Tiger in Trouble Read Free Page B

friends.”
    “Your
friends
?”
    Nick suddenly turned red and looked at the ground. “My girlfriend.”
    “Girlfriend! What are you talking about?”
    “I sort of have a girlfriend.” He turned redder with each word.
    “You do?”
    “Yeah. Her name is Tori. You’ve even spoken to her on the phone.”
    “You have lots of friends who call.”
    “She’s the only girl who calls.”
    “I’ve got news for you, Nick. Half your friends sound like girls.”
    “They do not!”
    “Almost all eleven-year-old boys sound like eleven-year-old girls. Besides, what exactly does ‘having a girlfriend’ mean?” I questioned.
    “It means that she likes me and I like her, and that sometimes we go places with each other, or eat lunch at the same table at school, or talk on the phone.”
    “That sounds like things I do with my friends who are boys, but that doesn’t make any of them my boyfriend.”
    “Of course not,” Nick said. “That would involve somebody wanting to have you as a girlfriend, and that’s a long shot … unless maybe the boy was blind, or stupid, or desperate, or maybe he was feeling sorry for you, or he lost a bet or —”
    “Are you two fighting again?” Mom asked as she came back into the kitchen carrying two suitcases.
    “I’m not fighting!” I protested.
    “Good. That’s not how we should be spending our last night together.”
    “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Nick said. “This is only the last night the three of us are spending together. Sarah and I are going away together.”
    That was just like Nick: always finding a way to make a bad situation even more irritating for me. I didn’t know who this Tori girl was, but she must be really, really tolerant.
    •
    Some people counted sheep. Others counted their blessings. I had even heard of people who counted the number of little holes in the ceiling tiles over their beds. Me, I counted things I was worried about.
    We were going away to a place I didn’t know. My mother was going away to another place I didn’t know. My brother was going with me, so that meant I was in charge of him. My brother didn’t like my being in charge of him. He was always looking for ways to get into trouble and was good at finding those ways. We were all going away in airplanes. Two airplanes, which meant there were twice as many chances that one of them might crash. Sure, they say airplanes are safer than cars, but if a car’s engine dies, all that happens is that it slows to a stop. It doesn’t plunge from the sky and explode. Or for that matter it doesn’t crash into the side of a mountain or drop into the ocean — were the Bahamas inside the Bermuda Triangle?
    Satisfied that I’d pretty well listed all available problems, I decided it was time to get to sleep. I wondered how many holes were in the ceiling tiles over my bed.

Chapter 2
    “Okay, is everything turned off?” my mother asked, talking more to herself than to me as she started to check things for the third time.
    There is absolutely no question where I got my paranoid side from. She scurried around the house, unplugging electrical appliances, jiggling the handles of the toilets to make sure they wouldn’t run over and checking to see that all the windows were closed and locked.
    “Everything’s fine,” I said reassuringly as she made another pass through the kitchen.
    “I just want to make sure. It would be awful if something happened to the house while we were away, and we’re going to be gone for a whole week.”
    “But it isn’t as if the house is going to be abandoned,” I pointed out. “Mr. McCurdy said he’d come by every day and check on things.”
    We’d driven over to his place last night, right after we’d cleaned up the kitchen, to drop off the leftover Chinese food. As soon as he found out that my mother was going away, too, he offered to watch the house.
    Actually that was the second thing he did after hearing her news. The first thing was to shoot me a