Read Chasing Orion for Free Online Page B

tell you what I got. Let’s just say my talents lie elsewhere.” A cunning look slid across her face.
    Poor Emmett got all flustered. “I’m sure they weren’t that bad.”
    Wrong thing to say, Emmett. Wrong!
    “Oh, yes, they were.” She giggled again. If Phyllis had been a normal girl with a normal body, I could have just pictured her shoulders kind of doing a little shimmy. As it was, the hiccuppy giggle sent a tremor through her blond curls.
    Then she whispered something to Emmett. But I couldn’t hear. And he couldn’t either. “Come over here. I’ll tell you,” she said, meaning Emmett and not me. Emmett walked over to where her head poked out of the machine. He had to maneuver around some of the things sticking out from it. “Now bend down,” she said. “Put your ear close to my mouth.”
    Oh, my word!
I thought. What was I about to see? Emmett was blushing right to the roots of his red hair. There was now absolutely no difference between his hair color and his skin color. I was too afraid to look, so I studied a small ant colony that I had discovered emerging from between the stones of the patio. I wondered what would happen if an ant got into the iron lung. Would it live? If a male and female ant got in there, could they reproduce? Could the female lay eggs in an iron lung, or would the concentration of the eighty-seven cubic centimeters of air crush everything somehow? Then Emmett backed away. He looked incredibly pleased with himself, and I don’t think it was just because of his SAT scores.
    Then suddenly she swiveled the mirrors and I was caught.
    “Tell me about Nubian goats, Georgie.”
    “What?”
    “Your T-shirt.”
    “Oh,” I said.
    But then Emmett interrupted. “Hey, how come you can read that? How come it’s not backward?”
    “My special reading mirror! My dad invented it. But he’s made improvements. A whole new model that will make it even easier for me.”
    “Wow!” Emmett whispered.
    “Come on, tell me about the goats,” Phyllis urged.
    I stood up and came a little closer to her head, sticking out from the machine. It was weird to talk to someone this way. It felt as if her head were just sort of floating there, attached to nothing.
    “Uh, I just like them, that’s all.”
    “Why do you like them? Tell me all about goats. I know nothing.”
    “Well,” I began, “you’ve got your dairy goats, your pygmies, your Nigerian dwarf goats, and dozens of others.” I paused and looked at her in the mirror. She still seemed interested. So I continued. “It’s my true belief that there is a goat for every kind of person. And goats are very affectionate. They love it when folks scratch them. They are the most companionable of farm animals — that’s what my grandma says.”
    Phyllis made another little hiccuppy sound. It sounded like a sputtering waterfall, except instead of water, it was air.
    “Now, turn around,” she said. “I caught a glimpse in the mirror of something on the back of your shorts.”
    “Oh,” I said. “My mom sewed a cut-out poodle on them.”
    “So you like poodles and goats, I see.”
    “I don’t really like poodles that much. I think they’re kind of silly. They just make a nice decoration, you know.”
    “They are supposedly among the smartest of dogs,” Phyllis said. I kind of shrugged.
    “Maybe, but goats aren’t nearly as dumb as people think.”
    Just then Mrs. Keller came out with a tray of lemonade and a plate of cookies.
    “Now, let’s see,” she said, setting down the tray. One of the glasses was special and had a straw in it about a foot long. She set this glass into a metal claw that stuck out from the iron lung, then put the straw into Phyllis’s mouth. I was fascinated as Mrs. Keller put the glass in the claw and then somehow the claw automatically brought the glass, straw and all, closer to Phyllis. Mrs. Keller had been talking while she was doing this stuff with the glass and the straw. I was thinking about how beautiful