Free Taking Care of Terrific by Lois Lowry Page B

water's not very deep. Muddy, though."
    "I wonder how they get them out there to the middle when they put them away for the night. Does somebody have to swim back to shore?"
    Seth shrugged. "I dunno. They must have some system. They wouldn't make somebody
swim,
not in this gunky water."
    "Rats," I said suddenly. I'd been staring at the swans, floating there in the dusk, their eyes staring blankly into the trees, when I remembered how longingly Tom Terrific had looked at them, how wistful he'd been as they slid past filled with laughing children.
    "Rats? Where?" Seth jumped like a panther on the prowl and looked around.
    "Relax. I didn't mean real rats. I just meant,
rats.
"
    "Why?" He sat back down and tossed a pebble back and forth between his hands.
    "This little kid I babysit for," I told him. "He never in his whole life has ridden on the Swan Boats. His mother won't let him."
    "It's only fifty cents for under twelve," Seth said, pointing to the sign.
    "It's not the money. She's loaded. You should see their house on West Cedar Street. She just thinks the Swan Boats are—I don't know—
tacky,
I guess."
    Seth shrugged. "They are. So what?"
    I threw some pebbles out into the water,
plink plink plink,
and they made circles that expanded and expanded and expanded. Seth tossed his pebbles into the center of my circles. His aim was pretty good. He ought to try out for the Carstairs basketball team. They haven't won a game in
three years, though they tied Milton last spring and lost in overtime.
    And now I was thinking about something else as the Swan Boats moved gently against each other at the center of the pond.
    "The bag lady, too," I said. "I saw
her
looking at the boats the same way Tom Terrific did. I bet she'd give anything to have a ride."
    "So?
She
doesn't have a mother who thinks they're tacky."
    "I don't know." I sighed. "Probably she can't afford the seventy-five cents it costs for adults. But that's not really it. You know what it is, Seth?"
    He waited.
    "It's because the bag ladies all feel as though they're not real people. They know they're different. Everybody looks at them funny and moves away when they walk by. After everybody's treated you like filth for a few years, probably you start
feeling
like you're really out of it, and—"
    Seth was looking at me a little oddly. Me, who had treated him as if he'd crawled out from under a rock for as long as I could remember. We both decided to ignore that thought.
    "—so you're not going to go stand in a line
full of tourists wearing pink and green alligator shirts, not if you know everybody's going to nudge each other and move away from you, not even if you've got the seventy-five cents and want to sit in a Swan Boat feeling like Queen Elizabeth for twenty minutes.
    "It's not fair," I concluded, and I hunched up with my chin resting on my knees. It was starting to get chilly. "I wish sometime when no one was here, all those bag ladies could come and ride around the pond like Cleopatra's handmaidens so they could feel proud, and important, and peaceful, and—"
    Seth had stood up and walked away. I thought for a minute that I had started getting too sentimental and poetic for him, that maybe he was going to do a barfing imitation into the rhododendron bushes. Then I saw what he was doing. He was examining a padlock and chain on the dock. If I had been a comic book character at that moment, a light bulb would have appeared in a balloon above my head.
    "Seth!" I called in a loud whisper. "Do you think—"
    "Shhh," he said. He stood there chewing on his tongue for a minute. Finally he came back to where I was sitting on the bench.
    "Could they be quiet?" he asked. "If we did it at night, and they were absolutely
quiet,
we wouldn't get caught."
    There were twenty-four seats on each Swan Boat, plus the place where the operator sat and pedaled. I pictured twenty-four bag ladies, erect as royalty, their eyes bright, their shoulders straight inside their