Roshni came back the next morning to examine the letter. Amelia slumped in her beanbag chair, and Roshni flopped on the bed.
“When are you going to write back?” Roshni said.
Amelia hadn’t thought of that. “I don’t know. What would I say?”
“For starters, ask her about her great-grandchildren.”
“Who?”
“William and Kate’s kids! Queen Elizabeth probably adores them.”
“Oh, right,” Amelia said. “I don’t know. It’s not like she said to write back. She sounded kind of final.”
“So? Do it! You and Queen Elizabeth could be pen pals! How awesome is that?”
Amelia couldn’t help laughing. “We’re not going to be pen pals!”
“Why not? You could ask her for her email address. That would be a lot easier.”
“Forget it.”
“Come on. We can ask her to say hi to Kate and William for us!”
Amelia groaned.
Amelia gave Winston his fourth dose of tetracycline.
He was living on water that she squirted into his mouth and was mostly asleep.
She sat beside his pen.
Please, please, please get better.
“What are you doing in here?” Amelia said the next morning when she came back to check on Winston.
Mick was leaning against a wall in the reptile room, his arms full of King Kong. “What does it look like I’m doing? Checking up on you to make sure you weren’t lying about the animals.”
“Did Duke say you could hold King Kong?”
“No. I just kinda got lost and wandered in here by mistake.”
“Ha-ha, very funny. Did you bring the money?”
Mick saluted. “In the pickle jar, ma’am. Ten bucks.” He put King Kong back in his tank. “I’d give anything for a snake like this.”
Amelia ignored him. She crouched down beside Winston’s pen. Sleeping again.
Mick crouched beside her. “Is there anything I can do? To help?”
“No.” Amelia’s eyes blurred with tears. “There’s nothing anyone can do.”
Mick and Amelia set up a bin with Cheerios and honey for a new batch of wax worms that Duke had bought with money from the pickle jar. They only cost five dollars, but she was worried. The money in the pickle jar was growing so slowly, and she didn’t think there would ever be enough for the drug.
“They look like maggots,” Mick said when they dropped the white worms into their new home.
“But they’re not,” Amelia said. “They have legs and mouths, and maggots don’t. They’ll eat the honey, and then they’ll make cocoons. And then they’ll turn into moths. The moths don’t eat anything because they don’t have a mouth. They’ll lay eggs and then die. And then there’ll be more wax worms. Maybe seven or eight hundred.”
“You know all that?” Mick said. “And who gets to eat these tasty morsels?”
“Apollo, Kilo, Oliver, the fire-bellied toads and Nate the tomato frog.”
Mick made a smacking noise. “Oh, yum.”
In the afternoon Jordan came by the apartment, carrying a large glass aquarium.
“I used to keep fish,” he told Amelia and Gabriella, who were couponing at the kitchen table. “Don’t need it anymore.”
“Duke is not here right now, but he will be so happy,” Gabriella said.
Jordan set the tank on the counter. “Okay if I have a quick peek at Winston?”
Amelia took him into the reptile room. “He’s asleep,” she whispered.
She gave Jordan a quick tour of the other reptiles. Then she took him into the living room to see Mary, who was clinging upside down to the mesh on the top of her tank, Zak and Lysander, Georgia and the ferrets.
“I gotta get to the gym,” Jordan said finally. “I’ll see you guys later.”
“See you,” Gabriella said. “And thanks again.”
Amelia sat down at the table and then leaped to her feet. She raced after Jordan and caught up to him on the street. “Wait a sec!”
She gave him a coupon for Whiskas cat food.
Jordan gave her a thumbs-up.