The Daring Escape of Beatrice and Peabody by Kimberly Newton Fusco Read Free Book Online Page A

cart.’
    ‘You’ve got time. Come on. Besides, we’ll be setting up outside of Nashua tomorrow and who knows if there will be a good place to run?’
    I cross my arms in front of me and glare at him. Peabody whines.
    Bobby crosses his arms, too. ‘Probably best if you remember those boys every time you feel like quitting.’
    I look at him with his thick-rimmed glasses and his coal-dark hair shooting up in a hundred directions and I know that if Pauline gave him half a chance, things might go better for us.

25
    Morning after morning, before anybody is up, me and Peabody are out past the Little Pig Race and Bobby has his pocket watch in the air.
    It turns out there are plenty of woods outside of Nashua.
    ‘You have to start out slow,’ Bobby tells me for the hundredth time. ‘Then pick up speed as you go. That’s what went wrong. If you use up all your heart at the start, you’ll never find your second wind.’
    He checks my laces. They are tied twice. ‘If you get tired, slow down before you fall down. Got it? And go straight uphill, climb rocks, jump over trees. Understand?’
    I nod.
    ‘At the top of the hill, turn around and fly down as fast as you can. And keep your arms at a forty-five-degree angle. Like this.’ He bends my arms at the elbow. ‘Raise them and push back with each step so it’s like you’re pulling back a lever. Try it. And don’t stoop like that.’
    He tells me so many things I can’t keep them in my head. Peabody wags his stumpy tail. Cordelia and LaVerne nosearound the edge of their pen waiting to see somebody else race for a change.
    ‘Ready?’ says Bobby.
    I nod.
    ‘Set,
go
!’
    And we are off.
    I start off fast like a rabbit and then go slow like a turtle, straight into the woods, then fast like a rabbit and slow like a turtle.
    ‘No, no, no!’ Bobby is yelling, following me until I reach the woods.
    I slow down until I am a turtle and I keep that pace until I am over a stone wall and have jumped a pile of logs. I try and come up with all the words I know for
turtle
and
tortoise: sluggish, slow, determined
. I plod forward until I reach the top of the hill and then head down again.
    When I get out of the woods, I see Cordelia sticking her snout through the fence and the sight of her sets me on fire and I am a rabbit all the way back until I fall at Bobby’s feet.
    ‘Not fast enough,’ Bobby says when I am rolling in the dirt, choking as I try to suck air into my lungs. ‘Twice a day. We’ll do this morning and night.’

26
    My muscles are aching. My shins feel like there is a knife slitting them, top to bottom. My face is burned from the sun and the sweat pours down my chest and the back of my neck.
    ‘Eighteen minutes,’ he says the next morning in Portland. ‘You’re still running like a girl.’
    ‘I
am
a girl.’ I glare at him.
    He spits out across Peabody’s head toward me. It nearly hits me. I think maybe I am mad as a wet hen. I suck up spit and shoot it back. It lands in a soft wet drip on the top of my work boot.
    He grins. ‘That all you got?’
    My face is hot from already being mad at him and now even hotter from seeing the spit on my boot.
    ‘There’s an art to spitting. Most girls don’t know how. Do you want to learn?’
    ‘No, I do not want you to teach me to spit.’
    I clomp off with the spit on my boot. I don’t wipe it off until I get to the truck.

27
    ‘Okay, here’s how you do it.’ Bobby sucks up spit in his mouth. I am out watching him feed the piglets the next morning and I am not so mad any more. He scratches each of them behind the ears and talks all sweet to them and calls them Sweet Pea and Darling Dear and Honey Pie. When I am not so mad I think how they are lucky to have him.
    ‘You have to get a lot of spit worked up in your mouth. Whoosh your mouth like this until you get a lot.’ He swishes his mouth around. ‘Then gather the spit on the edge of your tongue and pucker your lips. Then blow as hard as you