Free Prairie Ostrich by Tamai Kobayashi Page A

sister?”
    Martin can barely stutter before Kathy grabs his back and yanks his underwear, lifting him off the ground for an astral wedgie. He screams, his eyes bulging. Kathy pulls him up to the jungle gym hook by his underwear and leaves him to hang. Kathy’s hand pats Egg’s shoulder as the other kids look on in awe and amazement.
    Egg glances back at her wonderstruck classmates, up at her looming sister. Kathy looks a thousand feet tall. Egg trots to keep up with her long stride. As they approach the doors, she slips her hand into Kathy’s palm and feels the answering squeeze.
    Kathy, with a grudging smile, tells her, “It’ll be okay. I promise, Egg.”
    She promises.
    â€¦
    In bed, Egg pulls the blanket over her head as Mama and Kathy yell in the kitchen, Mama calling up Jesus to turn the other cheek and Kathy shouting to Hell with all of that. Egg bites her hand. Hell. H E double hockey sticks. Her knuckles still bleed from the inside of the locker. Kathy has gotten a week’s detention for stringing up Martin Fisken but she just shrugs it off. How can she be so brave? Now Mama is saying she doesn’t like Kathy’s attitude, how she dresses, or how she hangs out with Stacey Norman and, last of all, how Mama’s whiskey has gone missing.
    Egg curls deeper under her covers.
    It is her fault. Reverend Samuels always says that things happen for a reason. It is her fault for Mama and Kathy screaming at each other, Papa in the ostrich barn, and Albert in Heaven.
    And she has lost the silver dollar. Albert’s silver dollar. Her plan was a complete failure. She takes out her notebook and writes:
    Not Fair! Not Fair!
    She scribbles a circle on the page. Round and round in frustration, until the pencil gouges into the paper, round and round until the tip breaks. Stab, stab, stab, into the centre.
    Egg stares at the hole on the page. She will not cry. She places her forehead against the notebook.
    Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
    Her tears blot the sheet. With her eyes full of tears, her fingers fumble for the broken head of the pencil. With the stub of lead, she writes:
    Money did not work with Martin.
    Plan did not work.
    The hurt is what he is after.
    â€¦
    She slides off the bed, imagining some kind of abyss, or chasm. The edge of the world, the end of it. She wants to plummet and shatter, the whole day broken, her whole life wrong. She falls, eyes closed, feels the vertiginous drop, that spike of fear. Her back hits the floor, a bump on the back of her head. There. With a slow roll, she scoots under the bed.
    Egg clutches Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl and the Young Reader’s Guide to Science . She wants to know how to survive the worst things. Her eyes are blurry but she tells no one. She can’t read the blackboard and Mrs. Syms thinks she is stupid, but a four-eyes ostrich Egghead is just too much in Bittercreek, the laws of nature would not allow it. Egg squints and tries to read about Newton and the apples and the oranges in the Young Reader’s Guide to Science . There is no equal opposite force at rest or in motion. This is the law of everything. Egg yawns. She gazes at the photograph of Anne Frank at the back of the book and rubs stars into her eyes. There is a secret, some kind of code that will make everything better. She has looked around and everyone seems to know it, some kind of key, or sign, or something. In the beginning was the Word and the end will be Revelation. If she stares long enough at the photo, Anne Frank will tell her. Egg is patient. Good things come to those who wait.
    Wonder Woman has magical bracelets that deflect bullets and she carries the Lasso of Truth. But you can see her through her invisible plane, sitting upright and everything in her golden wonder bra all in the middle of the air. Egg wants to be a superhero but not like Wonder Woman. Every superhero has a fatal flaw that the Greeks call hubris. Pride is what the lions have, on their