Free Not the End of the World by Rebecca Stowe Page A

garage and all the neighborhood kids would bring us any dead birds they found lying around and Ruthie would take them into the garage and start operating with a Projecto knife, cutting the stiff body open and pulling out its insides and then filling it up with cotton balls or something. She made Daddy take home movies of it and then she’d show them, along with her bird movies. “That’s the epiglottis,” she’d say as we sat around the living room with the drapes drawn, looking at bird guts, and Daddy would say, “I had a real hard time holding the camera for that one.”
    She kept dead birds in the freezer and sometimes I’d come running home from the beach to get a Popsicle or something and I’d reach in the freezer and pull out a sparrow. It was really sick.
    “I’m hungry, Maggie,” Ruthie said. “Hurry up and set the table.”
    “Set it yourself,” I said and she started to blubber and Mother moaned and said, “Margaret Sweet Pittsfield, can you never be pleasant? You’re in the house five seconds and you’re already being mean to your sister.”
    “Yeah,” Ruthie sniffled, “if you were nice to me, I’d be normal.”
    I doubted it, but still I felt guilty. I always felt guilty; it was a way of life for me, but it didn’t change my behavior. If I hadto feel guilty no matter what I did, I might as well do what I wanted.
    “You have to set the table,” Ruthie said, sitting there like some sultan’s wife. “It’s your job.”
    “I just walked in the door!” I shouted. “Can I at least go to the bathroom? Can I take a second to go to the bathroom?”
    “Hurry up,” Mother said. “Your father will be home any minute and he’ll have a fit if the table’s not set.”
    Let him, I thought, let him have a fit. He acted like it would be the end of the world if dinner wasn’t steaming in his face at precisely six o’clock, as if the whole universe would be set off balance if we weren’t in our places, saying grace, as if God would leave without us if we weren’t on time.
    I locked myself in the bathroom and sat on the toilet seat, wondering what I’d do now that I was friendless. “Nice work, dumbo,” Margaret said and Cotton Mather wanted me to drown myself in the tub. “Now, now,” Sarah said, “it’s not as bad as all that.”
    When Sarah wasn’t busy crying or whining or wringing her hands, she liked to be a Good-Do-Bee. She was always saying things like “Forgive and forget,” and “Turn the other cheek” and all that blessed-are-the-meek stuff.
    “Count your blessings,” she said and I had four. The first was Goober, who was everything a friend should be. She listened to me without interrupting and never threatened or teased or turned on me, like real people do. Ginger used to have a dog, a silly hotdog named Fritz who she called Bean. “Bean as in human bean,” she said and it was true, dogs were more human than people, or at least they were all the things that everybody kept telling us we were supposed to be but never were themselves. Loyal. Trustworthy. Devoted. Loving. Protective. Playful. That goofball Fritz was the best thing in Ginger’s life—he’d get on his back and scoot acrossthe floor like a swimmer doing the backstroke. “Swim, Fritz!” we’d say and down he’d plop, with the corners of his muzzle turned up as if he were laughing too. Too bad Mrs. Moore had him gassed. He pooped in her bedroom once and that was his death sentence.
    My second blessing was the Lake. I knew how lucky I was to live in a house right on the Lake, to have my very own beach and a place to run to. In the summer I was in the Lake more than I was out of it. I had a bright yellow raft with a clear plastic view-hole in the pillow, and I’d lie on it and paddle out, looking straight down to the rocks below and watching the fish swim by. Last summer a foreign freighter had brought some lampreys into the Lake, stuck on the bottom of the boat like barnacles. They attacked the fish and