The Boy Book by E. Lockhart

Author:E. Lockhart [Lockhart, E.]
Language: rus
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2008-09-28T20:00:00+00:00

I was at my zoo job. I’d spent the morning at the Family Farm, helping toddlers get food out of the dispensers and answering questions about the names of the llamas and the breeds of the goats. It was actually fun. I pet the soft gray necks of the llamas and fed Maggie the cow a handful of pellet treats. Her tongue was slimy when she licked them off my fingers.

Then I helped Lewis in the greenhouse for a bit, watering stuff and pruning a little, and ate my brown-bag lunch by the elephant enclosure, watching a baby elephant trail around after its mother.

Two o’clock was the penguin feeding. I had my script memorized, but I also had a printout of it folded up in my pocket. Anya met me by the door of the AV closet and got me set up, since it was my first time being official penguin announcer. The feeding schedule was posted all around the zoo, so a few minutes before we were supposed to start, visitors began crowding in around the penguins, watching them swimming their fat bodies through the blue water.

The room was dark, and penguins on the land part of the enclosure seemed to sense that feeding time was near: a good number of them had waddled over to the door, waiting for the keepers to come out with buckets of fish.

I stood on a footstool and started my talk when Anya gave me the sign to go ahead. “Welcome to the Woodland Park Zoo’s Humboldt penguin feeding. You’ll notice that Humboldts are medium-sized penguins, averaging twenty-eight inches long and weighing about nine pounds. You can distinguish them from other penguins by the black band of feathers across their chests and by the splotchy pink patches on their faces and feet. The pink parts are bare skin, which is an adaptation that keeps these warm-weather penguins nice and cool. Humboldts are native to the coastal regions of Peru and Chile.”

I looked up from my paper as the keepers entered the enclosure wearing knee-high rubber boots. Penguins started hopping out of the water and waddling toward the buckets, opening their mouths. “Okay, you can see they know it’s lunchtime!”

I looked out at the crowd. There, with his back to me, looking at the Humboldts, was Jackson.

Jackson and a girl.

A girl I’d never seen before. An impossibly pretty African American girl, with a head full of tiny dreadlocks.

A girl who reached out, there in the dark, and took his hand.

“If you don’t like eating fish, you wouldn’t like to be a penguin!” I squeaked out, feeling Anya’s eyes on me. “The keepers are feeding them anchoveta, little fish that live in the waters off the South American coast. Humboldts also eat squid and crustaceans.”

Jackson leaned down and whispered in the girl’s ear. I could feel heat rushing to my face. My mouth felt dry, and I could hardly keep going.

“They don’t have to drink water, since they take in seawater as they swallow their fish.

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