Someday Angeline by Louis Sachar Read Free Book Online Page B

be like me,” said Abel. “Someday she could be somebody special.”
    “She already is somebody special,” said Gus. “And so are you. It is time you started treating yourself that way.”
    “All right, what do you think of this?” asked Abel. “She has an imaginary friend named Mr. Bone.
Mr
. Bone is a lady.”
    “Well, I’m not a psychiatrist,” said Gus, “but after all, you’ve been both a father and mother to her for all these years. She needs a real mother.”
    “Oh, so now I’m supposed to marry Donna’s sister,” said Abel.
    “All I’m saying is that you should start going out with women again, both for your sake and for Angeline. Have a good time.”
    “Maybe I shouldn’t let her drink so much salt water,” said Abel.
    Angeline reached up and pulled the cord. The bus stopped in front of the aquarium. She got off and stared at the large building where, once inside, everything would be all right.
    She walked up to the front door. It cost a dollar for adults and fifty cents for children. She didn’t have enough. She only had enough for the bus ride home.
    Sadly she leaned against a cold, black, marble statue of a seal. What was she doing there anyway? she wondered. What did she expect? It wasn’t as if the aquarium would magically make everything all right.
    A group of kids about her age ran toward her, laughing and screaming. They were followed by two women walking quickly after them. The women shouted at the kids to be quiet and to getinto two lines. Angeline recognized it as a field trip. One of the women was a teacher and one was a kid’s mother.
    As the class entered the aquarium, Angeline darted to the end of one of the two lines and walked in with them. Once inside, she went off by herself.
    She walked down a long hallway lined with fish tanks. The hallway was dark but the fish tanks were lighted. She saw fish of all shapes and sizes, some almost as big as she was, others smaller than her fingernails. There seemed to be every possible combination of colors. And as she walked down the corridor, somehow everything
was
all right.
    There were tigerfish, dogfish, goosefish, fox-face rabbitfish, monkeyface blenny, and the beautiful but deadly turkey fish, the most poisonous fish on Earth. And as she looked at all the wondrous fishes, she was amazed by each one. Yet, at the same time, she seemed to recognize them too, as if she knew them from before she was born. She saw clown fish, convict fish, moonfish, some bumphead hogfish, and as she stopped in front of each fish tank she seemed to say, “Oh, yes, I remember you.”
    There were four-eyed butterfly fish, whoswam right at the very top of the water so that their eyes were half-in and half-out of water. They were able to look both above and below the water at the same time. She saw fairy basslets, who are girl fish when they’re born, but are men fish by the time they die. There were Caribbean grammas, who live and swim upside down, and marbled headstanders, who do just that. She saw stonefish, who just lie on the sand at the bottom of the ocean, pretending that they are rocks, but if you step on one, you’re dead.
    Octopuses, sea horses, barracudas. “Yes,” said Angeline very softly to herself, “I remember you.” And as she looked at each fish, peacefully swimming along or lying flat on the sand, she didn’t once think about Mrs. Hardlick or the note for her father or anything, and everything was somehow all right.
    She passed a “Garden of Eels.” These eels were long and thin, like rubber pencils. They lived in the sand under the ocean, and only their heads, about three inches long, stuck up into the water. They looked like a meadow of tall grass, gently swaying in a breeze.
    Past the fish known as the fat innkeeper, and the one appropriately called elephant lip, and thesquirrel fish, toadfish, and long-snouted hawkfish, Angeline walked up a spiral staircase and emerged in the middle of a large round room. There was one, big,