Thirteen Plus One by Lauren Myracle Read Free Book Online Page A

on my bed and drew my knees to my chest. I did not want this conversation to go bad.
    “How about Saturday?” I suggested.
    “Sorry, told Bryce I’d watch the Hawks game with him. They’ve got a shot at first in the division. Hey—wanna join?”
    Um ... sure, only Cinnamon would kill me. “Nah. But thanks.”
    From downstairs, Mom called up a request. “Winnie? Would you margle-gargle Ty?”
    I pressed my phone to my chest. “ What ? I can’t hear you!”
    “Mlarfle mflarfle bath!” she called. “Please?”
    I groaned. “Mom needs me to go make Ty take his bath.”
    “Okay,” Lars said. “I should go anyway. I should finish my lab report.”
    Depression kicked in, intensified by how little he seemed to care. “But ... are we ... ?”
    “I want to,” Lars said. He exhaled, and I realized he was frustrated, too. Which made me feel slightly better, but at the same time more stuck in the mire. How pathetic was it that neither one of us could solve such a seemingly simple problem of wanting to spend time together? “You come up with something, and we’ll do it. All right?”
    Why me? I thought. Why do I have to come up with something?
    “Winnie!” Mom called. “Are you flarfle glargle ?! ”
    “I hear your mom,” Lars said. “I’ll let you go.”
    But I don’t want to be “let go,” I thought. What I said, flatly, was “Okay, bye.” I tapped the END CALL bubble and watched his profile picture be sucked— whoosh —back into the phone.
    Ty had a phobia about taking a bath alone. Why? Because of the Bathroom Lady. And who was the Bathroom Lady? No one. The Bathroom Lady didn’t exist.
    So why was Ty afraid of her? Because I was good at inventing stories, and long long long ago I’d told Ty that a witch named the Bathroom Lady lived in the sewer system and slurped up tasty children through the pipes. I made the story good, too, giving the Bathroom Lady rubbery lips and grasping claws as blue and cold as ice.
    Whoops.
    I rapped on the door of the bathroom, then twisted the knob and barged in. Ty was squatting fully dressed by the tub. Not in the tub, but by the tub, just staring at the drain. He whipped his head around at the sound of my arrival.
    “Ty,” I scolded. “You’re seven years old. You’re too old to be afraid of taking a bath.”
    Ty’s eyes widened, and he propped his elbows on the edge of the tub and tried to form a wall with his scrawny upper body. “I’m sorry, Ty is unavailable,” he said. “ Beep . Please leave a message.”
    What was he hiding? I attempted to peek past him. He moved his body in tandem with mine.
    “Ty, what’s going on?”
    “Nothing! Beep! Leave a message!”
    I spotted his backpack on the bathroom floor. His open, empty backpack. He scrambled to his feet and drove his hands into my hip bones, attempting to push me backward.
    “Not gonna work, bud,” I said, lifting him from under his armpits and moving him out of the way. “Whatever you’ve got in there, I’m sure it’s not—”
    My throat closed, because there was a penguin in the bathtub . A penguin , and it was alive, and its chest puffed in and out as it breathed. It pitter-pattered from side to side when it saw me, and its penguin feet made slippery sounds on the porcelain.
    “Heheheh,” Ty said. It was his robot laugh, which he pushed from his lungs in an anxious monotone.
    “Ty?” I finally managed. “There is a penguin in our bathtub! ”
    He made his “adorable me” smile, but like his heheheh, it was stretched too tight.
    A vague memory floated into my mind. Ty went on a field trip today—the details were coming back to me. To the Georgia Aquarium. And apparently he’d acquired a penguin while he was there, a penguin which was now in our bathtub.
    “His name is Pingy,” Ty whispered. “He’s a baby.”
    Omigod. I knelt by the tub and gulped. I gingerly touched the penguin’s feathers. I thought a penguin’s skin would be more slippery, like a seal’s, but maybe that