Shoebag Returns Read Online Free Page A

critter. “Go make a nest in there! Invite all your six-legged friends to join you! Have babies in there! Make yourself right at home!”
    It was a hot autumn morning, and Cook was perspiring from the weather, her work at the stove, and her anger at the computer.
    She struggled out of the T-shirt she was wearing over her sleeveless blouse. It was an old Hootie & The Blowfish T-shirt, a rock group whose music the cat did not enjoy. Mozart was more to the cat’s taste: Bach, Beethoven.
    Cook giggled as she put the T-shirt over the computer.
    “I’ll just cover it up!” she said. “Then I don’t have to look at the thing!”
    But the cat decided to keep looking at the computer, even though Hootie & The Blowfish stared back at him.
    The cat believed that eventually the roach would reappear. Even though Cat was finicky about what he ate, as all cats are, he liked to bat roaches around. And Cat wouldn’t mind having something real under his paw, instead of a rat in a dream.

Eight
    A FTER CHURCH, AND BEFORE Sunday dinner, the students at Miss Rattray’s were allowed to make phone calls.
    “How is everything going?” Mrs. Sweetsong asked.
    “Not great,” Stanley said. “There are only two clubs here and it looks like I won’t be asked to join either one.”
    “You already belong to the best clubs anywhere,” said his mother. “The Bucks County Country Club and the Red Fox Hunt Club. They are the best clubs.”
    “There is one here that is better.”
    “Better than the best?” said Mr. Sweetsong, who was on one of the twelve extension phones at Castle Sweet. “There is no such thing as better than the best.”
    “There is, though, and they even have buttons that say WE’RE BETTER .”
    “Oh, dear, dear, dear,” Mrs. Sweetsong sighed. “The Better Club. I had forgotten all about that wicked club! I once wanted to be a Better very, very badly, too!”
    “Then how could you forget it?” Stanley asked.
    “Time heals all wounds, dear. Often what was important long ago, is not even remembered later on.”
    Stanley said, “But it’s not later on yet, for me. … And even if I could find some creature to collect for the Science Room, I would never get in that club. I told Mr. Longo he was wrong.”
    “Never tell a teacher he is wrong, even if he is,” said Mrs. Sweetsong. “Teachers don’t like to hear that they are wrong.”
    “I learned that,” said Stanley sadly.
    “Before I married your mother, I didn’t belong to any club,” said Mr. Sweetsong. “It didn’t bother me!”
    “It didn’t bother you because there were no clubs in your school,” said Stanley’s mother.
    “There was a Drama Club.”
    “That’s not the same thing. Anyone could be in the Drama Club.”
    “I was not a club type, anyway,” said Stanley’s father. “I was not a snob until I married your mother.”
    “You are still not much of a snob,” she said. Then she said, “But we didn’t send Stanley off to school to be in clubs. We sent him there to learn to be a gentleman and a scholar … and to make friends.”
    “Do you have any friends?” asked his father.
    Stanley decided not to say anything about the voice he had heard offering to be his pal. What had it said its name was? Something with “bag” in it. … Probably he had imagined it, anyway. Possibly being the only boy in an all-girl school was stressing him out.
    He said, “I’ve made one friend named Josephine Jiminez.”
    She was standing just outside the phone booth, which was just outside the dining room. She had swiped a roll from a large tray being carried into the dining room by a waiter in a white coat.
    Ever since they had sung “This Is the Feast of the Lord,” in church, Josephine had begun to complain that she was hungry. … Again. … She was always hungry.
    “Is she any relation to General Jiminez?” Mrs. Sweetsong asked.
    “She is his daughter.”
    “Pedro Jiminez, hero of the Gulf War!” said Mr. Sweetsong.
    “She calls herself