Free Young Fredle by Cynthia Voigt Page A

whoever
they
were, or what she wanted with him, she asked, “What’s your name? Bardo doesn’t tell us names. He’s the go-between, did he tell you?”
    Fredle nodded.
    “I don’t know why they call him that, since his job is to keep you away from us. What
is
your name?”

    “Fredle.”
    That seemed to please her. “Fredle,” she repeated. “He said you were a giant, almost as big as a rat. But Bardo’s a liar, sometimes.”
    “I’ve noticed,” Fredle said.
    “Most of it’s just mischief, although—sometimes?—it’s pretty mean mischief. You can never be sure about Bardo.
I
think they should let
me
be go-between, but they don’t trust me to do what I’m told. They think I don’t care about the rules. They’re right, but I’d still make a better go-between.”
    Like her brother, she talked a lot. In fact, she was a chatterer, and Fredle began to hope she might be willing to tell him a way back into the house, a way home.
    “He says you’re nasty. Are you?”
    “No,” Fredle said.
    “I bet you don’t bite, either, do you.”
    “Only food, so far in my life,” Fredle said.
    “But how did you escape? From inside the house, I mean, because they keep the inside mice like chickens, that’s what I’ve heard. Was it scary, escaping?”
    Neldo had mixed everything up. “Why would they keep us like chickens?” he asked.
    “To eat. Everything eats mice,” she explained. “We’re at the bottom of the food chain, except maybe for ants. And beetles. And spiders, too. Not counting vegetables, of course, especially the vegetables that grow out in the open, the tomatoes and peppers, lettuce and beans? They’re the real bottom because they’re so easy to forage.”
    “But aren’t all vegetables the same?” Fredle asked.
    Neldo gave the little squeaking sound that is a mouse’s laugh, and rarely heard. “That’s like saying all mice are the same and just look at us two, a field mouse and a house mouse, look how different we are.”
    “There
is
something to what you say,” Fredle said. He guessed that if he could change his sleeping and eating habits, he could change his opinions, too. “And the differences don’t end with looks, do they? I’m a kitchen house mouse, which is different from being a cellar house mouse or an attic house mouse.”
    “I’m a woodshed field mouse,” Neldo announced.
    Fredle asked, “Aren’t there snakes in the woodshed?”
    “There’s only one I ever heard of. It’s not easy, being a woodshed mouse, even though, actually, the snake lives up in the rafters and our nest is way at the back, in the bottom layer of wood.” Then she changed the subject. “Bardo says you’re easy to fool. Are you?”
    “I don’t know,” Fredle said. “Maybe.” He thought about it. “But maybe not.”
    “I think that if you escaped from the house you must be something special,” Neldo decided.
    This was a compliment Fredle didn’t deserve. “I didn’t escape. No house mouse wants to go outside. It’s not as if we’re prisoners, inside. We live there.”
    “Then what are you doing out here?” she asked.
    “Well,” he said, starting at the beginning of the story, with finding the good thing.
    Neldo interrupted him almost immediately. “It was brown? It was sweet? Don’t you know what that is?”
    “The inside was white and it was almost all inside. The brown was only a thin shell. That white soft filling was … It tasted”—and unexpectedly Fredle could remember exactly how that flavor spread out in his mouth—“wonderful.”
    “Chocolate, that was chocolate, that shell, I bet. We
never
eat chocolate,” Neldo told him, sounding a little bossy now. “Chocolate’s bad for mice.”
    “How was I supposed to know that?”
    “You’re a mouse. Where are your survival instincts?”
    “I don’t know how you can talk to me about survival instincts when you live with a snake.”
    They had made one another cross, and sat silent for a while, until Neldo