“Eww!” I pushed him away.
“What?” he said with a hurt, hangdog expression.
“You just licked me!”
“I did?” He looked confused. “I’m just glad to see you. Again. I mean, I remember everything now.”
“Great, but I think maybe you remember some stuff you shouldn’t.”
Gilly was watching us and smiling.
“It’s not funny!” I said.
“Actually, it is,” Gilly said.
“What if he tries to lick his own butt?”
“Don’t worry—it won’t last. A certain amount of memory leakage is unavoidable, but a few days from now Billy’s memories will settle back into their old neural pathways. The remnants of Gertrude’s memory will fade away.”
“I hope so,” I said. “Having my face licked once is quite enough.”
Billy said, “You don’t mind when Gertrude licks you.”
“Gertrude is a dog!”
“Okay, no more licking. I also promise not to chase balls or chew on bones. At least not when you’re around.”
As I have mentioned before, I can be somewhat sarcastic at times, but I do not like it when other people are sarcastic with me. I gave him the evil eye, but he was grinning.
“It’s really nice to have you back in my head,” he said.
“It’s nice to be there,” I said, which made no sense at all, since I myself had never visited the inside of his head. But he knew what I meant, and that was what was important. I think if Gilly hadn’t been sitting right there we would have had a nice boy-girl-style kiss.
“I have some more good news,” Billy said. “The library is saved!”
“I’ve agreed to make a substantial contribution to that dusty old museum,” Gilly said. “Despite the fact that Olivia Pfleuger, who used to be one of my best programmers, quit ACPOD to bury herself in dead trees.” He was trying to sound grumpy, but he couldn’t help smiling. “After all, we can’t have one of the smartest software engineers on the planet out there vandalizing our literature, right?”
“So she’s not going to jail or anything?” I said.
“Certainly not. But I will require her to make sure every person who attempted to read the corrupted version of Charlotte’s Web is notified, apologized to, and offered a free paper copy of the book.”
“That sounds really complicated. How can she track down all those people?”
“Olivia may be a fool, but she also happens to be a genius. I’m sure she’ll figure out how to do it.”
• • •
All that happened a few weeks ago. Since then, Ms. Pfleuger has added two computers to her library and restarted her Saturday morning story-time program. Last week twenty preschoolers and kindergarteners came to hear her read Where the Wild Things Are. I was there too, volunteering to help with kid control. Those four-year-olds are monsters!
Dottie Tisk is living with her grandparents now, and she’s back at school. Last week I saw her wearing one of Myke Duchakis’s ANIMALS ARE PEOPLE TOO T-shirts. Billy was right. A girl who would crash through a closed garage door on an ATV was a lot tougher than she appeared.
Ernest Rausch never did remember who he was or what he had done, but he seemed to know pretty much everything else. He had not only downloaded Wikipedia, but all 400,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary. He immediately began sharing information with anyone who would listen. Do you want to know how fast an aardvark can run? Rausch is your go-to guy. Questions about the royal family of nineteenth century Portugal? Ask Rausch.
“He’ll probably have to be institutionalized,” Dad told me. “The man knows everything, but he can barely feed himself. Knowing a lot is not the same as being smart.”
“He’s still going to jail, right?”
“There’s no point in bringing him to trial. He remembers nothing of what he did. In a sense, he is not Ernest Rausch anymore. He’s a completely different person.”
“I guess that’s a good thing. I didn’t much care for the original.”
Billy is back to normal, almost. He does bark now and then, but I think he does it just to bug me. I try to ignore it. Gilly, whose missing memories were divided between the goat and Gertrude, occasionally lets out a random bleat. Dad no longer eats tuna fish, but he does curl up on the sofa and purr sometimes.
Fortunately, this is Flinkwater, where eccentric behaviors are considered normal.
Speaking of Flinkwater, I got an incomplete on my report for Mr. Westerburg because, well, I didn’t complete it. But I did solve the mystery eventually. Just last week, as a matter of fact.