All About Sam by Lois Lowry Read Free Book Online Page B

the back porch. It was boring, being outdoors after dinner. There were no kids around. At school, there would be lots of kids yelling and shoving and grabbing and running. Nicky would be biting people, and Adam would be dropping bombs on the castles that other kids would be building in the sandbox, and Skipper would be going down the giraffe slide headfirst, and it would be a whole lot of fun.
    But being alone in the back yard was boring. Sam sat for a minute on his tricycle. He pushed the pedals with his feet, rode the tricycle into a bush, got off, and left it there, mashing the rhododendron.
    He watched a squirrel climb the side of a tree trunk. Squirrels couldn't be pets; they always ran away very fast if you came close. A pet should be willing to sit beside you, eat your peas, and listen quietly while your mom read you a story. A squirrel wouldn't do any of those things.
    He wandered over to his sandbox, sat down on the triangular corner seat, and reached for a big spoon that was partly buried in the sand and dirt.
    When he picked it up, he saw a worm.
    Sam wasn't afraid of worms. Sam wasn't afraid of
anything
much, except maybe the Terrible Twos, which he
still
had never seen. And Nicky at school, who bit, and left little pink circles of teeth marks on your arm.
    But he had never thought very much about worms until now. He picked this one up and examined it. It was long and fat and glistening, and it wiggled in the palm of his hand.
    Could a worm be a pet? Sam wondered. He had never heard of anyone who had a pet worm. But maybe no one had thought of it yet.
    A worm was small, the way a pet should be.
    It was alive.
    No one was allergic to worms. He was pretty

    sure of that. Daddy was allergic to dogs and cats. Sam's friend Adam was allergic to orange juice, so at snack time at school Adam always had tomato juice instead. And Sam's mother was allergic to ironing; he had heard her say that lots of times.
    But no one was ever allergic to worms, Sam was quite sure.
    And a worm would never surprise you by having lots of babies the way Anastasia's gerbils had. Worms didn't have babies. In his whole entire life, Sam had never once seen a baby worm.
    A worm would never ever run out into the street and get squooshed flat by a car the way a cat might. Because worms didn't have legs. Sam lifted the worm and dangled it in the air, checking. No legs.
    And Sam thought of something else good about worms. Sometimes, when they were walking to the store, his mom would grab Sam's hand and say, "Watch out. Dog mess." Sam would have to walk very carefully around it.
    But she never once said, "Worm mess." So that was
another
thing that worms didn't do and another problem that a pet worm wouldn't be.
    A worm would sit quietly beside you while your mom read a story, Sam was sure. This worm was sitting quietly in his hand right now.
    Would a worm eat peas? Or broccoli? Probably not. Sam wasn't even sure that a worm had a mouth. He held this one up and examined each end of it carefully. There were things that
might
be a mouth, but he wasn't certain.
    But he was certain of something: it wouldn't bark or whine. That would certainly please his parents, who didn't like barking and whining one bit. There was a dog across the street—Mr. Fosburgh's poodle, Clarence, who barked and whined a lot—and sometimes Mrs. Krupnik said that she wished Mr. Fosburgh would move to Australia and take Clarence with him.
    "Saaaammmm!" He could hear his mother call him from the kitchen door. It was time to go in for his bath.
    "I'm coming!" Sam called back. Carefully he rolled his worm into a ball and put it into his pocket, where it would have three peas to eat just in case it was hungry, just in case it
did
have a mouth, just in case it was willing to eat peas.
    Trotting to the house, he tried to think of a name for his new pet. He had wanted to have a dog and name it Prince. But he had named one of Anastasia's gerbils Prince, so that name was taken, even