1
As Cody Harmon lay on the family room couch after dinner on Sunday evening, his calico cat, Puffball, purred on his chest. His tabby cat, Furface, kneaded his stomach. Rex the golden retriever snored at his feet. And Angus the terrier had just upended the wastepaper basket and was shredding wadded-up tissues all over the family room carpet.
“Angus, no!” Cody hollered.
The cats leaped at the sound. The sheaf of papers on which Cody had been making pig doodles, when he was supposed to be writing a three-page animal report for his teacher, Mrs. Molina, scattered onto the floor.
“Oh, Angus, look what you did!”
Shoving the dog out of the way, Cody started scooping up tissue bits, crumpled wrappers, and the small stuffed giraffe Angus had already destroyed that afternoon. But Cody wasn’t mad. He would rather clean up dog mess—even dog poop—than write an animal report any day.
Cody loved animals, all animals.
He did not love writing reports about animals. Especially a report assigned three weeks ago that he had barely begun. Especially a report that was due tomorrow.
His mother came into the room, a baby on each hip: Cody’s twin sisters, nine months old and starting to crawl all over the house. Tibbie and Libbie were almost like two more pets, in addition to the dogs, cats, bantam rooster, chickens, and enormous pig out in the pigsty.
“What did he do now?” Cody’s mom demanded.
“Nothing,” Cody said quickly. “Just got into the trash, but I cleaned it up already.”
“That dog is nothing but trouble!” Her eyes fell on the papers still littering the floor, which Angus was now sniffing. “I thought you didn’t have any homework this weekend.”
“It’s not really homework. It’s an animal report.”
“Well, good for you for starting it nice and early.” She paused. “When is it due?”
Cody knew better than to lie. “Well, Monday, but—”
“Tomorrow?”
What could Cody say but “I forgot”?
And he had forgotten. He’d been busy the whole weekend. A soccer game with his best friend, Tobit Johnson. Helping his mother with the babies. Helping his dad plant the corn. Riding in his dad’s pickup to town to spend his twenty dollars of birthday money on tease toys for the cats, squeaker balls for the dogs, and hoof conditioner for Mr. Piggins. How was he supposed to write a pig report, too?
His dad poked his head into the family room doorway. “Everything okay?” he asked with a slow smile.
“Cody has a report due tomorrow,” his mom said. “And he hasn’t even started it. Have you?” She turned to Cody. “Don’t bother answering. I know you haven’t.”
Well, he had started it. Mrs. Molina had made them pick their animal, so he had picked pigs. And she had made them get library books and write a list of the kind of facts they were supposed to find: size, diet, life span, habitat. His books and list were still in his desk at school, buried under all the other work he hadn’t remembered to bring home.
“Well, it’s only six-thirty now,” his dad said mildly. “Bedtime’s not for another hour and a half. Let’s clear out this menagerie and give the boy a chance to get this thing done.”
“Can the animals stay?” Cody asked. “It’s a report on animals.”
His mom harrumphed, but his dad said, “Sure. Just do your best,” and gave him another smile.
His dad’s encouragement almost made Cody wish he had been working on his report harder.
Back on the couch, with the cats in place and Angus whining to have the squeaker ball tossed for him, Cody looked at Mrs. Molina’s assignment sheet. Awake now, Rex nuzzled Cody’s knee, as if worried that his boy had such a big report to write so quickly.
“You must get your animal facts from at least two different sources. These must be books or magazines, not the Internet,” read the instructions.
Cody doubted everyone in his class would do that. Perfect Simon Ellis would have ten—or twenty, or a hundred—sources, but no one else in the Franklin School third grade was like Simon. Well, Kelsey Green would have a lot of sources, too. Kelsey loved to read. But Tobit probably only had one.
Zero wasn’t that much less than one.
Besides, if there was one thing Cody knew about, it was pigs. He could be his own source.
He picked up his pencil and started writing.
I like pigs. Pigs are smart. People think pigs are dirty, but pigs are clean. I like pigs a LOT.
That was a good start.
Pigs eat slops from a trough. My pig is called Mr. Piggins.
Six whole sentences! That was long enough for one page, and he could add another page with a picture. Cody set his completed page on the floor and, on a second sheet of paper, started to draw a portrait of Mr. Piggins from memory.
It wasn’t like he’d get a good grade anyway. Mrs. Molina never gave him good grades on anything. He had the worst grades in the class, even worse than Tobit’s.
But no one else had as many pets as he did.
Cody looked over at Angus, who had pieces of something white and crumpled hanging out of his mouth. Pieces of Cody’s pig report.
“Angus, no!”
It was too late.
Now he had to write the whole dumb report all over again.
* * *
At school on Monday, Mrs. Molina collected the animal reports first thing.
“How long was yours?” Cody whispered to Tobit.
Tobit shrugged as if to say, Who cares? Then he said, “Two and a half pages. But I wrote really big.”
Mrs. Molina had just finished setting the pile of reports on her desk when Mr. Boone, the Franklin School principal, came into the room. Cody relaxed. Some schools had principals who yelled at kids like him and Tobit, whose reports were too short, but Mr. Boone was funny and jolly.
Today, instead of wearing his principal jacket and tie, Mr. Boone wore a T-shirt that said SUPPORT YOUR HUMANE SOCIETY! Cody had adopted his dogs and cats from the Humane Society, though his mother kept threatening to make him take Angus back. Maybe he could support the Humane Society even more by adopting extra pets. A rabbit, maybe. Or a goat!
“Boys and girls!” Mr. Boone boomed. “Next week is going to be a very special week at Franklin School.”
Mr. Boone thought every week at Franklin School was a special one. You had to like school a lot to be a principal. Cody hoped the special week wouldn’t involve a reading contest, a spelling bee, a science fair, or something where you had to dress up and pretend you lived in the olden days.
“Next week,” Mr. Boone said, “is our first-ever Franklin School pet show.”
Cody could hardly believe his ears. The hubbub in the room showed that everyone else was excited, too. But nobody else could be as excited as Cody.
There would be prizes, Mr. Boone explained. For each grade level, a panel of pet experts would award the prizes for best animal in each species category, as well as a grand prize for best in show. There would also be a popularity prize voted on by students.
Cody’s pets could win heaps and heaps! He didn’t like to raise his hand in class—that was the kind of thing Simon did all the time—but he had to ask. “How many pets can we enter?”
Mr. Boone grinned. “As many as you want!”
Two dogs. Two cats. Three chickens. One rooster. One pig. Cody counted on his fingers: nine!
“The point of the pet show is to raise money for the Humane Society,” Mr. Boone said, pointing to his T-shirt. “So there will be an entrance fee for every pet you bring to school that day.”
“How much?” someone else asked.
“Ten dollars,” Mr. Boone replied.
Ten dollars?
Cody didn’t have ten dollars. Last week he had gotten a twenty-dollar bill for his birthday, but he had already spent every penny of it on pet presents.
What was ten dollars times nine pets? Cody couldn’t do tough math problems, like Annika Riz, who was a math genius, but it had to be a fortune.
Cody would be lucky if he could come up with the money to enter one pet, let alone nine.
What kind of pet show would it be if Cody Harmon, king of pets, couldn’t enter any pets at all?
copyright © 2016 by Claudia Mills
