Cheating for the Chicken Man Read Free Page B

been made. Neither had his dirty socks been picked up from the floor, nor the water glass retrieved from the bedside table.
    A thin patina of dust had collected on J.T.’s desk. She made a path with her index finger, then wiped the dust off on her shorts and closed the cover that had been left open on his laptop. Every spare minute he had, he’d been on that computer. Most kids at school probably thought he was a nerd, but Kate knew better. J.T. made her laugh, and he was a genius when it came to math and science. He knew how things worked, and not just computers, but tractor engines, fertilizer, and generators, too.
    Kate picked up her brother’s Game Boy and then set it back down on the desk beside his copy of
Lor
d of the Rings
, his place kept with a triangular bookmark that looked like a slice of pizza. Her eyes flicked to a shelf above his desk where a framed picture of a black and white puppy prompted a faint smile. Beside the picture was a plastic “magic wand” that her brother had used not so many years ago in magic shows down at the tractor shed. Kate remembered sitting on prickly hay bales in the audience with J.T.’s friends Digger and Brady, clapping and chuckling at the performances.
    They were best friends, those three boys. But could they everbe friends again after what had happened? It seemed impossible. And yet Kate had wondered how a bond so strong could simply disappear. When J.T. came home in seven months, it would be hard enough not having his dad, but what was going to happen when the boys eventually saw each other in school? If J.T.’s two best friends couldn’t be his friends anymore, then who would be? Everybody needed at least one friend.
Who would want t
o be J.T.’s friend?
    Maybe growing up on the farm and being homeschooled all those years made them closer. But J.T. was the best brother anybody could wish for. Kate knew this for a fact, because he had protected her in a special way that neither of them would probably ever acknowledge out loud.
    Was prison changing him? When he came home, would he be the same inside?
    Kate needed her brother to be the same inside. It was the first step to saving her family, she had decided. And it was the reason she did not quit searching until she finally found the trumpet, buried under clothes, in the back of J.T.’s closet. She sat with the case on her lap and opened it. Inside, the silver instrument her father had passed on to J.T. lay nestled in faded blue velvet. Kate slid the trumpet case under her own bed and gave an extra tug to the dust ruffle to be sure it was hidden. Then she locked up J.T.’s room and returned the key to her mother’s jewelry box.
    After her grandmother arrived, Kate took the trumpet case—wrapped in brown paper and addressed in black marker—with her when they ran errands.
    â€œBig package,” her grandmother commented, finally noticing the parcel on Kate’s lap as they pulled up to the post office. “What’s in there?”
    â€œA cat!” Kerry piped up from the backseat.
    Kate and her grandmother chuckled.
    â€œJust something J.T. will like,” Kate said.
    Grandma frowned slightly. “I thought you couldn’t send him food.”
    Kate did not meet her grandmother’s eyes. “Because of Dad, they’re making some exceptions. I’ll be right back. Do you need stamps or anything, Gram?”
    *
    The workers who delivered the chicks were tossing empty trays back into the bus, and the noise startled Kate out of her daydream. “All done, miss!” one of them called out.
    Kate signed off on some paperwork, freed Tucker, and went to work, checking the temperature in each of the houses once again and then entering with a bucket and a flashlight to survey the new arrivals. The chicken company had long ago required her father to shut all the windows and put up blackout curtains so the chickens would think it was night all the time.