Emmy and the Home For Troubled Girls by Lynne Jonell Read Free Book Online Page A

“he’s just a child.”
    â€œHe’s old enough to learn some manners!” bellowed Marshall, swimming at Thomas with his whiskers bristling.
    Everything seemed to happen at once. Thomas, delighted to find more rodents that he could understand, surged toward the muskrat. At the dock’s end,Peter Peebles was tying his boat to the cleats. And out of the corner of her eye, Emmy could see the sturdy figure of Mrs. Brecksniff hurrying toward them.
    Emmy grabbed Thomas by the collar and hauled him back onto the lawn. “Thank you, Mrs. Brecksniff!” she called, giving Thomas a shove in the right direction. She snatched up her life jacket and threw it on, struggling with the buckles. It seemed strangely lopsided, but she was in too big a hurry to adjust it. She sprinted to the end of the dock, jumped in the boat, and helped Mr. Peebles cast off. She waved at Thomas and Mrs. Brecksniff as the boat accelerated, and fell back in her seat with a gusty sigh. She had managed pretty well, considering everything.
    There was a squirming sensation in the front of her life jacket. Startled, Emmy looked down. A familiar gray head poked out from the armpit hole, and grinned.
    â€œSee? I told you this life jacket didn’t need all that padding.”
    Emmy suppressed the urge to throw the Rat overboard and be done with it. “I suppose you think you’re clever,” she said through gritted teeth.
    â€œWell, yes, actually.” Raston turned back a flap of the life jacket’s outer covering to display neatly snipped stitches and a gnawed-out section of the buoyant padding. “See? I fit right inside. And if you ever want to take another rat with you—say, Sissy— I can just chew out a spot on the other side.”
    â€œAnd what if I fall in the lake?” Emmy said under cover of the boat’s motor. “With a life jacket full of holes?”
    â€œOh, that ,” said the Rat, waving a dismissive paw. “If worse comes to worst, you can always swim. And there’s certainly enough left to float Sissy and me.”
    â€œOh well, if you and Sissy would be all right,” Emmy said gloomily, staring out at the lake whizzing by.
    It was true that the Rat had come up with the perfect camouflage. And Mr. Peebles was too busy driving the boat to notice anything happening behind his back. But as they approached the yacht club, and Emmy saw the bright sails gliding smoothly past, she had a feeling of doom. It was a hopeless sort of feeling, as if everything that had already gone wrong would just keep on getting worse, no matter what she did.
    As it turned out, she was right.
    When Mr. Peebles tried to show her how to put up the signal flags, she ended up losing one overboard in the breeze.
    She blew the whistle at the wrong moment, and the whole fleet got confused.
    And when Kate and Meg came sailing past, they were so startled to see her that they bumped into another boat and had to turn three circles as a penalty. The breeze carried their comments over the water. “She could have crewed for me,” Kate said, and Meg added, “It’s not like she’s really needed on the signal boat.”
    To top it all off, Emmy was so distracted by Ratty (who kept saying “Arrr, me hearties,” and popping out to feel the breeze in his whiskers) that she missed half of Peter Peebles’s explanations; and then the other half didn’t make any sense.
    But the worst moment came at the race’s finish, when Ratty lost his head completely and leaped from his hiding place in her life jacket to the glossy white deck.
    â€œPut your backs into it, maties!” he cried, waving his cutlass as the boats passed the final buoy. “Shiver me timbers! Yo ho ho and a bottle of ru—”
    His voice cut off suddenly as the boat rocked on a wave. Emmy, who had already caught up her towel to muffle him, watched as if in slow motion as the Rat lost his balance and fell