On the Road to Find Out Read Online Free Page A

bag.” She looked a little disgusted, though it’s not like she hasn’t seen him do this kind of thing seven thousand times.
    Walter wasn’t, technically, in the bag. Only his front end was. On a search-and-destroy mission, he grabbed a Ritz Bits, backed out of the bag, and retreated to my lap, where he perched to disarm it with his teeth.
    â€œOkay,” said Jenni. “It’s time to resolve.”
    â€œResolve what?”
    â€œResolve what we’re going to do better next year. New Year’s is coming, or did you forget because you don’t approve of a holiday that’s all about getting drunk and making noise.”
    It’s true. I don’t like New Year’s Eve. It’s noisy and unruly and usually cold.
    Plus, there’s no good candy. The best holidays involve candy. I’m a big fan of Christmas, even though my family doesn’t celebrate it, because there’s so much good stuff to eat. Hanukah’s pretty lame in comparison. Those gold chocolate coins we get for playing dreidel taste like poop medicine.
    This year, I was too dejected (“sad and depressed”) to help Jenni bake Christmas cookies, which is something we always do. She likes to give them out to everyone she knows and even some people she doesn’t know that well, like our UPS driver and the secretaries at school.
    As far as holidays go, Halloween is tops in my book, except for the whole costume part. I try to be strategic about gathering a year’s supply of Indian corn because it’s seasonal, and even then, it comes only in small bags. If you get the larger bags of Autumn Mix, you end up with a few Indian corns, a lot of regular old candy corn, and a bunch of nasty pumpkins.
    I can’t stand the pumpkins so I make Jenni eat them. She likes to point out they’re made of exactly the same stuff as candy corn so why don’t I like them?
    â€œBECAUSE THEY TASTE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!” I have to gently remind her.
    Jenni doesn’t understand how shapes affect taste. She also doesn’t understand the Peeps hierarchy.
    It’s a happy day when Easter Peeps make their annual appearance at the grocery store. I only like the yellow chicks, which must be eaten stale—or frozen, if you don’t have the time to leave them out—and you have to nibble the butt first and then bite off the head. The pink bunnies are okay, but everything else in Peeps-dom is a wannabe.
    Don’t get me started on the purples and the blues.
    Or on Peeps for other holidays. That’s just wrong.
    I’d gotten so worked up thinking about candy I managed to forget, for a few minutes, that my future career might be ringing up Peeps at a grocery store and asking, “Paper or plastic?”
    â€œResolution,” said Jenni. “New Year’s. Now.”
    I pounded my right fist on my heart and said, “I hereby resolve to be more like Walter,” which was, when you think about it, not a half-bad resolution.
    â€œAlice,” Jenni said.
    I said, “Walter is always in a good mood. He’s curious and playful and interested in others. He’s loyal and faithful and has a great sense of humor. He’s open to new things and never bites anyone. He eats when he’s hungry, and when he’s full, instead of stuffing his face until he needs to go lie down, he stashes the leftovers. Now, it might be better if he didn’t store them in the far corners of the closet or under the bed, since sometimes he forgets about the piles and they start to rot and stink, and Mom gets all, ‘You can’t let that rat spread food all over the house,’ and I have to clean up after him, but it’s a good policy in case we ever run out of food. You can’t fault someone for preparing for a rainy day.”
    I stopped for a minute to poke Walter in the belly. He grabbed my digit with both of his tiny four-fingered hands and brought it to his mouth and licked