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I'd get so nervous going down there that my voice would squeak when I'd tell Lynetta it was time for dinner. It literally squeaked. But after a while the band
dropped Mystery from their name, and Pisser and its entourage got used to me showing up. And instead of glaring at me, they started saying stuff like, “Hey, baby brother, come on in!” “Hey, Brycie boy, wanna jam?”

This, then, is how I wound up in Skyler Brown's garage, surrounded by high school kids, watching a boa constrictor swallow eggs. Since I'd already seen it down a rat in the Baker brothers' bedroom, Pisser had lost at least some of the element of surprise. Plus, I picked up on the fact that they'd been saving this little show to freak me out, and I really didn't want to give them the satisfaction.

This wasn't easy, though, because watching a snake swallow an egg is actually much creepier than you might think. The boa opened its mouth to an enormous size, then just took the egg in and
glub
! We could see it roll down its throat.

But that wasn't all. After the snake had glubbed down three eggs, Matt-or-Mike said, “So, Brycie boy, how's he gonna digest those?”

I shrugged and tried not to squeak when I answered, “Stomach acid?”

He shook his head and pretended to confide, “He needs a tree. Or a leg.” He grinned at me. “Wanna volunteer yours?”

I backed away a little. I could just see that monster try to swallow my leg whole as an after-egg chaser. “N-no!”

He laughed and pointed at the boa slithering across the room. “Aw, too bad. He's going the other way. He's gonna use the piano instead!”

The piano! What kind of snake was this? How could
my sister stand being in the same room as these dementos? I looked at her, and even though she was pretending to be cool with the snake, I know Lynetta — she was totally creeped out by it.

The snake wrapped itself around the piano leg about three times, and then Matt-or-Mike put his hands up and said, “Shhh! Shhh! Everybody quiet. Here goes!”

The snake stopped moving, then flexed. And as it flexed, we could hear the eggs crunch inside him. “Oh, gross!” the girls wailed. “Whoa, dude!” the guys all said. Mike and Matt smiled at each other real big and said, “Dinner is served!”

I tried to act cool about the snake, but the truth is I started having bad dreams about the thing swallowing eggs. And rats. And cats.

And
me
.

Then the real-life nightmare began.

One morning about two weeks after the boa show in Skyler's garage, Juli appears on our doorstep, and what's she got in her hands? A half-carton of eggs. She bounces around like it's Christmas, saying, “Hiya, Bryce! Remember Abby and Bonnie and Clyde and Dexter? Eunice and Florence?”

I just stared at her. Somehow I remembered Santa's reindeer a little different than that.

“You know … my chickens? The ones I hatched for the science fair last year?”

“Oh, right. How could I forget.”

“They're laying eggs!” She pushed the carton into my hands. “Here, take these! They're for you and your family.”

“Oh. Uh, thanks,” I said, and closed the door.

I used to really like eggs. Especially scrambled, with bacon or sausage. But even without the little snake incident, I knew that no matter what you did to
these
eggs, they would taste nothing but foul to me. These eggs came from the chickens that had been the chicks that had hatched from the eggs that had been incubated by Juli Baker for our fifth-grade science fair.

It was classic Juli. She totally dominated the fair, and get this — her project was all about watching eggs. My friend, there is not a lot of action to report on when you're incubating eggs. You've got your light, you've got your container, you've got some shredded newspaper, and that's it. You're done.

Juli, though, managed to write an inch-thick report, plus she made diagrams and charts — I'm talking line charts and bar charts and pie charts — about the activity of eggs. Eggs!

She also managed to time the eggs so that they'd hatch the night of the fair. How does a person do that? Here I've got a live-action erupting volcano that I've worked pretty stinking hard on, and all anybody cares about is Juli's chicks pecking out of their shells. I even went over to take a look for myself, and — I'm being completely objective here — it was boring. They pecked for about five seconds, then just lay there for five
minutes.

I got to hear Juli jabber away to the judges, too. She had a pointer — can you believe that? Not a pencil, an actual retractable
pointer,
so she could reach across her incubator and tap on this chart or that diagram as she explained the excitement of watching eggs grow for
twenty-one days. The only thing she could've done to be more overboard was put on a chicken costume, and buddy, I'm convinced — if she'd thought of it, she would have done it.

But hey — I was over it. It was just Juli being Juli, right? But all of a sudden there I am a year later, holding a carton of home-grown eggs. And I'm having a hard time not getting annoyed all over again about her stupid blue-ribbon project when my mother leans out from the hallway and says, “Who was that, honey? What have you got there? Eggs?”

I could tell by the look on her face that she was hot to scramble. “Yeah,” I said, and handed them to her. “But I'm having cereal.”

She opened the carton, then closed it with a smile. “How nice!” she said. “Who brought them over?”

“Juli. She grew them.”

“Grew them?”

“Well, her chickens did.”

“Oh?” Her smile started falling as she opened the carton again. “Is that so. I didn't know she had… chickens.”

“Remember? You and Dad spent an hour watching them hatch at last year's science fair?”

“Well, how do we know there're not …
chicks
inside these eggs?”

I shrugged. “Like I said, I'm having cereal.”

We all had cereal, but what we talked about were eggs. My dad thought they'd be just fine — he'd had farm-fresh eggs when he was a kid and said they were delicious. My mother, though, couldn't get past the idea that she might be cracking open a dead chick, and pretty soon
discussion turned to the role of the rooster — something me and my Cheerios could've done without.

Finally Lynetta said, “If they had a rooster, don't you think we'd know? Don't you think the whole neighborhood would know?”

Hmmm, we all said, good point. But then my mom pipes up with, “Maybe they got it de-yodeled. You know — like they de-bark dogs?”

“A de-yodeled rooster,” my dad says, like it's the most ridiculous thing he's ever heard. Then he looks at my mom and realizes that he'd be way better off going along with her de-yodeled idea than making fun of her. “Hmmm,” he says, “I've never heard of such a thing, but maybe so.”

Lynetta shrugs and says to my mom, “So just ask them, why don't you. Call up Mrs. Baker and ask her.”

“Oh,” my mom says. “Well, I'd hate to call her eggs into question. It doesn't seem very polite, now, does it?”

“Just ask Matt or Mike,” I say to Lynetta.

She scowls at me and hisses, “Shut up.”

“What? What'd I do now?”

“Haven't you noticed I haven't been going down there, you idiot?”

“Lynetta!” my mom says. Like this is the first time she's heard my sister talk to me or something.

“Well, it's true! How can he
not
have noticed?” “I was going to ask you about that, honey. Did something happen?”

Lynetta stands up and shoves her chair in. “Like you care,” she snaps, and charges down to her room.

“Oh, boy,” my dad says.

Mom says, “Excuse me,” and follows Lynetta down the hall.

When my mother's gone, my dad says, “So, son, why don't
you
just ask Juli?”

“Dad!”

“It's just a little question, Bryce. No harm, no foul.”

“But it'll get me a half-hour answer!”

He studies me for a minute, then says, “No boy should be this afraid of a girl.”

“I'm not
afraid
of her…!”

“I think you are.”

“Dad!”

“Seriously, son. I want you to get us an answer. Conquer your fear and get us an answer.”

“To whether or not they have a rooster?”

“That's right.” He gets up and clears his cereal bowl, saying, “I've got to get to work and you've got to get to school. I'll expect a report tonight.”

Great. Just great. The day was doomed before it had started. But then at school when I told Garrett about what had happened, he just shrugged and said, “Well, she lives right across the street from you, right?”

“Yeah, so?”

“So just go look over the fence.”

“You mean spy?”

“Sure.”

“But … how can I tell if one of them's a rooster or not?”

“Roosters are …I don't know… bigger. And they have more feathers.”

“Feathers? Like I've got to go and count feathers?”

“No, stupid! My mom says that the male's always
brighter.” Then he laughs and says, “Although in your case I'm not so sure.”

“Thanks. You are giving me big-time help here, buddy. I really appreciate it.”

“Look, a rooster's going to be bigger and have brighter feathers. You know, those long ones in the back? They're redder or blacker or whatever. And don't roosters have some rubbery red stuff growing off the top of their head? And some off their neck, too? Yeah, the rooster's got all sorts of rubbery red stuff all around its face.”

“So you're saying I'm supposed to look over the fence for big feathers and rubbery red stuff.”

“Well, come to think of it, chickens have that rubbery red stuff, too. Just not as much of it.”

I rolled my eyes at him and was about to say, Forget it, I'll just ask Juli, but then he says, “I'll come with you if you want.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, dude. Seriously.”

And that, my friend, is how I wound up spying over the Bakers' back fence with Garrett Anderson at three-thirty that afternoon. Not my choice of covert operations, but a necessary one in order to report back to my dad that night at dinner.

We got there fast, too. The bell rang and we basically charged off campus because I figured if we got to the Bakers' quick enough, we could look and leave before Juli was anywhere near her house. We didn't even drop off our backpacks. We went straight down the alley and started spying.

It's not really necessary to look
over
the Bakers'
fence. You can see almost as well looking through it. But Garrett kept sticking his head up, so I figured I should too, although in the back of my mind I was aware that Garrett didn't have to live in this neighborhood — I did.

The backyard was a mess. Big surprise. The bushes were out of control, there was some kind of hodgepodge wood-and-wire coop off to one side, and the yard wasn't grass, it was highly fertilized dirt.

Garrett was the first to notice their dog, sacked out on the patio between two sorry-looking folding chairs. He points at him and says, “You think he's going to give us trouble?”

“We're not going to be here long enough to get in trouble! Where are those stupid chickens?”

“Probably in the coop,” he says, then picks up a rock and throws it at the mess of plywood and chicken wire.

At first all we hear is a bunch of feathers flapping, but then one of the birds comes fluttering out. Not very far, but enough so we can see it's got feathers and rubbery red stuff.

“So?” I ask him. “Is that a rooster?”

He shrugs. “Looks like a chicken to me.”

“How can you tell?”

He shrugs again. “Just does.”

We watch it scratching at the dirt for a minute, and then I ask, “What's a hen, anyway?”

“A hen?”

“Yeah. You got roosters, you got chickens, and then there's hens. What's a hen?”

“It's one of those,” he says, pointing into the Bakers' backyard.

“Then what's a chicken?”

He looks at me like I'm crazy. “What are you talking about?”

“Chickens! What's a chicken?”

He takes a step back from me and says, “Brycie boy, you are losin' it.
That's
a chicken!” He stoops down to pick up another rock, and he's just about to let it fly when the sliding-glass door to the back patio opens up and Juli steps outside.

We both duck. And as we're checking her out through the fence, I say, “When did she get home?”

Garrett grumbles, “While you were losing it about chickens.” Then he whispers, “But hey, this'll work great. She's got a basket, right? She's probably coming out to collect eggs.”

First she had to get all mushy with that mangy mutt of hers. She got down and nuzzled and ruffled and patted and hugged, telling him what a good boy he was. And when she finally let him go back to sleep, she had to stop and coo at the bird Garrett had scared out, and then she started singing. Singing. At the top of her lungs, she goes,
“I've got sunshine on a cloudy day. When it's cold outsi-ye-yide, I've got the month of May. I guess you'd say, what can make me feel this way? My girls. Talkin' 'bout my little gir-ur-rls …”
She looks inside the coop and coos, “Hello, Flo! Good afternoon, Bonnie! Come on out, punkin!”

The coop wasn't big enough for her to walk in. It was more like a mini lean-to shack that even her dog would have trouble crawling in. Does that stop Juli Baker? No. She gets down on her hands and knees and dives right
in. Chickens come squawking and flapping out, and pretty soon the yard's full of birds, and all we can see of Juli is her poop-covered shoes.

That's not all we can hear, though. She's warbling inside that coop, going,
“I don't need money, no fortune or faaa-ya-yame. I got all the riches, baby, anyone can claim. Well, I guess you'd say, what can make me feel this way? My girls. Talkin' 'bout my little gir-ur-rls, my girls…”

At this point I wasn't checking the chickens out for rubbery red stuff or feathers. I was looking at the bottom of Juli Baker's feet, wondering how in the world a person could be so happy tunneling through a dilapidated chicken coop with poop stuck all over her shoes.

Garrett got me back on track. “They're all chickens,” he says. “Look at 'em.”

I quit checking out Juli's shoes and started checking out birds. The first thing I did was count them. One-two-three-four-five-six. All accounted for. After all, how could anyone forget she'd hatched six? It was the all-time school record — everyone in the county had heard about that.