You Will Call Me Drog by Sue Cowing Read Free Book Online

fools.”
    “Dr. M.? He was okay. At least he believed me.”
    “You think so? ‘Ignore Drog,’ ha! What ignorance! When it’s time to see that Dr. Mann again, you and I will have a previous engagement.”

    Friday. What was I going to do for a whole weekend without Wren?
    That night wasn’t actually so bad. Mom brought out a video she checked out from the library where she works. She likes movies about other places and times, and I like adventure, so she chose
October Sky
. It’s about this small-town kid named Homer back in the nineteen-fifties who gets all excited after the Russians put up Sputnik, the first satellite, and starts building his own rockets. Some of his friends get into it, too, but he is the leader, and after a couple of impressive blow-ups, he makes terrific rocket. He dreams of becoming a rocket scientist, and his mom is all for it. His dad, though, is counting on him to stay in Coalwood and work in the mine like him and his grandfather.
    For a while, I almost forgot about Drog.

chapter eight
    Saturday it poured. Way after Mom left for the library, I rolled out of bed and fixed myself some toast, dropping a couple of blobs of jelly on my foot.
    “Ah. That would be toe jam, I presume,” Drog said.
    Then I just couldn’t get started on anything, because everything needed Wren. It was like when there’s a power failure and you keep forgetting and trying to switch on lights.
    I could see nothing but rain out of every window. There were plenty of unfinished projects in the spare room, like the flying saucer I was trying to make out of a model-plane motor and two hubcaps I found. Things I’d built out of Legos, starting with the crocodile I made when I was seven, crammed the shelves where Dad used to keep his engineering notebooks in neat rows.
    Maybe I could work on Wren’s and my bird feeder, which was supposed to look like this Japanese castle. We had to buy bags of extra Legos from the thrift shop so we’d have enough whites.
    I tried snapping a couple of bricks together, but they slipped and pinched my finger. I probably could do it, but it was hard. Too slow. No fun anymore. I needed two hands. Or a friend.
    I wandered back into the living room and rewound the movie from the night before. This time, watching the kids make rockets and set them off just reminded me of all the things I couldn’t do anymore. And Homer’s arguments with his dad made me shut the thing off.
    “You’ve got a rocket in your pocket,” Drog said.
    Dad. I was going to have to get free from Drog before Dad found out about him, but how? When Dad had a problem he couldn’t solve, he wrote it out, and he always came up with an answer.
    I took a pencil and notepad from Mom’s desk and wrote:
I need to get this talking puppet off my hand
. Then I drew little arrows out from the problem the way Dad does, pointing to possible solutions. Arrow:
pull him off
. Arrow coming out of that arrow:
squeezes harder and stays on
. More arrows for cutting and soaking and even
pretend he’s not there
, with arrows coming out of them all leading to “stays on.” Dad’s arrows led to answers, mine just took me back to the problem. I must be stupid. I scribbled a picture of me, cross-eyed.
    After studying the phone for a while, I picked it up and called Wren.
    Her mom answered.
    “I’m sorry, Parker. Wren’s not here right now. She’s at a friend’s house.”
    “Oh, that’s right,” I said, making myself feel even dumber. “Thanks.”
    A friend’s house.
    “You see?” Drog said.
    I scuffed into the kitchen. Wren and I always had plans. For the day and for the future. As soon as we were old enough to drive, we were going to put together a whole car from junkyard parts and go on a long trip out west together, exploring towns in the atlas that nobody ever heard of unless they lived close by, towns with names like Hurricane, Utah; Searchlight, Idaho; and, Wren’s favorite, Horse Heaven, Oregon. And of course we’d collect