Half Brother by Kenneth Oppel

Author:Kenneth Oppel [Oppel, Kenneth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4434-1127-1
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2011-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

On June twentieth we celebrated Zan’s first birthday in the backyard. Peter was there, and lots of the other students. I’d wanted to invite David and Jennifer—it was my last chance to see them before they left for Europe—but Dad said it should just be people Zan was very familiar with; he didn’t want Zan to get overexcited. As it was, he was pretty darn excited.

I didn’t know if he understood what was going on, but he wolfed down three huge pieces of Mom’s banana cake, had more glasses of ginger ale than was good for him, and ripped the wrapping paper off his presents with lots of hoots and shrieks.

Mom and Dad got him a new ball, and I got him another birdfeeder that we could hang up in the backyard to attract even more birds. (Listen bird, he signed to me when he opened the box.)

Peter got him a pair of his own sneakers, because Zan was fascinated by people’s shoes and was always pulling them off and trying them on himself.

Dad invited the local paper, and they sent a photographer to take some pictures of Zan surrounded by all of us, singing “Happy Birthday to You” before we cut the cake. Dad figured it might undo some of the bad publicity we got after the biting incident. See, he’s adorable and no one lost a finger!

My own birthday, ten days later, was pretty good too—much better than last year’s. This time we actually made it to Beaver Lake, leaving Zan at home with Peter. I really liked it just being the three of us. When Zan was around, all eyes, including my own, were on him. He was the star of the family, the celebrity. I wondered if I was still a bit jealous of him sometimes.

But it was strange being without him. When he was little, we’d sometimes taken him with us shopping and even to restaurants, but now that he was so active, we couldn’t take him out in public. He wasn’t used to cars or big crowds. He might get freaked out and bite someone or—and this was scariest to me—he might run off into the forest and decide he didn’t want to live with us any more. Dad had once said that if we ever took him out in public we’d have to put him in a collar and leash, but I’d hate to see that—even if it was for his own safety.

I stretched out on my beach towel. School was all over now. My final marks weren’t the greatest, but I’d improved a bit, and that seemed enough to satisfy Dad. He wasn’t going to pull me out of Windermere. I closed my eyes and thought of Jennifer, somewhere in Europe. I thought of smoothing suntan lotion on her perfect back.

When we got home, Mom and Dad gave me a great new photo enlarger as my main present. And in the evening, instead of going out to a restaurant, we just ordered in Chinese food, because that way, Zan could be with us.

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