LITMIR.BIZ

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sits straight out and it’s almost like sitting on a bench except that it is a lot higher off the ground and it bounces up and down a bit when we move around on it.

      Bird and I were careful not to jump down on the side of the tree facing Mr. Byers’ house. At the beginning of the year we were told in school assembly that we could play only on the school-facing side of the apple tree. Mrs. Wardman even went out to show us where we could go and where we could not.

      Bird said, ‘Can we step here, Mrs. Wardman?’

      And she said, ‘Yes.’

      Then he said, ‘How about here, can we step here, Mrs. Wardman?’

      And she said, ‘No.’

      He said, ‘But what about right here, Mrs. Wardman, can we step right here?’

      And she said, ‘You can, but you may not, Richard, and your allowable questions are up.’

      Richard is Bird’s real name. Everyone calls him Bird because his last name is L’Oiseau, which is bird in French. Bird likes his nickname better. It irritates him that Mrs. Wardman won’t call him by that, so he makes sure not to call her by the name she prefers either – just not to her face.

      Bird stopped asking questions. But when Mrs. Wardman wasn’t looking, he stepped over to the side she told him he couldn’t step on, and then he jumped back before she looked around. But nothing happened to him when he was where she told him he shouldn’t be.

      I don’t want to go anywhere near Mr. Byers anyway. He makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

      One day I got Silly Putty stuck in the hairs on the back of my neck. I’m not sure how I did it – I think I forgot to put it away before I went to bed, and I lay down on top of it. When I got up the next morning, it was stuck to me.

      I went to my mother and she said, ‘Geez, Phin, you’re turning green.’ She tried rubbing it off with soap and water but it wouldn’t come off. Then she tried baby oil, and she pulled some off but the problem was she pulled off the hairs on the back of my neck too.

      I yelled because it hurt, and then I said, ‘Great, Mom, now how am I going to know when I’m scared of someone?’

      She said, ‘Phin, sometimes you exhaust me.’ She says that a lot. But then she smiles.

      When we were on the tree branch I told Bird that I thought I hated Lyle who pushed me yesterday and then told on me for calling him lady. Then I told Bird I would like to call Lyle an F-er to his face instead of behind his back.

      The F word is one of the very first words I think of when I’m really mad. For example, in third grade we had to write down words that described our French partner, and the only word I could think of was the F word because I really didn’t like him. Maybe it was a good thing that I didn’t know what that word was in French – especially after he bit me. When that happened, I yelled the F word, but just inside my head.

      This morning I woke up to an awful sound – it was like a wolf trying to howl after swallowing one of those birthday-party noisemakers. And it was standing over me.

      I was a little worried about what I might see – maybe a pack of wolves having a birthday party and the cake just happened to be me – but I took a chance and opened my eyes. My mother was standing there and that awful noise was coming from her. She was smiling so I figured she wasn’t choking on something, so I asked her what the heck she was doing.

      ‘I’m yodelling, Phin,’ she said.

      ‘But you’re not on a mountain,’ I said. ‘You’re standing over me making that awful sound. I thought you were a wolf with something caught in its throat. If you were a wolf, you’d have to be the alpha because if you were a submissive, the others would attack you for making a sound like that.’

      Since my mother seemed to be interested in awful sounds, I told her that a science show I watched was about how researchers asked people across lots of countries to rate how horrible different sounds are. The top five were:

      5. a metal drawer being opened

      4. scraping wood

      3. scraping metal

      2. Styrofoam being rubbed together

      1. scraping slate with a garden tool, which makes the fingernail-on-a-chalkboard sound

      I told Mom that I figured her yodelling would be pretty close to the top of the list if the scientists had used it in their study.

      ‘Ha ha,’ she said. ‘I actually think I’m pretty good. Anyway, I’ve been asked to give you a message. Your father is in Switzerland covering a story about how the permafrost is melting in the Alps and he emailed me and asked me to say hello to you and to give you a big lick from him.’ Then she reached for me and pretended to lick me and it felt like I was being mauled by a crazy wolf mother. I told her to stop before she gave me the creeps.

      As I ate my breakfast, I wondered how close Switzerland is to where I live, so I went up to my room and got out my distance globe. It’s a globe where you touch one part of it with an electronic pen and then touch another part of it with the pen and then the globe tells you how far apart those two places are.

      My father bought it for me on my last birthday so that I could always know how far away he was from me. I think he thought it might make me feel better to be able to see exactly where on the earth he was, but it doesn’t. Now not only can I see how far away he is but I can hear the exact number of kilometres. That’s like not only knowing that you’re about to get a needle but also knowing how far it’s going to go into your muscle. The robot-sounding voice said 5,403 kilometres.

      I wondered which animals will start dying if the permafrost melts, so while my mother was having a shower, I got on to her computer and did a Google search. My mother told me to figure out the most important words when doing a search and type them in. So I typed in animals and melting and permafrost and it came up with 217,000 hits. One said that melting permafrost in Siberia is releasing carbon that’s been trapped there since the Pleistocene era. As it bubbles to the surface, it releases methane gas into the atmosphere, and since methane is twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide, this means global warming will happen even faster than the scientists originally thought.

      The article said that this news is not good for human and animal life. This made me worried and scared. My insides, even my heart, felt like they were getting skinnier and skinnier.

      I turned off the computer when I heard my mother coming downstairs. She saw me sitting in her office and asked me what I was up to. I told her I was reading about the melting of the permafrost.

      She said, ‘Phin, right now you should be getting on your snow pants and boots because there’s nothing melting here today – it’s minus 21 degrees.’

      ‘But,’ I said, ‘doesn’t it worry you that the permafrost is melting? The permafrost?’

      ‘Yes, Phin, sometimes it does, but I don’t have time to think about it right now. Now, come on, we have to get going – quick as a bunny!’

      She handed me my jacket and snow pants, and I put them on, but what my mom said didn’t make any logical sense. If a starving grizzly bear walked up to a person having a picnic, would it be good for her to say she doesn’t have time to be scared because she hasn’t finished her sandwich?

      When I walked into my classroom this morning, I noticed right away that there were two things out of the ordinary. The first was that Mrs. Wardman’s desk was moved over too far to the right at the front of the classroom. I sit in the back row, which has seven desks. The middle row has eight desks and the front row normally has seven. But today it had eight. I counted twice to be sure. Eight.

      The other out-of-the-ordinary thing was that there was a lump on the show-and-tell table with a white sheet over it. It looked about the shape of the big box where I keep my Reull drawings.

      When everybody sat in their seats, the extra desk was taken up by a

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