Don't Feed the Geckos! Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Frontispiece

  Company Coming

  Mami Still Talking

  Bernardo

  You Can’t Feed a Gecko Popcorn!

  First Day

  All the Best Kickers

  The Care and Feeding of Geckos

  Soccer Practice

  Where’s the Woolly Mammoth’s Ear?

  Storm Warning

  What’s That Noise?

  The Coming and Going Party

  Sample Chapter from DOG DAYS

  Buy the Book

  Read More from the Carver Chronicles Series

  Sample Chapter from NIKKI AND DEJA

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  Clarion Books

  3 Park Avenue

  New York, New York 10016

  Text copyright © 2015 by Karen English

  Illustrations copyright © 2015 by Laura Freeman

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  www.hmhco.com

  The illustrations were executed digitally.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  English, Karen.

  Don’t feed the geckos! / by Karen English ; illustrated by Laura Freeman.

  pages cm. — (The Carver chronicles ; book three)

  Summary: When Bernardo comes to live with Carlos temporarily, taking over his top bunk, his spot on the school soccer team, and even his Papi’s attention, Carlos knows he is not happy, but worse, Bernardo starts messing with Carlos’s pet geckos, so Carlos tries to see past his cousin’s annoying ways and keep the peace for his family’s sake.

  ISBN 978-0-544-57529-5 (hardback)

  [1. Cousins—Fiction. 2. Geckos—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction. 4. Hispanic Americans—Fiction.] I. Freeman-Hines, Laura, illustrator. II. Title. III. Title: Do not feed the geckos!

  PZ7.E7232Don 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2015013602

  eISBN 978-0-544-60976-1

  v1.1215

  For Gavin and Jacob and all their friends.

  —K.E.

  For my mom, who was stronger and braver than she believed she was.

  —L.F.

  One

  Company Coming

  Carlos’s cousin, Bernardo, is coming. It’s after school and Carlos sits down at the kitchen table to eat his Toaster Tart and eavesdrop on his mother and Tía Lupe’s telephone conversation. His mother and Tía Lupe are always on the phone, checking with each other about everything. At least once or twice a day. His father doesn’t even answer the phone anymore because he knows it’s probably Tía Lupe.

  Carlos overhears that his cousin Bernardo is coming to stay with them all the way from Texas because Bernardo’s mom—Tía Emilia—is having a rough time and needs to get a fresh start somewhere else. She’s moving to their town and sending Bernardo ahead.

  Carlos stops chewing to listen better. Now it sounds as if his mother and Tía Lupe are gossiping about Tía Emilia. She’s always having problems; she doesn’t make the right choices; she needs to manage her life better; and blah blah blah. Boring grown-up stuff. But it does make him think about his cousin and the fact that he’s coming tomorrow.

  His mother finally gets off the phone and comes to sit across from him. She puts on her serious face.

  “Now, listen here, Carlos. Do you remember your cousin Bernardo?”

  “A little bit.” Bernardo was kind of chubby and had a mop of dark curly hair. Carlos went with Mami and Papi to Texas—San Antonio—when he was almost six and his sister, Issy (short for Isabella), had just turned three. It was Bernardo’s birthday; Carlos turned six a few months after him. Carlos remembers sitting on a porch, eating a Creamsicle with Bernardo before his birthday party. Oh, and running through the sprinklers. He remembers Bernardo cried because he wanted two pieces of birthday cake on his plate at once. He didn’t want to wait until he finished what he had first. He just sat there crying and looking stupid with a mouth full of chewed-up cake.

  And Carlos remembers seeing a photograph of Bernardo’s dad in some kind of uniform—like an army uniform.

  “Bernardo and Tía Emilia are moving here. Your tía wants him making the change in schools and settled as soon as possible. I’m picking him up tomorrow, so I just want to give you a heads-up.”

  Maybe this will be a good thing. Maybe Bernardo will be cool and it’ll be awesome to have another guy in the house—kind of like a brother. They’ll be able to do things together. Mami doesn’t let Carlos go to the park by himself, or the store, or anywhere, actually. But with his cousin Bernardo here, he’ll have an automatic buddy to go places with. Yeah, Carlos says to himself. Bernardo.

  “What’s he like?” Carlos asks.

  “How am I supposed to know?” Mami says, sounding a little irritated. “All I know is that you better make your cousin feel at home. Make him feel welcome.”

  That’s important to Mami, Carlos knows. Family. And sticking together and helping each other out.

  Now Mami is giving him a list that she’s counting out on her fingers—which shows she means business. She still has the serious face where she stares at Carlos, looking at him closely. His little sister comes into the room and stands next to Mami. She’s wearing her tiara because she wants to be a queen when she grows up. It’s annoying. Ever since Mami told her she was named after Queen Isabella of Spain, she’s been wearing that tiara as much as possible. Mami did a report on Queen Isabella in high school, apparently.

  “Can I have a Toaster Tart?” Issy asks in a whiny voice.

  “Not now, Princess.”

  “Queen,” Issy says. She adjusts her crown. Carlos rolls his eyes.

  “Oh, right. Queen Isabella. Not now.”

  Issy must sense that there’s something going on that she wants to be a part of. She climbs onto Mami’s lap, and then there are the two of them, looking at Carlos like they expect something special from him.

  Bernardo has had a hard year, Mami tells him. She doesn’t tell him what that means exactly, but because he has had this hard year, Carlos is to make Bernardo feel extra “at home.” Like letting him feed Carlos’s geckos. Stuff like that. “And introduce him to your friends, help him in school, share stuff with him.”

  That sounds super, but Carlos is stuck on letting Bernardo near his geckos. Uh-uh . . . Ain’t gonna happen. At least not without supervision.

  In the last few months, Carlos has discovered a love for animals—and insects. Different kinds of animals, like geckos and horned toads and albino snakes. He also realized he loves insects and their weird behaviors. Because of this, Carlos is no longer a member of the Knucklehead Club. He used to always miss turning in his homework, he did a sloppy job on his projects, he didn’t always study for spelling tests, he brought toys to school to play with in his desk, and he didn’t do his classwork in a timely fashion. Just a general knucklehead.

  Those were the words of his teacher, Ms. Shelby-Ortiz, actually. He’d overheard her talking to Mr. Beaumont, the other third grade teacher, in the front office. She’d said, “I’ve got a few knuckleheads in my class this year. I’m hoping they’ll decide to straighten up.” She didn’t know Carlos was listening.

  He had come into the office to see if he could call his mother and tell
her to bring the lunch he’d forgotten (typical knucklehead behavior), and he was standing right behind the two teachers as he waited his turn to speak to Mrs. Marker, the office lady.

  He’d left after that. He didn’t want Ms. Shelby-Ortiz to know he’d heard. He went back out to the yard and sat down on the nearest bench, thinking he’d just ask a couple of kids for whatever they could spare out of their own lunches.

  It wasn’t time to line up yet, so he’d had time to think—about being a knucklehead. He didn’t want to be thought of like that. It made him feel funny. What if he went through his whole life being known as a knucklehead?

  Besides, when he’d helped Papi fix the back door screen that Saturday, Papi had told him that if he wanted to be one of those new things he was talking about all the time—an entomologist or a zoologist—he’d have to go to college.

  Could he get into college? Could he be an entomologist (a person who studies insects) or a zoologist (one who studies animals) while being a knucklehead? He didn’t think so. That really bothered him.

  Two

  Mami Still Talking

  Mami is still talking—but once Carlos stops thinking about the knucklehead life, his thoughts return to Bernardo. Bernardo messing with his geckos: Darla, Peaches, and Gizmo . . . He doesn’t think so. Uh-uh.

  Carlos frowns. Just a little, so his mother doesn’t really notice. Those geckos are fragile. They have to be taken care of just so. He barely lets Issy look at them. When Richard and Gavin come over and want to take one out of the terrarium and hold it, Carlos stands over them, watching closely so they don’t scare the gecko or handle it the wrong way. Sometimes he’ll only let them look at his geckos.

  And then there’s his ant farm. He’s had that ant farm for three months. A person has to be especially gentle around an ant farm. No jiggling. Even a little jiggling can collapse a tunnel. Everything is especially sensitive in an ant farm. You have to send for the ants after you get the farm. Which he did, though some were already dead on arrival. The information that came with the farm warned against just getting ants from any ol’ place. If you weren’t careful, you could get ants from two different colonies. Then they would fight each other. They wouldn’t be cooperative and do the teamwork thing that ants do.

  He’d carefully placed the farm on a little table in the corner of his room by itself. Just to ensure it wouldn’t be exposed to any kind of jostling. Now, with Bernardo coming, he’ll have to sit him down and explain all of this. He thinks about that. Didn’t Bernardo breathe through his mouth and walk around with a kind of blank look on his face when he saw him last? Would he be able to grasp the words of warning?

  The only way he allows Issy to look at the ants is if she sits in the little chair at the table where the ant farm is and keeps her hands folded. No touching, no pointing, no even breathing too hard on it. Just looking.

  Soon he’ll have his butterfly habitat, too. Papi said he could get one if he scored a hundred percent on the next five spelling tests. He has only two more to go. Then he’ll be able to see the butterflies go from a larva (or caterpillar) to a chrysalis to a butterfly.

  “What do you feed those things?” Richard asked one time when he and Gavin were over to practice soccer dribbles and they were looking at the geckos.

  “Crickets.”

  “Yuck,” Richard said. “Where do you get those?”

  “At the pet store.”

  “Do you feed them with your hand, or do you just dump the crickets in?”

  “Either way, but you have to be careful,” Carlos had said.

  “And the crickets are alive?” Gavin asked.

  “Well, yeah.”

  There are so many things people just don’t know about geckos.

  Now, even though his mother is searching his face to see if her words are sinking in, Carlos is thinking, No way. No way am I going to let that guy touch my geckos. Or my ant farm.

  Soon Mami’s back to counting on her fingers: “I want you to put fresh linens on the top bunk.”

  “But that’s my bunk, Mami.”

  Issy is smiling at him as if she’s enjoying herself. Sometimes she likes to see Carlos flustered.

  “I’m thinking Bernardo will probably prefer the top bunk—so let him have it.” Mami pauses. “Clear out a dresser drawer so he’ll have a place to put his socks and pajamas and stuff.”

  Underwear, Carlos thinks. He knows his mom means underwear too but just doesn’t want to freak him out.

  “Let me see. What am I missing?” Mami looks up toward the ceiling.

  That’s enough, Carlos wants to say.

  “Oh, yeah. I want you to go up and give your bathroom a good scrubbing.”

  Oooh. This is bad. What his mother means by a good scrubbing, no kid should ever have to do. It means scouring the sink and tub, mopping the floor, and cleaning the toilet. Yuck! Who does he know who has to give a bathroom a good scrubbing? No one. That’s what mothers are for. Not little kids. But his mother always says, “You mess up . . . you clean up.” And she always has Papi onboard. He never disagrees with her. It’s like he’s obeying Mami as well. Then she usually tells Carlos all the chores she had to do as a kid—and Carlos thinks, Oh, gosh, here it comes.

  “You think we had a dishwasher? What a joke. And a clothes dryer? I had to hang the clothes on a line with clothespins. You don’t even know what a clothespin is, Buddy Boy.”

  Mami always calls him Buddy Boy when she’s making a point about her childhood. She calls him Buddy Boy and his sister Miss Priss. Anyway, he does know what a clothespin is, because sometimes Ms. Shelby-Ortiz uses clothespins to attach their artwork to an overhead string going from one end of the classroom to the other.

  “And take him out in the backyard and let him kick around your soccer ball. Show him some moves. Make him feel like he’s good at something. Your tía Lupe says some kids at his old school weren’t very nice to him.”

  That gets Carlos’s attention. Why were some kids not nice to Bernardo? What’s with him? He almost asks this, but something tells him that it would just start up a long lecture from Mami about bullying and standing up for the bullied person and being careful not to blame the victim. So he keeps that question to himself.

  Mami goes on. “You make sure your friends are nice to Bernardo. And the other kids in your class, too.”

  Carlos bites his lip. How’s he supposed to do that?

  “He’s coming by himself?”

  “Not exactly. Your tía Lupe’s neighbor is coming here to visit some family. So she’s bringing Bernardo with her.”

  “How are they getting here?”

  “On the bus.”

  “Why not on an airplane?”

  “Because not everyone’s rich, Doofus.”

  That’s another word Mami uses for Carlos. She called him that a lot after the last parent-teacher conference, when his parents learned he’d been acting up a little: messing up on spelling tests, playing with toys in his desk, and talking without raising his hand and waiting to be recognized. All that seemed natural before he turned over his new leaf. In fact, he once marveled at how kids like Nikki, Gavin, and Erik Castillo managed to keep it all together. They were the three best students in Ms. Shelby-Ortiz’s class. And it didn’t even seem hard for them. Scoring hundreds on spelling tests and multiplication-facts quizzes was nothing to them. It was probably like breathing for those three.

  But now that he was being good, or at least better—paying attention, studying for spelling tests, and no longer bringing little toys from home to play with at every sneaky opportunity—he actually felt okay about comparing himself to Nikki and Gavin and Erik. He kind of looked at people like Calvin Vickers and Ralph Buyer with pity.

  “How long’s he here for?”

  “For a while,” his mother says, and Carlos thinks, Funny how grownups can answer a question without really answering it. Like, how long is “for a while”? It could mean anything: a few months; a few years.

  “And he’s goin
g to be in my class?”

  “Right.”

  “How long’s a while?”

  “Don’t you worry about that, mi hijo. You just worry about the things you need to worry about.”

  Carlos frowns. What is it he’s supposed to worry about? He definitely worries about soccer—that he’s not very good at it. He wants to please Papi, but he can’t really say he loves soccer the way Papi does. Carlos likes animals and insects more. (Not more than his mother and father and Issy in her tiara, but a lot). Sometimes, Carlos worries that he will never be chosen to be office monitor. And now he’s worried about the next spelling test.

  Three

  Bernardo

  “My cousin’s coming,” Carlos says to Richard and Gavin the next day while they sit in the cafeteria.

  Richard is blowing bubbles into his carton of milk. When he finishes with that, he gulps down some air and lets out a big burp. He grins and looks around as if he’s proud of his achievement.

  “When’s he coming?” Gavin asks.

  “Today. After school.”

  “He’s going to live with you?” Gavin asks.

  “For a while.”

  “How long is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s he like?” Richard asks.

  “I haven’t seen him since I was little. He was kind of big and . . .”

  “And what?” Gavin asks.

  “And . . .” Carlos says again—but he can’t put it into words. “It’s hard to explain.”

  The bus station is crowded with travelers. Mami checks a paper in her hand and then looks up at the numbers above the doors of the idling buses. “Thirty-two . . . There it is,” she says. She leads the way to a nearby bus.