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

called her “a defect.” He wanted to “dispose of her” in the same mysterious way he did with other gerbils that didn’t suit his purposes, an activity he did at night after we were in bed. I assumed that he drowned them in the lake, but he never admitted to this. I had pleaded with him for Kinky’s life, though, and he let her live in a separate cage. I still took her out and brought her into the house to play with now and then. Could Kinky have somehow gotten rabies while she was out of the cage?
    “Are you positive that gerbil doesn’t have rabies?” I asked Dad. The gerbil appeared to have recovered completely, and sat up now on its hind legs to stare at us as we stared at it.
    “Absolutely,” he said. “This animal is simply subject to seizures, like an epileptic,” he explained.
    I knew all about epilepsy because Laura Troisi, a new girl in my sixth-grade classroom, had it. Each time Laura had a seizure, the teacher held her down by the legs while the nurse pressed a tongue depressor between Laura’s foaming lips, shouting, “Don’t let the poor thing swallow her tongue!”
    Once, I’d even been the one chosen by the teacher to hold Laura’s legs until the nurse arrived. I tried hard not to look at Laura’s underpants as she flopped around on the cold tile floor, but I could see that she wore day-of-the-week underpants like mine. As noble as I felt for being the one chosen to hold the afflicted in place, it bugged me that Laura had worn Wednesday underpants on a Thursday. The feel of Laura’s cool fishy skin made me shiver, too, and I had to be brave not to make a face at the nubby feel of the black leg hair stubble sprinkled on her skin like pepper.
    “Maybe some gerbils can get epilepsy, but others can’t,” I suggested. “Like people.”
    “You’re probably right, Holly,” Dad said. “Or maybe all gerbils can have seizures, but it has to be the right combination of environmental factors to set them off. I don’t really know.”
    Even though the gerbil in question appeared completely normal again, Dad kept it in a cage by itself after that, just in case there was something wrong with it. From then on, he spent every free minute in the garage, doing everything in his power to induce seizures in gerbils. When I asked why, he muttered, “This could be my big scientific breakthrough.”
    I liked the sound of that. What if my father wasn’t just aNavy commander with a secret stash of gerbils but a genius scientist, like Einstein or Madame Curie? And, by extension, if Dad was a genius, maybe there was hope for me, even if the art teacher at school had just called me a retard for painting my self-portrait blue.
    Some nights I sat on the stepladder in the garage and watched my father at work until Mom sent me to bed. Dad was so intent on the gerbils that he never acknowledged my presence while engaging in various seizure-inducing tactics: shining lights into a gerbil’s eyes, flicking the garage lights on and off, moving gerbils between cages, or holding them upside down by their tails before flipping them right side up again.
    “About the only thing you haven’t done is yell ‘Boo!’ in their faces,” Mom observed one Saturday morning.
    Afterward, we heard Dad shouting at the gerbils in the garage.

    A S DAD conducted his gerbil experiments with increasing intensity, he also began writing to veterinarians and researchers around the country, searching for someone else who might have made the same observations of this bizarre rodent behavior. Eventually he got lucky. Dr. Sigmund T. Rich, director of the research animal facility at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote back to tell Dad that although he had never seen seizures among the gerbils in his lab, he’d sure like to.
    “Film it for me,” Dr. Rich suggested. “I want to see what you’re talking about.”
    So Dad promptly hung up a white sheet in his office as abackdrop and filmed an 8 mm movie of gerbils having