So just when I was breathing a sigh of relief that he would be gone from school at last, Mom told me that for his own good they were keeping him back. Great. What about my own good?! At least if he wasn’t there I would have been able to spend part of my week in a Wills-free zone.
The only time Wills is quiet, the only time he really concentrates—which just goes to show that he can if he wants—is when he’s working on his fossils. He’s so quiet then that you wouldn’t know he was in the house. He’s got the most amazing collection: hundreds of them, and gemstones as well. He spends hours cleaning, labeling, cataloging, and arranging them. If you ask him a question, he can tell you everything about each one of them: how old they are, where they were found, where he got them, what they’re worth. Sometimes I wish I had a collection like his, but I wouldn’t have the patience to spend all that time organizing it. Wills gave me one of his ammonites and a piece of amethyst, but it didn’t make me feel like starting a collection myself, and I don’t think he’d want me to anyway.
If I were to start a collection, it would have to be something completely different. I’ve got a mouse, and I once thought it would be cool to have lots of mice, but Dad said NO WAY JOSE, which is what he always says instead of just saying no. I think he had visions of the mice multiplying daily until there were hundreds of them running all over the house, nesting in our armchairs and breaking into our breakfast cereal. THE GREAT MOUSE INVASION! I call my mouse Muffin, because he escaped once (I think Wills helped him) and ate half a chocolate muffin that was supposed to be for Dad’s snack. Dad wasn’t very happy, but Mom said it would do his waistline a world of good. I keep Muffin in a cage in my bedroom. I don’t know why, but I find it comforting to hear him scuffling around while I go to sleep.
I’ve thought about collecting stamps or coins, but I haven’t done anything about it, so I suppose I’m not really interested enough. Jack makes and collects model airplanes. There’s no way I can make any models with Wills around, not without putting a million bolts on my bedroom door.
My favorite thing is reading, and I’ve got loads of books, but that’s not the same as collecting fossils. What’s good about reading is that if I get right inside a story, right inside, I completely forget where I am in real life. It’s like I’m beamed up out of my room into a different world, where no one can reach me and nothing can touch me, not even Wills. The strange thing is that I think it’s the same for Wills with his fossils. When he’s wrapped up in his fossils, he doesn’t even hear when Mom says it’s snack time, and he doesn’t even realize when he’s missing his favorite program on the television. Dad says Wills goes off to another planet (sometimes he says Wills comes from another planet!), and that’s what happens to me when I read.
My favorite place for reading is the library. It’s only fifteen minutes’ walk from home, and I go there whenever there’s a hurricane, unless I think Mom needs me. Sometimes I just go there anyway if I’ve run out of books, or I just want to be on my own, or I’ve got homework to do and won’t be able to with Wills around. Wills doesn’t know I go there. I don’t want him to know either. Not likely! Jack says going to the library is a bit of an old-people thing to do, but I bet he’d go there too if it was the only way to get some peace. He says only old people and nerds go to the library, and he says I’m not a nerd because I don’t come out the best in anything, so I must be an old person. I punch him when he says that. He doesn’t punch me back because he says that you mustn’t punch old people, so I punch him again then, but not hard. He knows why I go there and says he doesn’t blame me, though he says you wouldn’t catch him in a library for all the burgers in McDonald’s. He’s crazy! I would live in a library if I could have all the burgers in McDonald’s. I love them, but Mom says they’re bad for us, especially for Wills, and will only let us have them if she’s feeling really, really lazy and doesn’t want to cook, and that doesn’t happen very often. Hardly ever. She insists it’s because Dad eats too many burgers that he’s turned into a bowling pin. Dad says it’s from sitting at a desk for fifteen years.
It’s only small, our library, and there are hardly ever more than two people in it apart from me. When you walk in, you have to go left for the children’s books and right for the adult books. In the middle, behind the librarian’s desk, is a computer where you can go on the Internet if you want, and behind that is a shelf of talking books. (I’ve never heard them say a word.)
The first time I went into the library was when I wanted to get away from Wills and his horrible friends. They were following me down the road and yelling things at me, so
