The Prisoner of Snowflake Falls by John Lekich

Author:John Lekich
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: JUV021000, book
ISBN: 9781554699803
Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
Published: 2012-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

NINE

I woke up way later than everybody else. Mostly because I’d had the most horrible night’s sleep of my life. Oscar was the worst roommate you could ever imagine. When he wasn’t snoring, he was awake and saying my name over and over again. “Hen-wee! Hen-wee! Henwee!” When he got tired of repeating my name, he would try out different kinds of screams.

They weren’t the kind of terrifying screams that would make Theodora come running. It was more like Oscar was screaming for fun. He’d found the perfect volume for screaming at night. Not loud enough to wake anybody else. But just loud enough to make my life totally miserable.

Finally, I remembered the earplugs. But when I reached inside my drawer to get them, they had vanished. Oscar was standing up in his crib, with his chubby little hands around the bars. “Where did you hide the earplugs?” I asked sternly. He let go of the bars and looked at me, all innocence. Then he shrugged, with his palms up in the air.

“Just go to sleep!” I said.

“Seep!” said Oscar, pointing to his stuffed toy, a little lamb with a missing eye. “Baa-h!”

“Not sheep!” I said. “Sleep!”

But it was too late. Oscar began to run through his collection of barnyard noises. He was imitating the snort of a pig for the forty-eighth time when I realized it had blended into one long snore. I must have managed to sleep for a little while after that, because I do remember opening my eyes in the morning and forgetting where I was.

At first, I expected to see the familiar wooden beams on the inside of Evelyn’s tree house roof. Instead, I saw a mobile of circus animals attached to the ceiling. I looked over at Oscar’s empty supercrib and suddenly remembered that I was in Snowflake Falls. I pulled the blankets over my face and let out a big groan. Even my worst night in Evelyn’s backyard had been better than my first night in Oscar’s room.

I thought maybe I would just roll over and go back to sleep for a while, but then I felt a small tug on the bottom of my blanket, followed by a piercing scream. It sounded a bit like a really loud smoke alarm. Except that every once in a while, the smoke alarm would pause for breath before starting right up again.

I looked up from under the covers and there was Oscar, fully dressed and all flushed from screaming. As soon as he saw my face, he broke out into a big smile. “Please don’t say ‘Hen-wee,’” I begged.

“Hen-wee!” he said, with a high-pitched squeal of glee. Then he opened the bottom drawer of the dresser and started to throw my folded underwear all over the place. “Put down my underwear,” I shouted. “And it’s not Hen-wee. It’s Hen-ree.”

After throwing my only clean T-shirt across the room, Oscar squinted at me with his mouth hanging open. Observing his baby squint, I realized that he was probably going to end up needing big clunky eyeglasses.

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