soon as he’s born so