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wasn’t. I mean, what was I supposed to do all day, chat on the Internet? Even if I were allowed—which I wasn’t—it just wouldn’t be the same as—friends, what was I going to tell my friends? I still hadn’t explained anything to Hunter or Keisha or Stephe or—or anybody. I couldn’t tell them the truth, but I didn’t want to lie to them, and as far as going anyplace with them, forget it.
    Was I even going to have any friends anymore?
    I didn’t answer the old guy’s question. I turned my back on him and walked away with my armload of snake books. Rude. I felt like being rude.
    â€œHappy reading!” he called after me.
    Right. Sure.
    Safe at home, I threw the babushka in a corner and grabbed myself something to eat. Actually, a lot to eat. Two shrimp egg rolls, cold cuts, a tuna salad sandwich, three chicken empanadas, and half a calzone. I didn’t know why I was so hungry.
    Ratsss , somebody in my head urged. Don’t you have any sssucculent young ratsss?
    â€œIck!” Okay, I did know why I was so hungry, but not for cereal bars or fruit salad. I was chowing down like a pregnant woman because I had to feed the snakes as well as myself. And the snakes were carnivores.
    Forgsss? asked somebody else, sounding all green with longing. Newtsss?
    â€œListen,” I complained, “I’m not an ecosystem.” I finished up with some mint cookies and a dish of butter-pecan ice cream just for me. What a pig-out. I was going to be as big as a bus if I kept this up. After clearing away some of the evidence, I settled in the front room and started to read.
    At first it was boring. Snakes took their body temperature from the environment. (Yawn.) Because they didn’t spend their own energy keeping warm, they didn’t have to eat much. (You wouldn’t know it from listening to my bunch.) This made them good at living in deserts. (I wished mine would go to a desert and stay there.) Snakes could see pretty well, but they wouldn’t notice you if you didn’t move. (Ho-hum.) They smelled and tasted prey with their tongues. (No, duh.) They couldn’t hear much, just felt vibrations. Having no external ears, snakes were about 90 percent deaf—
    Right there I stopped being bored and got a real creepy feeling. Okay, my snakes could feel vibrations, but no way could they actually listen to me talking, not so as to understand the words.
    Okay, I knew I was hearing their thoughts, but, color me clueless, up till then I hadn’t really understood that they were hearing mine .
    Not hear, Ssstupid, said the regal voice in my head. We are your thoughtsss .
    What was that supposed to mean?
    We are the dark and sssecret cranny dwellersss of your mind .
    Oh, give me a break! I threw down the book with a bang just as Mom came zipping in on her way from someplace to someplace else. What the heck did she do all day, anyway, if she wasn’t sculpting statues? Where was she going in such a hurry, for a pedicure? Were her toenails bronze, too? I sooo did not feel like asking her any of this, and when I whammed my book down, she gave me a wary look. “Dusie, what was that all about?”
    â€œNothing.”
    On my head I felt the snakes—active, crawling. I’d vibrated them.
    Mom asked, “What are you reading?”
    â€œNothing, Mom.”
    Mom hadn’t said a word about my dissing her in front of all her freak friends, but I had a feeling she was not happy with me. Which made me feel bad, but at the same time mad at her, too. I mean, she was my mother. She was supposed to protect me. Somehow she should have kept all this from happening. She had lied to me, or at least she hadn’t told me the truth. I had always looked up to her but now she had let me down, so she could just keep her distance, thank you very much.
    Which she did. She went away somewhere, and I picked up another book and kept reading. Or tried to keep reading. My