Autumn Street by Lois Lowry Page A

called him in for his bath.
    We never told anyone. In the morning, when Nathaniel called solemnly through the hedge to me, "Pixie is dead," I called back words of sympathy and felt hate form in a hard knot beside fear. Later Jess, Charles, and I went into Hoffman's yard to attend the funeral of the cat. Noah had dug the grave with his shovel. We all stood at attention while he lowered Pixie in her shoebox casket, covered the grave with earth, and planted a little American flag on the top. Nathaniel held Jess' hand tightly and wept.
    So when Charles found the knife and suggested a little bitty ole wound for Noah Hoffman, it seemed profoundly just to us both. We stood on Grandfather's back porch and watched over the hedge. But
the Hoffmans' house was unusually still.
    We played in Grandfather's yard all afternoon. Beside the garage we carefully cut a worm in half with the knife. If you cut a worm in half, Charles told me, each half would grow into a whole worm. Ours didn't, though we waited, watching it, for quite a long time. Maybe, we decided, it could only do it underground; so we each buried half a worm.
    Then we built, in the dirt, a racecourse for ants. We each got a cookie from Tatie, scattered cookie crumbs around the dusty oval of our racetrack, and we knelt and munched chocolate chip cookies and watched ants industriously dealing with the crumbs. The sun was fiercely hot. Above the tin roof of the Hoffmans' garage, when we looked through the hedge to their yard, the air seemed to shimmer and move.
    Finally one of the twins came out of the house, carrying a comic book, and sat down on the steps of his back porch.
    Charles fingered his pocket where the knife was. "That him?" he asked me. "That Noah?"
    I looked carefully. The twins' short-trimmed haircuts were identical. They each had freckles across their cheeks. But the boy on the steps was sitting still, only his mouth moving silently as he sounded out words to himself, reading the newest Captain Marvel. His fingers weren't fluttering. His feet were motionless.
    "No," I said. "That's Nathaniel."
    Charles sighed. We waited. But Noah did not appear. Nathaniel came to the end of his comic and read the Charles Atlas advertisement on the back cover.
    "Hi, Nathaniel," I called finally, through the hedge.
    He looked up and smiled. "Hi," he called back. "Noah's sick!"
    "Oh."
    "He has a temperature of a hundred and four."
    "Oh."
    "It went almost to the top of the thermometer," Nathaniel said in an awed voice. "The doctor came last night."
    It was almost startling to hear Nathaniel talk. When Noah was with him in the yard, Nathaniel barely spoke at all.
    "You want to come over and play?" he called.
    "Can Charles come?"
    "Yeah, bring Charles. You can help me feed the ducks."
    The ducks! Charles and I looked at each other with delight.
    The Hoffman twins had been given baby ducks for Easter. My envy had reached heights almost to the point of physical pain when I had stood on the back porch, looked over the hedge, and seen the two
tinted ducks—pink and green—waddling in the grass.
    "Outrageous," Grandmother had said, when she saw them. I had nodded mutely. But when Grandmother went inside, I stayed on the porch and watched; and I wanted a bright-colored duck who would follow me, quacking jauntily, with all my heart. I wanted a little duck more than I wanted a kitten, which had already been refused me; certainly more than I wanted a turtle, which would grow massive and flee to lurk in the woods, hungry for flesh; and I would even, given the opportunity, have traded my mother's then-unborn baby for a small, fluffy, garishly dyed creature that would walk on little webbed feet like a wind-up toy, the way the Hoffmans' ducklings did.
    The twins named them Donald and Daisy. They set up an old canvas wading pool, and the ducks floated forlornly on top of the shallow water from the garden hose. They grew larger, louder, more demanding, and less attractive. Their dyed feathers