Dusssie Read Online Free PDF Page B

Little-Known Side Effects of Puberty . Or something in how-to, like Reptile Removal for Dummies: Rid Your Head of Troublesome Serpents .
    It’sss no ussse, one of my snakes told me, sounding smug.
    you’re ssstuck with usss , agreed another one.
    â€œWe’ll see about that,” I muttered. A crazy homeless person talking to herself.
    Okay, trying to be real about this, I knew I needed to know a lot more about snakes before I could even begin to figure out how to get rid of my headful. I mean, just calling an exterminator wouldn’t work under the circumstances. I was going to have to come up with a plan myself, and so far, all I knew was that at least one of my snakes was hungry for crayfish. I knew this because I had actually slept for a little while the night before, and during that time I had crawled through grass and mud along a stream, stuck my head under the water, and gulped raw soft-shelled baby crayfish in my dreams. Ick.
    It was Saturday morning, so there were not many people at the library yet. Kids liked to sleep in on Saturday. They wouldn’t start showing up to work on their term papers till afternoon.
    When the doors opened, I scuttled in without looking at anybody, heading for a computer. SEARCH BY SUBJECT : SNAKES . I managed to come up with a couple of call numbers, then headed for the stacks.
    There. A whole shelf full of books on snakes.
    And right in front of them stood a skinny old bony-faced man. I mean old . All bent over like a rusty fire escape falling down. He wore pleated pants hiked up practically to his armpits by bright red suspenders, with a starchy white shirt ballooning out around them. Totally and majorly in my way, he stood staring up from under his hunchback at the snake books.
    My snake books. I needed them.
    I shoved in front of the old man and started grabbing books before he could get them.
    Like, rude . I was being so rude I thought he would move away. But he didn’t. He stayed right where he was, like his big feet in their old-man leather shoes were stuck to the tile. “Goodness,” he said, “you must really like snakes.”
    I ignored him, piling books into my arms: The World of Snakes, The Encyclopedia of Snakes, Snakes of North America .
    â€œI do, too,” the old man talked on, his voice warm and high and breezy like a summer sky. “I think they’re fascinating creatures, the way they walk without legs and swim without fins.”
    I felt my snakes stir in silent approval, like cats purring without making sound.
    The old man continued to talk. “Every term I audit a course at NYU, and I’m trying to decide whether to take herpetology next, or history of architecture.”
    But he was way too old. Surprised out of my silence, I looked at him. “You go to school?”
    I guess he’d been taller once, but bent over by age, he was just my height. He nodded, gazing back at me with pale, eager eyes. “I’ve been taking courses every spring and fall since I retired. In twenty-two years I’ve taken forty-four courses.”
    â€œBut … but what for?”
    â€œTo learn. I enjoy it. And the college kids keep me young.” He smiled all over his sharp face. “Last term I took Writing Personal Poetry. I didn’t do very well. The instructor said I wrote political essays that rhymed. But I had a wonderful time. Where do you go to school?”
    Probably I didn’t anymore. Mom had arranged for me to go see some shrink she knew on Monday, and he was supposed to let her know whether I was sane or not, but also give me a medical excuse. To Mom this was no big deal, because she didn’t understand about school, or think I needed it. I mean, she was the next best thing to a goddess, so she’d learned everything she needed to know on her own, without teachers, and for friends, she had the Sisterhood. But me—you’d think I would be glad not to have to go to school, but I