Creatures of Habit Read Online Free

her assignment: Hear all you can but don’t say one word, not to anybody. She knew that somewhere out in the yard Danny was hiding and watching to make sure she passed the test. If she passed today, he would let her go to the pool with him again tomorrow and he would even admit to people that she was his sister. Today she had been an orphaned neighbor child he was being paid big money to watch.
    Next door, Mrs. Hopper was stretched out in her lounge chair even though it was after four. Her sprinkler sprayed water over her ugly brown yard and over her huge ugly son who lay out in the grass with his big bare feet propped on the endof her chair. Occasionally Mrs. Hopper laughed and shook her head from side to side. Just the two of them lived there. Mrs. Hopper was a divorcée who had once lived in Chicago. Her son’s name was Bo and her cat’s name was Cat, after one in a movie she’d seen. She wore big round sunglasses and colorful beads and taught biology at the community college. These were the facts Caroline had gathered for Danny on another assignment. Mrs. Hopper looked normal enough but Danny said that at sundown her yellow hair stood straight up and her teeth grew long and mossy green. He said that her husband hadn’t really left like the grown-ups said he had; she had eaten him.
    N OW C AROLINE WAS thinking about
that
in the dark woods on this black moonless night. The picture in her head of Mrs. Hopper’s teeth growing made her shaky, and then came the sick wave of school thoughts: the teachers with their paddles, the squat-necked man in charge. She tried to shut out of her head all the stories she had heard by reciting things. She knew “This Old Man” and “When You Wish Upon a Star.” She knew the words to “Don’t Say Ain’t,” which used to be Danny’s favorite poem before he learned “Beans, Beans.”
    Don’t say ain’t,
your mama might faint.
Your daddy might fall in a bucket of paint.
Your brother might die.
Your sister might cry
and your dog might call the FBI.
    But she knew the scary things just would not let her alone. In fact, only yesterday she’d caught herself needing to cling to her mother’s bare legs while she stood in the yard talking to Mrs. Hopper.
    â€œGo on now, honey,” her mother had said. “Let me talk to Mrs. Hopper for a sec.”
    â€œLord, please let her call me Gail,” Mrs. Hopper said, lifting those big sunglasses. Her eyes were crayoned to look like a cat’s. “I was never cut out to be Mrs. Hopper.” Her mother and Mrs. Hopper both laughed. Mrs. Hopper said she couldn’t wait to get a load of those relatives, and Caroline’s mama said that she could.
    â€œI’ll tell you about the relatives since you might not remember them so good from last time,” Danny had said that very morning, his spoon poised over a bowl of Cocoa Puffs. “They all eat like hogs and Aunt Patricia wants to hug and slobber all over you. Those
girls,
” he whispered the wordlike it was a swear, “are just stupid, all of them. Uncle Tim is fat. The only boy cousin is Randy, who’s okay except last time he brought a girl.” Danny knew these things. If he said Mrs. Hopper was friends with the devil and put him up in her basement then it was so. It gave Caroline a shiver to think of all the secrets he told her late at night when their parents were asleep: hunks of hair from dead people found in the cafeteria ravioli, kids’ fingers bent backward by the principal until the bones snapped, parents getting arrested and sent to prison when their children talked too much.
    Caroline’s mother sometimes referred to the relatives as the dog people because they spent their lives going from show to show with these big scary Dobermans. They were always talking about “the circuit” and such. They had wanted to bring along some of the baby dogs but Caroline’s