Chasing Orion Read Online Free PDF

didn’t.” The Mushroom sighed.
    I looked at her more closely. “What’s your name?”
    “Evelyn Winkler. What’s yours?”
    “Georgia Mason, but everyone calls me Georgie.”
    “Me too?” There was something so pathetic about her question. It was almost as if she had never had a close friend.
    “Of course. I said everyone, Evelyn.” I would never think of her as the Mushroom again. And actually a slight blush rose in her pale white cheeks. She smiled and looked pretty again.
    “Why are you interested in myths about the sky?” she asked.
    I began to explain about my small worlds and why I was looking for a good star story. We talked and talked. Evelyn was very nice and very smart. Both her mom and her dad were doctors. I had never heard of a lady doctor before. “What kind of doctor?” I asked.
    “My mom’s a gynecologist.”
    I wasn’t really sure what a gynecologist was, but I asked, “Does she ever have polio patients?”
    She looked at me kind of funny. So I said really quickly, “Just wondering, because the girl who lives next door to us is in an iron lung.”
    “Gee whiz, is she pregnant or something?” Evelyn asked.
    This really threw me for a loop. “No, why?”
    “Well, when you asked if my mom did anything with polio and told me about this girl, I thought maybe she was going to have a baby. That’s the other part of being a gynecologist. She’s an obstetrician, too. She delivers babies. But have you met this girl in the iron lung?”
    “Oh, no. We just moved into the neighborhood.”
    “I never heard of a person at home in an iron lung. Boy, kind of weird, isn’t it?”
    “Sure is.”
    “I wonder if you’ll ever get to meet her,” Evelyn said.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Well, if you do, you don’t have to worry about catching anything. It’s no longer infectious after the person has come down with it.”
    “I know. Not transmissible. I read a lot about polio.”
    “Did you know that they used to think it was a poor people’s disease? But that was all wrong.”
    “Really? I never read that.”
    “Yep. The virus spreads through people not washing their hands after pooping and other bodily secretions.” I wasn’t sure what the word
secretions
meant, but I could take a pretty good guess — pee, possibly. I thought of how when I was really little I had often peed in swimming pools, rather than taking the time to get out and walk all the way to a bathroom. “But it’s actually the poor people with bad sewers that built up an immunity to those viruses.”
    “So it’s rich people with better sewers who get it now.”
    “Yep,” Evelyn said, and blinked.
    Of course, now we had moved into this new fancy neighborhood that probably had much better sewers than our old neighborhood. Not that I ever noticed anything wrong with the plumbing. It turned out that Evelyn and her family had just moved, too. They had lived closer to the downtown of Indianapolis before and she had gone to a special school for really smart kids, an exam school where you had to take a test to get in. But now her parents felt it was too long a drive to that school. So she would be going to the same new school as I would. This was some consolation. At least I would know someone.
    Before I knew it, the hour was up and Mom was coming in the front door of the library. But Evelyn and I made plans to meet there the next day. We exchanged phone numbers. I checked out a whole mess of books. Just before I was going out the door, Evelyn came and said, “You never told me what your favorite constellation is, Georgie.” She smiled when she said my name. It was as if she just enjoyed the sound of it.
    “Orion! It’s so beautiful. The jeweled sword, the club, the lion skin that he drags across the winter sky. But it’s a really sad story.”
    “But if you love it, you should do it.”
    “Maybe so,” I said softly.
    I did love the Orion story, and there were as many versions of that as any of the rest. The problem with