Mouthing the Words Read Online Free PDF Page A

so crawling through the fence was something I found myself doing with relative ease. Once on the other side, I stared at the girls, their manes flowing in the breeze.
    “First of all,” said Vellaine. “In this country we call it a horse, not a hoss.”
    “A horse,” I repeated diligently.
    “Now, if you can turn yourself into a kitten, you should have no trouble turning yourself into a horse,” she said decidedly.
    But I couldn’t begin to explain to her that I had actually turned myself into a stick insect in order to get through the fence. That was, after all, all that I knew how to be. I had no idea how to turn myself into anything bigger. A Shetland pony was about all I thought I might be able to muster.
    “OK, a Shetland pony it is. But they’re not very good jumpers. I just happen to have a little magic dust here, so I will sprinkle some on your heels and that should help you fly over the jumps,” Vellaine said, picking up a handful of sand from the sandbox and shaking the special powder across my shoes.
    “To the races!” Binbecka declared, sticking her arm in the air, and we were off. Vellaine followed by Binbecka followed by the Shetland pony. And the magic seemed to be working because I was flying over the jumps with grace and ease.
    “I knew you’d be a natural, strange pony girl,” said Vellaine as she etched nine points into a new column on the ground. “Looks like we have some stiff new competition, Binbi,” she commented.
    What a magical new world I found myself in—of special animals and plays and rain dances and television and soon-to-be school. Papa Claudio had built a wooden stage in the basement with a tree in the corner adorned with little red and white lights we could control with different switches. We performed plays there. Sometimes we performed ballets, and once we even made the room into a scary haunted house. Whatever it was, we charged admission and went to Mac’s Milk afterwards with our earnings to buy Mars bars and Doritos and Coke.
    We danced outside in our bathing suits in August rainstorms , banging empty plastic Becker’s milk jugs together and shouting “boinga boinga boinga!” We watched television and I became engrossed in the lives of new friends like Gilligan and the Skipper and Marsha, Jan and Cindy and the Captain and Mr. Spock.
    My mother yelled at my father, who was disapproving. “I don’t care if they are hippies, at least she’s got some real bloody friends! She’s hardly had a normal childhood with you as her father!”
    But my dad really was disapproving and he started saying, “No more television and no more sleeping over there.” Fine, I just wouldn’t tell them about the latest voyage of the Starship Enterprise and I would invite Binbecka and Vellaine to stay at my house. But they didn’t want to. In fact, although I knew they could turn themselves into kittens to crawl through the hole in the fence, they never wanted to come through to my side.
    “You come over here,” they said. “It’s better over here.”
    The only time I ever saw them come near our house was on Sundays when my mum was roasting a beast in the oven. They used to stand by the extractor fan in the lane between our houses and say, “This smells a hell of a lot better than tofu.”
    “But I like tofu,” I said. “And buckwheat honey and couscous and lentils. We never have those in my house.”
    “Precisely the point,” said Vellaine, inhaling wisely.
    “Well, why don’t you come and eat with us?” I suggested.
    “Because. We don’t like it there. Your father is scary,” Binbi said.
    “Anika and Claudio wouldn’t like it,” Vellaine explained. “They’ve told us to stay away from him.”
    That confused me. I mean, I was afraid of him too, but no one was telling me to stay away from him.
    “Maybe you could adopt me,” I said one day to Anika and Claudio.
    “Oh, I’m afraid we can’t do that,” said Anika, running her fingers through my black hair but