Quinny & Hopper Read Online Free PDF Page A

my picture some more.
    Then I figure out why I can’t sleep. My picture is all by itself. It has nobody to talk to. I think it might be lonely.
    I have no idea where all my art stuff is, but I find an empty moving box — #29. Rip!
    I tiptoe to the bathroom and unzip Mom’s makeup bag. She’s got all kinds of pencils and crayons in here. It would be rude to wake her up, so I borrow just a few.
    Back in my room, I draw a crinkly forehead and a careful, quiet mouth and a pair of looking-looking eyes. My picture is a little crooked. I guess my fingers can’t draw as fancy as Hopper’s, but so what? His mouth can’t talk as much as mine.
    I lean my cardboard picture of Hopper against my window, facing out at his paper picture of me.
    There.
    Now these two can keep each other company while Hopper and I sleep.

Twelve

    Teaching a person how to juggle isn’t easy. Especially if that person is Quinny.
    I’m too shy to knock on her door, so Mom calls her house after breakfast. Thirty seconds later, Quinny is standing right in front of me. Smiling. She’s not even out of breath. She’s got a watermelon barrette in her hair, but she smells like peaches.
    “Hi, Hopper!” she cries. “Guess what! That chicken named Freya came clucking at our door again, but she ran off before I could talk to her. Plus then, in my cup of milk at breakfast I had the biggest bubble ever!”
    I don’t know what to say to that, so I turn and walk upstairs. Quinny follows me. I go into my room. She keeps following me.
    Quinny stares at my fish tank full of clown fish and crabs. She stares at my foot model full of bones. She stares at my eyeball, brain, and heart, all lined up on the shelf next to my foot.
    “ Wo w, Hopper, your brothers were right. Yo u’ve got tons of body parts in here!”
    “I’m saving up for a whole skeleton.”
    “A real one?”
    “No, a plastic one. Like the kind they use to train doctors in medical school.”
    Then Quinny notices my favorite book, Atlas of Human Anatomy by Frank H. Netter. She picks it up. “ Wo w, it’s so heavy! What’s inside this thing?”
    “Please be careful with that.” I help her be careful. The book is special.
    We open it. We turn the pages gently.
    I show Quinny what the inside of a person’s head looks like. “T hat’s very, very, extra-very beautiful,” she says. “A nd kind of weird.”
    “T his is where you feel sad.” I point to the limbic system, deep inside the brain. “A nd also where you feel happy.”
    “ We ll, I get sad in my stomach,” says Quinny. “I get happy in my nose.”
    And in her teeth, too, I think.
    “So where is it?” she asks.
    I don’t understand this question.
    “My picture. Yo u know, the one you drew of my face last night? With the skin on?”
    Oh that. I took it out of my window this morning and slid it under my bed so Trevor and Ty wouldn’t see it when they left for soccer practice. I pull it out. I show it to Quinny.
    “I look so quiet,” she says.
    “I made up that part.”
    “Yo u’re good at drawing teeth,” she says.
    “T hanks. Yo u’re good at having teeth.”
    What I mean is, I like Quinny’s smile—but you can’t just say that, especially not to a girl. My face feels hot. I decide to change the subject.
    I pull out my beanbags and toss them up into a basic three-ball cascade.
    “ Wo w, Hopper, you’re the best juggler in the world!”
    I switch over into a cross-arm reverse cascade. Quinny gasps and laughs and grabs one of the beanbags from the air as I juggle. “Can I try?” she cries.
    “Of course. But not with these.” I put down the beanbags and pull out two thin blue silk scarves instead.
    “Scarves?”
    “Silk juggling scarves. They’re lightweight, so they float in the air and are easier for beginners to catch.”
    “Sounds boring. How about juggling knives?”
    “Quinny, just give it a try.”
    “Or fire sticks! I think the best way to learn juggling is with fire sticks! Because then you would