Free Cheating for the Chicken Man by Priscilla Cummings Page A

was angry—like that tiger on the book cover! Maybe that’s what anger did to a person. It madethem do things they otherwise might never do. She thought of J.T. curling his fists in front of Curtis. And how she had called out “Who did this?”
    â€œAdvances in biology help us fight diseases,” Mr. Rutkowski went on. “Diseases like cystic fibrosis and cancer.”
    Cancer
. Kate blinked hard and tried to close a curtain on the hallway incident and endangered tigers and now, hearing the word cancer. She needed to focus on her class.
    â€œYour diet and the chemicals that you are exposed to can affect whether or not you get a particular form of cancer,” her teacher continued.
    But there it was again. The word for the insidious disease that had taken away her father. Mr. Rutkowski had mentioned it twice already. Kate swallowed hard. She would never hear the word
cancer
again and not feel a punch to her stomach. From J.T.’s problems, to vanishing tigers, to cancer, to her father’s death. Was she never going to have a normal day again? A normal
moment
?
    Apparently, Mr. Rutkowski liked to walk while he talked. “For example,” he said, now from the back of the room, “smokers often get lung cancer, which is caused by tobacco. Now they say there is a link between CT scans in children and leukemia, which is a different kind of cancer where white blood cells displace normal blood.”
    Kate stared at a spot beneath the front blackboard and thought back to early summer, just after J.T. had come home. The truck that delivered chicken feed to their farm was pumping it into the two large metal tanks on either side of the chicken houses; and the auger, the long, metal pipelike armthat transferred the feed from the truck to the bin, had not aligned properly, allowing some of the feed to spill out onto the roof and into the air. J.T. stood watching with his hands on his hips and a deep scowl on his face.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” Kate asked him.
    â€œSee all that dust flying around?” he asked.
    Kate looked again. “Yeah. I see it.” She thought he was going to say that all that dust was a waste of money, but wouldn’t that be the chicken company’s loss? After all, they provided and paid for all the feed.
    J.T.’s expression didn’t change. “Could be what made Dad sick.”
    His reply shocked Kate. “What are you talking about? Chicken feed gave Dad kidney disease? And then cancer?”
    J.T. lifted his shoulders and then lowered them. He didn’t look at Kate. “Maybe.”
    Was he kidding? Why would he say that? Sometimes Kate had a really hard time figuring out her brother. “Well, I never saw him eat any of it!”
    J.T. didn’t think her reply was funny. “It’s nothing he ever ate,” he said. “It’s what he breathed in all those years. Before this big truck here, before we were even born, they used to drop off bags of feed that Dad cut open with his jackknife and dumped into feed carts. The carts ran on a steel track into the chicken house, where he’d scoop it out into the feeders for the chickens. There was a lot of dust. Dad said some farmers he knew even wore masks. But he said no one ever thought back then that it was going to make them sick. They never even questioned the stuff the company put in the feed.”
    â€œWhat was in the feed that was so bad?”
    â€œChemicals.”
    â€œChemicals,” Kate repeated, holding her hands palm up. “What kind of chemicals?”
    â€œYou ever heard of arsenic?” J.T. asked her.
    â€œArsenic?” Kate’s eyebrows shot up. “Sure! Arsenic is poison! But why would a chicken company put arsenic in the feed?”
    J.T. smiled a little. A funny smile, though, like she couldn’t possibly understand. “It’s complicated,” he said.
    Kate was put out by his attitude. It made her feel dumb or like a