Two-Thousand-Pound Goldfish Read Online Free

all seem more impossible.
    “I think … somehow … the telephone.”
    Weezie exhaled with disgust. “Oh, go to bed, Warren.” She fell back onto her pillow to show that the conversation was over.
    Warren waited in silence. In his movies, discoveries came so easily. “These scorpions are from the Incan cave.” “This woman was squirted by radioactive milk with two percent butterfat.” It was only in real life that you couldn’t get answers. “I’m not going, Weezie, until you tell me who you were talking to.”
    “All right. I was talking to a girl from school.”
    “I don’t believe you. A girl from school made you cry? Come on. I’ve seen the girls at your school, and there’s not one who—”
    “All right, a boy from my school.”
    “I don’t believe that either.”
    “He was going to take me to the prom, and now he’s going to take Isolee Watkins.” She looked at him through her lashes. Then she raised her head. “Satisfied?”
    “No.”
    “Well, it’s all you’re going to get.”
    The way she looked at him then, with her eyes as hard as stone, her mouth set, told Warren it was hopeless. He had seen that look before.
    He turned and walked to his room, past the living room where the blank TV crackled. As he lay down and turned his face to the wall, his mouth was as set as hers.

“No, no, it can’t be. No goldfish can weigh two thousand pounds. Why, a goldfish that big could ingest …”
    “Go ahead and finish, Chief. Could ingest two sewer workers.”
    “G ET UP IF YOU’RE going to Pepper’s,” his grandmother called from the doorway.
    “What?”
    “Get up.”
    Warren lay blinking in the sunlight from the window. All night he had suffered through one dream after another. He was never lucky enough to have good scary dreams with monsters and space creatures.
    In his dreams he searched for lost homework, was sent to a blackboard too tall to reach, worked with pencils that squealed and caused students to laugh, and wrote on paper that spread across his desk like milk. Now he lay on his dirty sheets, more tired than if he had not slept at all.
    “Is Weezie going?” he called.
    “To Pepper’s? No.”
    “Then I’m not going either.”
    “Well, then you’ll be here all day by yourself.”
    He rose on one elbow, alert at last. “Why? Where’s Weezie?”
    “She went out. Now come on, get dressed. We’ll miss the bus.”
    “Where did Weezie go?”
    “I don’t know. To the library.”
    “The library’s not open on Sunday morning.”
    “Well, I don’t know. She said she was going to study with somebody. Maria maybe. Or Isolee.”
    In one move he was on the floor, looking out the window at the street below.
    The sidewalks were empty except for two dogs lying in front of the corner grocery store. These two dogs made up the neighborhood pack. The dog warden had been trying to catch them for years, but they were too smart for him. They knew the crawl spaces under every house, the broken slats in every fence. Now, sensing it was Sunday, the warden’s day off, they lay openly soaking up the morning sun.
    “Why didn’t you tell me Weezie was going out?” He struck the windowsill with his fists.
    “Why all this sudden interest in Weezie’s goings and comings?”
    “Nothing. I just like to know what she’s doing.”
    “She’s studying.”
    “She says she’s studying.”
    He turned away from the sunny window and looked at his grandmother. She watched him for a moment and then shrugged. “Weezie’s generally doing what she says she’s doing.”
    “A lot you know.”
    Her eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to tell me something about your sister?”
    He sighed. “No.”
    “Then get dressed and let’s go.”
    Warren stood on the dusty floor. His grandmother thought it was a waste of energy to sweep floors more than once a month. He pulled on his clothes, the same he had worn yesterday. His grandmother didn’t believe in washing clothes often either.
    Then he continued to