Read Jack on the Tracks for Free Online Page B

want to. Something weird had recently happened at his house. His mom and dad had split up. But instead of going their separate ways they only walked across the street. Tack’s dad had traded wives with the man, Mr. Butters, who lived directly across the road. Or you could say that Tack’s mom and Mrs. Butters had traded husbands. Either way, it was very weird at his house, and even though Tack hadn’t talked about it I knew it had to be strange for him. The only thing he had said was that he woke up in his own bed and showered and dressed then carried his dirty clothes across the street where his real mom fed him breakfast.
    So, when he asked me to come over I thought it was my duty as a friend. Everyone thought that he had been getting sick and skinny because he was depressed from the parent-swap deal, but it turns out that he had a tapeworm in his belly. I figured he had saved it and wanted me to see it.
    I had put on my yellow plastic raincoat in case the visit got messy, but Mom stopped me and made me put on something decent. She said that the new mom was trash and she didn’t want me looking like trash too. Mom called her a “gold digger” because since she moved in with Tack’s dad she made him buy her a new Cadillac, install central air-conditioning, and lay multicolored shag wall-to-wall carpet in the house. So I left my door on my way to Tack’s to see his tapeworm as if I were dressed for church. I walked the twenty-five feet to his front door and took a deep breath and knocked. Just in case the new mom was spying on me through the peephole I hummed a church hymn and twiddled my thumbs in a circle like a well-mannered choirboy. But Tack was waiting for me. He whipped the door open. “You look like a Bible salesman,” he said. “Come down to my bedroom and feast your eyes on the Eighth Wonder of the World.”
    As we darted through the living room his new mom looked up from her HOUSE BEAUTIFUL magazine and gave me a tight-lipped glare as though she had been waiting forever in a doctor’s office. It seemed she was in a lot of pain so I just waved and kept walking. Tack’s room was the same as it ever was
—
a total blowout wreck that was so dirty my mom would have had a heart attack. I loved it. Books were piled up as high as the curtain rods. Every animal cage he ever had was still there, including a few of the animals that were dried out like tiny mummies. A mobile of wired-together animal bones clattered in a circle overhead as they spun from the blade of a ceiling fan.
    There was a mayonnaise jar sitting on his bed. Inside was something that looked like a giant rubber band. I couldn’t make out a head or tail. “Awesome,” I remarked, pointing at it.
    “Seven feet long,” he said, raising his shirt and rubbing his sunken belly.
    “How’d you get it?” I asked, wanting to avoid the same fate.
    “Raw hamburger meat,” he explained. “I used to eat bits and pieces of it out of the bowl as my real mom mixed it up.”
    I thought Tack’s real mom might have sent his new mom some raw hamburger and now she had a tapeworm which is why she looked so grumpy.
    Tack began to unscrew the jar. “Let’s measure it,” he said. “I want to be sure. Maybe it is a world record and I can be famous.” He fished the end of the worm out with two fingers and began to gently unravel a piece of it across the bedsheet. It smelled like pickle juice (SMELL).
    I spotted a ruler on his desk. I got it and began to hold it against the white worm. “How’d you know it was in you?” I asked.
    “Stool sample,” he replied. “The doctor gave me something that looked like a Tupperware container and I had to poop in it and take it to a lab. They did some tests and the doctor called and told my mom.”
    “How’d they get it out?” I asked, imagining they might have had to use a long pair of tweezers.
    “Poison,” he said and made a yucky face. “The taste almost killed me.”
    “Then what?” I asked.
    “It died