The Cat at the Wall by Deborah Ellis Read Free Book Online Page B

looking for terrorists in the sky?”
    “I’m looking at a Turkestan shrike,” Aaron said. “At least I think it is. I’ve never seen one before, and I don’t have my book with me.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “My bird identification book. I’m a birder.”
    “A birder?”
    “Israel is a major intercontinental migratory route for birds,” Aaron said. “Five hundred million birds come through here twice a year. Over five hundred different species.”
    “Who cares?”
    “Blast. It flew away.”
    Aaron launched into a long lecture about the importance of birds to the ecosystem, which led to Simcha talking about how surfing made him feel close to nature, and from there they moved on to talking about girls they met on the beach and on bird-watching trips.
    On and on. I opened one eye and used it to glare at them, but they paid no attention.
    Like I’ve said, no one cares about the feelings of cats.
    I already knew much more than I ever wanted to know about birds. They are too fast for me to catch. Whenever I try, they fly out of my reach, perch on a branch and laugh at me.
    Birds got me another detention.
    Before I died, I had to suffer through my sister’s school speech.
    It was this thing that happened every year. All the sixth-grade kids had to give a speech in front of everyone in the school. The best ones got prizes and were entered into the city-wide public-speaking contest sponsored by the Bethlehem Chamber of Commerce.
    When I was in sixth grade, we were supposed to come up with our own topic and let the teacher know weeks in advance. I figured that if I didn’t give her a topic, I wouldn’t have to do the speech. So, no topic.
    It didn’t work. One day, the teacher called my whole crew up to the front of the class, because, of course, none of us had chosen a topic. She had us draw slips of paper from Darren Brown’s smelly baseball hat, then said, “These are your topics.”
    Mine was mineral resources of Appalachia.
    I stood there, staring at it in horror, and immediately tried to swap. All my crew were against me that day. They took one look at my topic, then shoved theirs deep down in their pockets.
    “You will be on that stage alone for at least three minutes,” the teacher said. “I suggest you get prepared. It will be a long three minutes if you are standing there with nothing to say.”
    My way of getting prepared was to go to the mall with money from my mother’s wallet to get a new sweater to wear on stage. As for the mineral resources of Appalachia, I just got something off the internet and read it. I didn’t care what I was reading because I knew no one was listening. I got some laughs, though. They were laughing with me at how boring it all was.
    When Polly got to sixth grade, she didn’t choose a topic because the idea of going out in front of everyone and talking filled her with such terror that she just wanted to escape the whole thing. So she was called to the front to choose a topic from the hat.
    She got birds of Pennsylvania.
    Instead of fluffing it off like any normal person would do, she took her little self to the library. She stuck her face in a book. She talked on the phone with someone from the Audubon Society. She even went bird-watching at the Lehigh Gap Nature Center with the Catholic youth group. It was ridiculous.
    Polly worked hard at her speech. She wrote it out on cue cards and she practiced it in her room, over and over. My bedroom was next to hers so I couldn’t escape it. It made me sick the way Mom and Dad applauded when she did her speech for them after supper one night. I got so tired of hearing about the green-winged teal and the snowy plover and the nesting patterns of the pied-billed grebe.
    I made plans for my revenge. My crew were happy to go along.
    Polly had a big navy cardigan of my father’s that she liked to wear. She could hide in it. The sweater hung on her like a potato sack and had deep pockets that she used to carry around