The apartment door was propped open with a sandal. Amelia stuck her head in. Gabriella was sitting at the small kitchen table, clipping something with a pair of scissors. Little pieces of paper were scattered across the table, and more papers were crammed into a shoe box.
Gabriella’s red hair was tied in a messy bun on top of her head, and her eyes were rimmed with black. “Salut, Amelia. Entrez.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d be here,” Amelia said. “I thought you had to work at the salon today.”
“Me too. But there were no clients booked for this afternoon, so they sent me home. That happened last week too.”
Amelia walked over to the table. The pieces of paper turned out to be store coupons. Gabriella had hundreds of them.
“That’s a ton of coupons,” Amelia said. “What are you doing?”
“Sorting.” Gabriella picked up a small stack and stuck it in the shoe box, behind a piece of cardboard sticking up that said Cleaning.
“What are you going to do with them all?”
“Save money! Doesn’t your mother coupon?”
“No. She’s too tired when we get to the store. Or in a rush. But she usually looks for sales in the flyers.”
“There was a woman on TV who coupons,” Gabriella said. “She saved $30,000 in one year.”
“Wow!”
“She is…what do you call it…an extreme couponer. She has inspired me. I want to be an extreme couponer too. Duke and I are always needing more money. And now things are dead at the salon. I really can not afford to have afternoons off.” She cut out a coupon for Crest toothpaste and slid it into the shoe box behind Bathroom.
Amelia picked up one of the coupons and read out loud, “Save 75 cents on BIG G CEREALS when you buy ONE BOX of Honey Nut Cheerios. That’s a good deal.”
“Of course. Duke adores Cheerios. We will file that under Breakfast.”
“Where do you get them all?”
“I pick them up at stores. In newspapers. Mostly off the Internet—dealcatcher.com and savealoonie.com. Here is a good one—two dollars off any Revlon beauty tool.” She tucked it into the shoe box behind Gabriella.
Amelia read some of the other categories out loud. Animals, Health, Entertainment, Clothes.
“Sometimes it is hard to know where to put it.” Gabriella picked up a coupon. “As seen on TV. Ab Rocket Twister. With dvd workouts. $129.99. That could go in Health or Entertainment. Or Gabriella. Duke would never use it.”
Amelia watched Gabriella clip and sort. Three more coupons for toothpaste. “You’re going to have a lot of toothpaste,” she said.
She wandered over to Beaker’s cage. She felt sick when she saw his scrawny neck and bald head. “Hey, Beaker, how are you doing? You’re awfully quiet today.”
“He will be noisy again at night when it starts to get dark.”
“Where’s Duke?”
“He has gone to pick up some ferrets. Some kids found them in a box in an alley. I am thinking they will be very hungry. And maybe sick. But Duke will know what to do.”
Amelia wasn’t exactly sure what a ferret was. But it sounded interesting.
The bin with the turtles had been moved into the hallway. Amelia remembered their names. Romeo and Juliet. They were nibbling on little brown pellets floating on the surface of the water. One of the turtles clambered onto a plastic platform that bobbed up and down. Did it feel the same as floating on an air mattress, like she had done last summer for hours and hours when they rented a cabin at Cultus Lake for a week?
That was what she remembered about that week—lying on the air mattress, even though it was cool and rainy most days, thinking about how much she hated Dad. Mom had been mostly on her cell phone—setting up an appointment with a lawyer and making arrangements to have Great-Aunt Mildred’s house cleaned so they could move in.
Amelia sighed. Why was she thinking about that now?
She slipped into the reptile room. It was hot, like a sauna. A small red light glowed on each of the heaters. Round lightbulbs, shining brightly, hung from the sides of some of the cages.
Amelia went right to Winston’s pen. “Hey, Winston,” she said.
The tortoise was chewing on a wispy piece of hay. He didn’t look sick. But how could you tell with a tortoise? She wanted to touch his wrinkly neck, just to see what it felt like, but he might not like that.
Winston’s jaws moved up and down slowly. His black eyes blinked at Amelia.
What was he thinking about? He’d been dumped in a cold, wet drainage ditch. Did he worry about that? Was he paranoid that someone would abandon him again?
“You must have freaked out,” Amelia said. “But don’t worry. Duke and Gabriella will look after you. I promise.”
Duke had said that the animals were desert and tropical animals. She didn’t know which one Winston was. He was a special kind of tortoise—Duke had told her the name, but she couldn’t remember it.
She stood up. “I’m just going to say hi to everyone else. I’ll be back in a minute.”
The iguana, Bill, looked like he was asleep, but Amelia stayed well back just in case. The yellow-and-black snake was still curled up in a ball, each coil as thick as her arm. She peered into the tanks with the towels. One snake, skinny with black and white stripes like a zebra, had slithered out, but the other two snakes were still hidden.
She felt like someone was watching her and glanced up at the brown creature with the grinning mouth. “Who are you?” she said, smiling.
Amelia opened the door of the reptile room. “What’s that little brown guy called?”
“Apollo,” Gabriella said. “He is a bearded dragon. And the green lizard is Kilo. She is a Chinese water dragon.”
Dragons! Such big names for such little creatures.
“The ferrets are here!” Gabriella said.
There were three ferrets. Duke said they were related to weasels and let Amelia reach into the box and pick them up, one at a time. They were long and skinny, with thick fur. One was almost all white, with a dusting of black, and the other two were brown and white with black around their eyes.
“A group of ferrets is called a business,” Duke said. “You know, like a herd of cows? Well, it’s a business of ferrets. So I thought we’d call these guys The Secretary, The Accountant and The President.”
Amelia grinned. She held up the white ferret by its middle. Its head and tail dangled down. “Which one is this?”
“The Accountant,” Duke said.
“He’s so bendy,” Amelia said.
“Their spines have to be flexible so they can wiggle into holes in the ground.”
“Are they okay?”
“I think so. Maybe a little skinny, and I’m going to check for eye infections.”
Amelia helped Duke set up the ferrets’ cage in the living room, next to Georgia the rabbit and the crested gecko Mary. They strung a blue hammock from one side of the cage to the other. The ferrets clambered into the hammock and settled in a furry heap.
“They’ll sleep now,” Duke said. “Ferrets spend most of their lives sleeping. About twenty hours a day. I’m not kidding. And now I’ve got something to show you. Have you ever held a snake before?”
“No,” Amelia said.
“Come with me.”
Amelia followed Duke into the reptile room. He reached into a tank and lifted up the black-and-white-striped snake.
He handed him to Amelia. “This is a California king-snake. His name is Zebra.”
Zebra was squirmy, slithering partway up her arm. But he wasn’t slimy. His skin felt dry and cool.
“Look at his eyes,” Duke said. “What do they look like to you?”
“Kind of bluish?”
“They turned that way this morning. It means he’s getting ready to shed. His eyes will go clear again in a few days, and then he’ll get rid of his skin.”
“Is he sick or something?”
“Nope. All snakes shed their skins. It’s because they’re growing, and their skin doesn’t stretch like a human’s.”
“I’d love to see him do that.”
“I’ll come and get you. If you’re not at school.”
“Thanks!”
Duke and Gabriella were the best thing that had happened since Amelia and her mom had moved here. But how was she supposed to keep all of this a secret? A rat, ferrets, lizards, snakes. If her mom found out, she’d freak. She’d never let Gabriella and Duke stay.
Never.