Cherry Blossom Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page A

always loved flowers, and that my dad was always taking pictures of me holding them or smelling them or sitting in a field full of them. And sometimes when I see beautiful flowers or blossoming trees I get this silly dreamy notion that my dad is looking down on me from heaven, or wherever he is, and smiling along with me.
    I looked at the house and my smile faded as I saw my brother and Zack through the window of the downstairs back room. They were looking at something on the floor.
    I had a bad feeling as I opened the back door. I kept thinking of how Sean’s eyes would light up with excitement as he described how Zack’s pet tarantula, Tallulah, had a very hairy bottom to sense any predators that were sneaking up behind her. Or how cool it was feeding live crickets to Zack’s two lizards, Tex and Mex. Or how awesome it was to watch Zack’s corn snake, Percy, swallowing his weekly meal of a dead mouse. Sean and Zack had actually filmed Percy swallowing a mouse (head first) and added a soundtrack of spaghetti-sucking noises when Percy got to the tail. They’d posted it on YouTube and they were always checking to see how many hits they’d got. (Really, twelve-year-old boys are totally gross.)
    I burst into the back reception room.
    They were both squatting on the floor next to a large plastic box. That’s when my worst fears were confirmed. Well, not my worst, because that would have been the tarantula, but when I saw the snake on the floor in front of them, I let out a loud and very genuine scream.
    Sean looked cross. ‘Shut up, Sasha. You’ll scare him.’
    ‘ Me scare him ?’ I took a wobbly step backwards.
    ‘It’s OK, Sasha, he’s not dangerous,’ Zack said at once.
    ‘Is that what I think it is?’ I pointed to the snake, which had a suspicious-looking lump a short way down its long body.
    ‘Yeah,’ Sean said. ‘We just fed him.’
    ‘That’s disgusting,’ I snapped.
    ‘No, it’s not,’ Zack said, quickly defending his pet. ‘It’s perfectly natural. You eat dead animals, don’t you?’
    Before I could reply, Sean said with a stupid laugh, ‘Not whole ones, she doesn’t. You know … with the skin, and the eyes and the ears, and the cute little hands and feet and tail.’
    ‘Shut up, Sean,’ I hissed at him.
    Zack didn’t look fazed. ‘The point is she still eats them.’ He looked gravely at me. ‘And in any case, you have a choice about what to eat, Sasha, because you’re an omnivore. Monty isn’t .’
    ‘Monty?’ I was keeping my gaze fixed steadily on the snake, which had quite attractive gold, brown and black patterned scales. ‘I thought he was called Percy. He’s a corn snake, right?’ Mum and I had already looked up ‘corn snake’ on the internet just to satisfy ourselves that they were as harmless as my brother claimed.
    ‘ Percy is a corn snake,’ Zack said. ‘But this isn’t Percy. This is Monty and he’s a ball python.’
    ‘A python !’ I only just stopped myself from screaming again. ‘Oh my God! Isn’t that poisonous?’
    ‘You mean venomous and no … he isn’t,’ Zack replied calmly. ‘Pythons are constrictor snakes.’
    ‘You mean the kind who coil round you and squeeze you to death? Oh my God!’ I had stepped right back to stand outside the room now.
    ‘Oh, quit being so dramatic, Sasha,’ Sean said abruptly. ‘He’s way too small to constrict you !’ He actually stroked the snake as he added, ‘Don’t let her get to you, Monty – you just keep chomping away.’
    ‘ Digesting away,’ Zack corrected him. ‘He doesn’t have teeth, remember.’
    ‘Sorry, professor,’ Sean said, as it thankfully clicked with me that the snake’s mouth probably was quite small compared with the size of a human head.
    ‘Monty isn’t mine,’ Zack told me. ‘This guy I know wanted to get rid of him so I said I’d take him, but when I asked Mum and Dad they said no. Mum read something about how a huge python in Africa swallowed a child in some village