By Lily
Stupid X plus stupid Y equals stupid Z plus seventy-eight…. I knew that I would never finish my Algebra homework this way. But I thought I had a good reason to be annoyed. Diana had very plainly told me, “Forty-two seconds, you have, to slip on your shoes and come outside.” Then somewhere within that time, I was later told that it was thirty-eight seconds in, I had been told that my Algebra teacher just assigned us four pages of new homework that was due tomorrow. It was already evening, early evening. Around 5:00 had been when I was invited out by Diana. Now, it was 5:32 and oh…how many seconds? I thought, Forget seconds! The minutes will do! Though I knew Diana liked me to be exact with my math, I couldn’t be exact. I had lived with Diana so many years, that octopi were cnidarians if I didn’t know she would give me forty-two seconds, exactly forty-two seconds, and at the forty-third second mark, she would start waiting, usually a little ways from our homes, at 9584 Crescent Drive. Or else I would find her at Squeaky Road’s dead end. (By the way octopi are NOT cnidarians)!!
I looked out the window of my room, and sure enough, there she was. I could see her, her long blonde hair blowing in untidy waves. She was peering at a patch of grass, where I could barely see Coco camouflaged against dried grass.
Early June, it was. The grass was just drying up, and there were only a few days of school left. Littlewick Green, England was teeming with greens, yellows, blues, and extravagant puffs of snow-white cumulus clouds.
Coco darted quickly around, leapt back, and took a strike forwards. As you may have imagined, she was the same, quick, grouchy four-legged feline I had known to be so loyal to those loved ones, and so aggressive to those of her enemies. As you could imagine, Coco belonged to Diana Reed.
Beside Coco stood a silky Retriever Pyrenees mix. Butter, I thought. Butter was another of Diana’s pets, but a dog. Named for his butter-colored coat that was golden—like a retriever but tinted with the snow-white of the Pyrenees, he watched Coco hunting intently. I laughed. Butter wanted to hunt like Coco, and he always tried. However the bell on his collar was what always gave him away.
A meow startled me. My cat, Mr. Sherlock Holmes padded swiftly in. Jumping onto the window seat, he sat down, cutting my view from Diana.
“Hey, Sherlock!” I protested.
“Mreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeoooooooooow…” Sherlock protested back, wiggling and twisting, trying to get out of my grip.
I emptied him on the carpet, making him growl grouchily. Coco had vanished. In fact, so had Diana!
A loud bang on the door rattled the entire house.
So THAT’S where Diana’s been! I thought to myself. But why on earth would she come rattling on the door if she knows I won’t come out? For I knew she knew exactly what was going on. She would not come rattling on the door for no good reason when she knew I was busy. Because, though I could not say she thought everything out…she didn’t do things for no good reason, either. So why was she banging on the door?
The door opened, and I heard a murmur of voices. After a while, the door slammed shut. An engine started, and our family’s bright teal beetle pulled out of the driveway.
*
“Hello, Lucian.”
I whirled around in the seat. Diana was standing in the doorway, apparently she had padded down the hall, into my room, and then across the room and through the door into my study, all without making a sound.
“Diana!”
“English teacher mixed us up again, did you hear? She gave us one copy of reading homework, not two. Thought we were in the same family, again.” Diana seemed unconcerned about her reading homework, more concerned about our clumsy and very forgetful English teacher. “Had to photocopy it for you. Here.” She tossed a stapled stack of papers at me. “Your reading homework.”
“What—what happened to Coco?” I stammered.
“Oh, her.” Diana replied coolly. “I thought you might ask about her. She’s just been carted off in that teal insect of yours.”
“Diana!” I snapped disapprovingly. “You know I hate it when you call our car a teal insect!”
“Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay, okaaaaaaaaay. I’ll stop teasing you about it.” Diana smiled. “Anyways, what’s the big deal about it? I have a purple insect.”
“Diana, we have other things to worry about.”
“Like?”
“Tell me now, what happened to Coco?”
“Okay, here’s the whole story. Coco was hunting a snake, to be exact a garter snake, also known as a grass snake, also known as a garden snake. So then, she got bitten by the grass snake—”
The telephone rang. Diana picked it up, and asked, “Hello?”
A muffled reply came back.
“What!” Diana exclaimed. “You say she went missing? Oh…okay that works. C’mon Lucian! You’re done with your homework, anyway. We’ve got to find Coco. She went missing.”
But just at 9584 Crescent drive we saw Coco. A snake was by her. And it was trying to eat her.
I jumped back in surprise.
“Lucian!” Diana barked. “Don’t you see how urgent this situation is? If you don’t get right back here, Coco is going to become snake chow!”
The snake opened his mouth, and advanced. It stopped abruptly, hissed, and slunk away.
As for me and Diana, we burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter.
“Well?” I asked Diana. “Your predictions were not quite correct. Coco did not become snake chow, just…attempt-snake-chow.”
“Haha. Very funny,” Diana retorted, “Let’s get Coco inside. We’ll wait for Mr. and Mrs. Read inside.”
*
One hundred sixty-two, one hundred sixty-three, one hundred sixty-four, one hundred sixty-five….
Click!
Phew! I thought to myself. Waiting for your parents to go to bed was hard. Usually when I had counted to about sixty-three was when I heard their light click off. I stared at my glow-in-the-dark watch. 9:59, okay.
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick….
Ah! Exactly 10:00! I stole across the floor, and opened the window. Outside, there was an outcropping of the eaves, which I mounted easily onto. I followed the tree branch that snaked sneakily across the eaves, and climbed onto the big tree. Oh! The snake was there! I tried not to laugh; it was trying to eat a bird but was still not big enough. That was all I needed to figure out. Slowly, quietly, I crept back through the window, and decided to call Diana tomorrow, to find out just what was going on with Coco and the snake.
*
“You say you what?” Diana asked, amazed.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Okay, this seems to have taken a turn. You say the same snake was sighted at 10:00 PM last night, right?”
“Exactly. But Diana, we have to hurry. You know I still have English homework to finish.”
“Oh well! Your English homework can wait. It’s like your Algebra homework. You did it all yesterday because you didn’t know today was a conference meeting day. Well, what if tomorrow was also a conference day? I mind procrastinating about my thinking, but not about homework. So its not as if I care if you procrastinated. I procrastinate even more than you do, yet I still get good grades. Like I said, I don’t care if you procrastinate!”
“Well,” I thought a bit, then finally said, “I do.”
“Well there are more important things to do than homework. That snake isn’t an existing species. No grass snake comes around paralyzing animals, and if it was a poisonous species, first of all it wouldn’t look so alike. That snake has the exact same pattern as the grass snake. But grass snakes are not poisonous. Not even paralyzing. This has to be a hybrid snake. But no more evidence shows itself. Let us go, investigate at…hmmm…where?”
“It has to be a zoo,” I remarked. “Or an animal sanctuary. There’s only one poisonous snake wild in England. Anyways Adders are hemotoxic, not paralyzing.”
“THAT’S IT!” Diana sprang out of her seat so fast the chair tipped over. “My parents were talking about some commotion at the London Zoo. It seemed to surprise them—”
“But Mrs. and Mr. Reed didn’t want to startle you, so they kept the secret as best as they could. And then you figured it out.”
“Lucian, you are really getting the hang of how to properly deal with my ideas. Interrupt me when you know what’s going to happen next. So since the London Zoo is the one that was causing this commotion, it is the zoo near enough for a snake to crawl over here, it’s the only one that makes sense. Let us go conduct the investigation now.”
“But I have English homework to do, and according to the school calendar tomorrow is not a conference day.”
“Oh well!”
“Not oh well.”
“Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine,” Diana agreed. “But tomorrow, 3:00 AM be ready to be all set, with your shoes on, no homework excuses, and then we’ll go.”
I slipped through the door. “Bye.”
*
The abysmally purple beetle, or, as Diana called it, the “purple insect” pulled out of the driveway, drove one block up, and paused there. I stepped quickly in, though I had never been on Diana’s beetle before. Their family usually biked to places, to help prevent so much car exhaust from mixing into clean air. But on long trips, like this one, had to be done by car. Looking around myself, I realized the difference between this car and a normal car. It had fewer dials, knobs, and buttons than a regular car, and also it was smaller than even a regular beetle. But the biggest difference was that Diana was sitting in the driver seat. She turned around and smiled at me.
“Diana!” I spluttered. “You—you don’t have a driver’s license!”
“Oh well, Lucian. So what if I don’t have one, I don’t need one. Have you never realized that this is not a car? You realize that it doesn’t have a trunk? You see, we got a golf cart as a Christmas present from my Mom’s colleague, and we just renovated it into a car sort of thing. We gave it an extra row of seats, too. You don’t need a driver’s license to drive a golf cart—there!” Then Diana pressed on the accelerator and the golf cart—which I am still going to call a beetle, leapt into action.
It was, like Diana had requested, 3:00 AM in the morning. The sky was still dark, and the whole town of Littlewick Green was asleep. Sometime later, Diana reported that we were entering Maidenhead, which was also asleep. Then Slough, then Hayes, then Southall, then Brentford, then finally the outskirts of London. It had been around 35 minutes. Two minutes later we reached the more city-like part of London. About a minute later Diana pulled up outside the towering pillars of the Reptile House.
“Okay, ready?” Diana asked in a hushed whisper. I nodded and we entered in the Reptile House. Inside we lurked about in the darkness, being careful to keep in the shadows. When we were absolutely sure that nobody was around, Diana switched on a dim flashlight.
“Aha!” Even the slightest whisper of mine echoed loudly about the empty room. One of the exhibits, the Banded Krait exhibit’s glass was broken at the bottom. A wet trail glittered in the beam of Diana’s flashlight.
“That’s it!” She whispered. Then she glanced again. “Look. These are some footprints. People have been here. But evidently they weren’t following the snake. Also, the snake escaped today. But that doesn’t make sense—oh! Just under this wet trail, Lucian, do you see a dry trail? That is because it has been coming back and forth, back and forth. Probably to move some things that it needs over to its new nest in Littlewick Green.”
Suddenly, that Banded Krait slid out of the hole in the glass and slipped into the shadows. Then, it was gone.
“Lucian, I believe we have just witnessed one of the parents of the hybrid.”
“Diana, why don’t we inform the people that the Banded Krait got free?”
“Because they already know. Now, Lucian, what have you in your pockets?”
“Nothing much. An extra-large triangular paperclip, a popcorn kernel, an eraser, and a piece of wire.”
“Oh. And I have a hairpin, a mirror, a compass that comes with a magnifying glass, a tiny hole-puncher, and a thin extendable metal rod.”
The sound of footsteps echoed in the hall.
*
Though the hole in the glass was big, it was barely big enough. And I had barely enough time to process what was going on, to this day I don’t know exactly what happened. I had to trust Diana’s excerpt and claim, which I took to be truth. It all happened so fast, all I knew was one moment I was standing on solid ground, then I was slid lying down on a surface of smooth concrete or something like it. I found myself staring at a shard of jagged glass, then with a loud splash—the concrete was whisked away.
To my horror, I was in the Banded Krait glass case. I peered around. Through the glass, I could hardly see Diana. She hadn’t had time to hide herself; she would have to rely on keeping to the shadows.
*
The footsteps died away into muffled talking.
“Lucian!” Diana hissed. “I can’t get you out from here.”
“Diana, why—”
“Get out.” Diana’s voice was firm. “You can get out from inside. We’ve got stuff to do.” She checked her watch. “4:00.”
“Okay, what now?”
“That snake is circling in front of the golf cart. We’ve got to follow it back to Littlewick Green and send all these little snakes back.”
So we drove at a steady speed about 4 feet or so from the snake, all the way back to Littlewick Green.
When we at Squeaky Road dead end, Diana parked the beetle. She kneaded the eraser, extended the rod part way, and pushed the kneaded eraser up the rod. She unfolded the paperclip and stuck one end of it into the eraser. She fixed it on tightly with wire. “By the way, Lucian, don’t try make one of these, a makeshift snake hook won’t work unless it were very little used.” Diana picked up a bucket from the back of the car. “Ooookay. This’ll have to do.”
We slid after the Banded Krait under the hedge of blackberries, on the dust ground. Suddenly we emerged, though. The hedge was a thing of the past. A nest of snakes lay at our feet, the Banded Krait, the grass snake, and the hybrid. All of it.
*
Slowly, carefully, Diana picked up each snake in turn. We drove back to the zoo, where Diana left the bucket at the door of the staff room. On the bucket she wrote with a dry erase marker:
Returned Banded Krait Family:
This Banded Krait has been found breeding with a nonvenomous grass snake. The whole family was brought to you in case of any more outbreaks of venom among people and animals. Please note that those who caught this would rather stay anonymous rather than to be turned into a public celebrity.
Thank you for understanding
-Anonymous
*
RIIIIIIIIIIIIIING! RIIIIIIIIIIIING!
I smacked my alarm clock. Six already??? We were just up at five… my thoughts were interrupted by a loud banging on the window.
I looked that way, and my jaw dropped. It was raining outside, and Diana was on the roof outcrop.
“Hello, Lucian. I see you’ve finally procrastinated.”
I jumped in surprise. I had procrastinated. “Diana, can’t talk now,” I said hurriedly.
And again came that familiar catchphrase: “Oh well!”
