Philip and the Loser (9781619501522) Read Online Free PDF Page A

table, they hammered
the bottom of their cats onto the narrow edges of the small, flat,
square blocks of wood so the biggest part of the wood would make
the cat stand up. When they finished, the boys stood the cats up
and stepped back to admire them.
    “ Hey! What are they doing?” Emery
cried.
    All the cats had bent forward and appeared to
be checking out their paws.
    Philip walked back to the table and
straightened the cat in the middle, but it stubbornly dipped down
and stared at its paws again. Philip looked at Emery in disgust.
“The paper won’t stand up. It’s not thick enough.”
    “ They need something on their backs to
hold them up,” said Emery. “You got any more wood in the
garage?”
    “ I don’t know. Let’s go
see.”
    They searched the garage until they found
seven thin sticks resembling giant Popsicle sticks.
    Philip studied the situation. “I think we
gotta take the cats off and glue them to the skinny stick and then
nail the skinny stick back onto the wood.”
    “ Be careful you don’t rip the cats at
the bottom. I don’t want to have to draw seven more
cats.”
    The boys gingerly pried the cats off their
wooden blocks, but couldn’t help ripping the bottom of the paper on
all of them.
    “ How about we just cut the ripped part
off?” Emery suggested. “These cats don’t really need tails so
much.”
    “ I guess we gotta.” Philip ran into the
house and came back with his mother’s scissors and some white glue.
They cut off the ripped part of the cat’s tails, and after they
glued the sticks to the backs of the cats, they hammered the cats
back onto their stands. The cats, now a little shorter than before,
stood tall nonetheless.
    “ There!” said Philip with satisfaction.
“Let’s try them out. Get the tennis balls. They’re in a bucket. See
them?”
    Emery got two tennis balls from a dented
bucket full of balls sitting on the floor of the garage. Philip
lined the cats up along the edge of the picnic table.
    “ Let me try first,” said Emery. He
wound up and threw. The tennis ball missed everything and sailed
straight to the back wall of the house.
    “ Ha. You won’t be winning any prizes,”
Philip teased.
    Suddenly, one of the cats fell over. Emery
and Philip looked at one another. A weak breeze sailed through the
backyard, and three more cats fell onto their faces. As they
watched in amazement, a second breeze toppled the last three
cats.
    “ I threw one ball and knocked over
seven cats,” Emery muttered in amazement. “Maybe they do need their
tails.”
    “ Not you, goof. You didn’t knock them
over. The air knocked them over,” said Philip. “That’s no good.
We’d lose every time the wind blows.”
    “ Maybe we can nail them down to a
table.”
    “ Then they wouldn’t fall down even if
somebody hit one.”
    Emery thought a minute. “Maybe we can make
them heavier. You got anything to hold them down?”
    Philip scanned his backyard until his gaze
settled on the garden hose. He went and unscrewed the heavy metal
nozzle off the front of it. He moved to the picnic table and put
the nozzle down on the small wooden stand of the end cat. He stood
an unnozzled cat next to it.
    “ There. Let’s see what happens if we
make it heavier.”
    The boys watched for a few moments until the
wind blew. The cat with the nozzle did not topple over, but the
unnozzled cat fell on its face.
    “ Ha! Pretty smart, eh?” Philip crowed.
“Let’s see how the game works now.” He held the second tennis ball
in his hand and moved to where Emery had stood. “Cross your
fingers.”
    Emery crossed his fingers, and Philip
threw. He hit the cat held down by the hose nozzle right in the
stomach.
CRACK
.
    “ Uh, oh,” said Emery. He inspected the
cat’s spine. “The stick is cracked in half. Poor guy’s got half a
tail and a broken back.”
    Philip joined Emery to do his own inspection.
“The stick’s too thin, I guess. Anybody who hits a cat hard will
break the stick. We could