Free Sent by Margaret Peterson Haddix Page B

still sleeping there.
    “Strange,” the girl muttered, scratching at her head, under a silly-looking frilled cap. “They’s always abed when I come in.”
    She looked around, her gaze veering toward Jonah and the others. Jonah froze momentarily, but she looked right past him.
    “Must be in the privy,” she concluded, looking toward the door into the other room, the one Jonah and the others had arrived in the night before.
    The privy?
Jonah wondered.
Is that, like, the restroom? No wonder it stank in there
.
    The girl shrugged, put the tray down on the table, and left.
    Almost without thinking, Jonah stood up and walked over to the table.
Food …
When was the last time he’d eaten? Breakfast yesterday—well, yesterday more than five hundred years in the future. Mom had made French toast and bacon, one of Jonah’s favorite meals, as a special treat because she thought he might be nervous about going to an adoption conference.
    If only I’d known what was really going to happen to me that day
, Jonah thought,
I would have eaten six slices of French toast instead of only four!
    He looked down at the food on the tray—two mugs, two bowls of something that looked like oatmeal, two bowls of something that might be stewed dates, a charred hunk of something that might be meat, and a loaf of bread that looked hard enough to break a tooth on.
    It all looked disgusting, but Jonah’s stomach growled anyway.
    Nobody would be able to tell if I just took a bite or two of the oatmeal
, Jonah thought.
    He reached for one of the spoons and scooped up a tiny amount of the runny, grayish cereal. It steamed as he brought it up to his mouth and hesitantly maneuvered it toward his tongue. He closed his lips around the spoon. …
    And immediately began coughing.
    Did they use a whole jar of cinnamon in this one bowl? And then a whole jar of cloves, too?
    He coughed, gagged, coughed again. He spit the oatmeal back onto the spoon.
    When he finally stopped choking, he realized that Katherine, Chip, and Alex were all awake now, and staring at him.
    “
What
are you doing?” Katherine demanded.
    Jonah felt a little bit like Goldilocks, except he’d gotten caught eating the porridge, instead of sleeping.
    “I just took one bite,” he defended himself. “I was hungry, and I didn’t think anyone would notice. I just didn’t know it’d taste so awful.”
    Chip stood up, stretched, and wandered toward the table.
    “I bet it’d taste okay to Alex and me,” he said. “You’re right—nobody would miss just a bite or two.”
    “Plus,” Alex said, joining them as well, “it’d be an interesting experiment. Visible food being eaten by an invisible kid—can you see the food all the way down the digestive tract? Or does it disappear once it’s in your mouth?” He looked over at Jonah. “I don’t see the food in your stomach.”
    “Didn’t swallow,” Jonah muttered.
    Chip reached for the spoon in the other bowl of oatmeal.
    “One small bite for man, one giant science experiment for mankind,” he said, dramatically lifting the spoon toward his mouth.
    As soon as his lips closed around the spoon, he began gagging too.
    “Ugh! That’s nasty!” he screamed, spitting even more emphatically than Jonah had. “Water! Must have …”
    Jonah lifted a mug from the tray.
    Chip took a huge gulp—and then spit that out too.
    “That’s beer! Beer and oatmeal—blech!”
    “The king of England drinks beer for breakfast?” Jonah asked curiously.
    “Ale,” Alex corrected him. “Everyone drinks a lot of ale, even kids. The water isn’t always safe.”
    Jonah shook his head in amazement. Chip was still spitting and moaning.
    “Are you guys crazy?” Katherine demanded, coming over to the table to join them. “Making all this noise, spitting things everywhere—do you
want
someone to catch us?”
    Chip stopped spitting long enough to say, “Well, we are invisible. They have to
see
us before they can catch us.”
    “
That’s
not