The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter by Holly Robinson Read Free Book Online

easily passed beneath the garage door. By the time we raised the door to follow, the gerbils were tumbling like dried brown leaves across the paved road to a neighbor’s neatly edged lawn. We never recovered our subjects.
    After that, Marcy and I retreated to safer experiments, such as #12: “Gnawing Ability.” This required nothing more challenging than giving various groups of gerbils pieces of wood to chew on, recording their gnawing rates, and describing the shapes they made. This was a fun experiment to record, because while most gerbils would chew up just about anything you gave them, a few seemed to understand that this was their chance to shine. One gerbil, in particular, had the soul of an artist, chewing a little and then sitting back on her hind legs to examine her work before going at it again. We went through an entire box of my sister’s ABC building blocks before Mom found out.
    Afterward, we did as my father suggested and made a display out of each “unique wood sculpture” by gluing them into shoeboxes that we’d painted, creating dioramas of gerbil art. Gail was as pleased as we were with the results, but Mom made me babysit around the neighborhood until I’d earned enough money to replace my sister’s set of blocks.

    S HORTLY after Dad returned from sea duty, Donald and I were watching
The Jetsons
on TV in the den. We were debating whether it would be cooler to have an ejecting bed thatcould pop you out like a toaster or a vacuum tube that could shoot you off to school when Dad burst into the house from the side door to the garage, flailing his arms as if he were being chased by hornets. His hairless head gleamed as pink and shiny as a dog’s nose.
    “One of the gerbils is having a seizure!” he yelled.
    Mom, who was sitting on the couch with Gail, pulled my little sister closer, as if to prevent her from catching whatever lunatic fever had infected our father. “What do you mean, a seizure?” she asked.
    “Damn it, I don’t know!” Dad called over his shoulder as he jogged down the hallway toward his study. “The animal just started shivering and trembling and twitching its whiskers, and then it froze right up stiff!”
    “Maybe it’s dying,” Mom suggested, just this side of hopeful.
    “I don’t think so,” Dad said.
    He returned a minute later, carrying his camera and hurrying back to the garage, still talking fast. “I picked the gerbil up by its tail, and it flopped around and seemed like it was filled with jelly. But then, a minute later, it started running around like nothing had happened.”
    We all raced into the garage after him to witness the miraculous seizing gerbil, which he’d confined to an empty plastic cage. Dad was right: the animal looked normal. But when he picked it up out of its cage and dropped it gently into another empty cage beside it, the gerbil flattened out and bared its teeth, trembling so violently that I tried to stroke its back to calm it.
    Mom snatched me away by the wrist. “Don’t you dare touch that animal,” she said. “It looks rabid.”
    “It can’t have rabies,” Dad scoffed. “What rabid animal could get into the garage in the middle of the night and bite a gerbil?”
    “A muskrat,” she suggested. “A raccoon. A cat.”
    Dad shook his head. “And bite a gerbil through a plastic cage without eating it for a midnight snack? I doubt it. And it’s not like any of the gerbils could get out of the garage on their own.”
    “Just the same, I’m going inside,” Mom said. “You and the kids should, too. We should get rid of that gerbil before it infects somebody else.”
    She left the garage with Donald and Gail and closed the door firmly behind her, but I stayed behind with Dad. Guiltily, I thought of the gerbils that had escaped while Marcy and I were playing with them. Dad had never noticed them missing because he was at sea.
    I thought about Kinky, too, whose life I had saved when Dad discovered the crook in her tail and