Inside the bus sat the boy, his eyes glued to the outside world, his nose smashed against the bus’s smudged window. As the bus passed through the grand arch, the boy’s focus was torn between the ominous looking lion that guarded the entrance, and the arch that quickly disappeared from view as they passed beneath it. Once through, the boy smiled. He had arrived.
His excitement shouldn’t be understated. To the adults on board, jaded by life’s disappointments and not easily excited by its treasures, a trip to the zoo caused nothing more than the tiniest of sensations. But to him—a peculiar boy some might say—the zoo was a fantasyland.
When the bus pulled into one of the many empty parking spaces and came to a halt with sounds of squealing breaks and unkempt shocks, the legions of 3rd graders around the boy stood, almost in unison. On cue, Mrs. Deventure rose.
“Stay seated now, kids. Please, stay in your seats. Gerald, I see you. Sit down please. We have some things to pass out first.”
The boy paid little attention to the women at front. He was one of the few who hadn’t stood, and he knew what the teacher was going to say before she said it. Standard field trip protocol: outline the rules, warn children of potential dangers, hand out dreaded assignments sheets.
At the top of the assignment sheet, were the rules:
#1: Always travel with a buddy.
#2: Meet at the picnic tables for lunch at noon. Don’t be late.
#3: Do not feed the animals.
#4: Do not talk to strangers.
#5: Keep track of all your belongings.
#6: Don’t forget to complete your scavenger hunt assignment.
Below the list of rules was, predictably, the scavenger hunt assignment. The boy unzipped his backpack, stuffed his assignment sheet inside, and zipped it up again. He then began unwedging his jacket from under the seat.
“Why’d you bring a jacket?” Ethan Spelling asked. “It’s not cold out or anything. And you’ll just have to carry it all day.”
“I don’t know,” the boy said, his attention on the jacket. “My mom made me bring it.”
The boy struggled, yanking and prodding at the coat. “This stupid thing is stuck.”
Ethan didn’t say anything in response. In fact, the entire bus was eerily silent. Mrs. Deventure stood over the both of them, glaring down at Ethan and the boy. Finally the boy looked up and noticed everyone staring at him.
“Where’s your assignment sheet?” Mrs. Deventure asked the boy. “We’re going over it right now, which you’d know, if you were paying attention.”
The boy turned bright red and quickly unzipped his pack, trying to retrieve the sheet, but it was too late.
“We’ve been over this so many times. I don’t know what to do. You stay put and we’ll have a little talk.” Then to the rest of the students, “Everyone else, go enjoy the zoo.”
The crowds of children were moving now, the aisle traffic slowly crawling past the boy, who sat stone-faced, staring out the window, awaiting another lecture about paying attention, his time at the zoo slipping past him.
*****
“I don’t know why you insist on acting this way. Are you starved for attention or something?”
The boy just stared at his hands. He hated being in trouble.
“Nothing to say now? That’s fine. Just know that you’ll be doing some extra writing assignments when we get back to school.”
The boy looked up in protest. But this just made Mrs. Deventure more steadfast.
“And you’d better be on your best behavior today. No messing around. Or I will call your parents and get you back home and away from the zoo so fast that it will make your head spin. Do you understand?”
The boy bobbed his head ever so slightly.
“Do you understand? Yes or no?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. This had better be the last I have to speak to you today. Now run along.”
The boy stood, shifted past Mrs. Deventure, and bounded down the bus’s stairs, eager to get into the zoo but even more eager to escape further lecturing.
*****
The boy quickly found his usual group of friends crowded into a semi-circle just inside the main entrance. The boy readied himself for ridicule.
Patrick, the group’s largest member, spoke first. “Finally. Did you and Mrs. Deventure take a walk and hold hands or something?”
Everyone laughed at this, and the boy tried to chuckle at the joke too. But he didn’t say anything, hoping that would be the end of it. And surprisingly, it was.
“This is dumb,” Stevie said. “I don’t care about animals, I want to go play on the playground. Did you see that roller-slide? It looked awesome.”
Everyone else nodded in agreement. The boy kept quiet and dug through his bag for the map that he’d kept from the last time he visited the zoo.
“Yeah,” Patrick replied. “I wish we could play hide and seek at least.”
Being the smallest of the group, the boy was never looked to as the most talkative, but his silence was becoming noticeable.
“So what should we do?” Ethan asked, in his direction.
The boy stopped shuffling through his backpack and looked up at the group. After a second’s pause, he replied softly, “The penguins?”
Another pause, this one longer and more awkward. The boy began to doubt his answer, his cheeks showing the first signs of rosiness. Were the lions a more suitable first stop? Did they want to go see the snakes? What would a cooler kid have suggested? Ethan looked at the other two members of the group and back at the boy. “The penguins sound good to me,” he said finally. “Lead the way.”
After a quick look at his map and a tiny smile, the boy took off at full stride towards the penguin exhibit.
*****
The boy placed his coat on the bench that faced the cave-like exhibit and pushed his way to the front of the crowd that had formed in front of the penguins. Apparently his idea to visit the penguins first was not a unique one, but this didn’t dull his spirits. He watched the birds skate and waddle and swim their way from one end of the enclosure to the other, quickly forgetting about the embarrassment on the bus, and his promise to Mrs. Deventure to be on his best behavior. Patrick and Ethan and Stevie were all laughing next to him, their elbows nudging each other and their fingers pointing at the most entertaining penguins. He watched other students mimic the birds’ movements and the boy felt happy now. Not only because he got to see the penguins in their most active state, but also because his decision had led them to such enjoyment. He was hosting this event, and it was going well.
From his backpack, the boy retrieved his notebook and his pencil. He ignored the assignment sheet, stuffing it to the bottom of the pack. At the top of a blank page he wrote
Penguins – Enjoy life
as neatly as he could. He erased the stray marks caused by the jostling around him and returned the supplies to his backpack. From behind, he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Patrick, and he waved for the boy to follow him, the rest of the group already poised at the exit, ready to leave. The boy gave a final look back at the penguins, and trailed the others out of the exhibit.
Outside, the boy squinted against the sun, trying to retrieve his bearings. They’d been in the penguin exhibit much longer than he’d realized. The group of friends regaled each other with penguin stories as they walked. Even the boy participated, acting out a scene in which one penguin wrestled with another for a piece of fish. Everyone laughed and Ethan patted him on the back and together they walked on aimlessly.
Soon, they came upon a large enclosure with fences on three sides, and a wide trough that separated the animals from the visitors. Another fence, shorter and made of wood, kept visitors from straying too close, and falling into the trough where they’d certainly spoke the animals in the enclosure. This architecture made it so a view of the animals was unobstructed. The boy liked this.
This pen had two different kinds of animals in it. Inside were three enormous grey rhinoceroses and four bright peacocks.
“I wonder why the rhinos don’t smash those stupid birds?” Stevie asked, to no one in particular.
Before the boy could speak up, Ethan said, “I bet the birds are too fast for them.”
A moment later, the boy opened his mouth again but was again interrupted, this time by Patrick. “Look at how huge they are,” he said. “They could crush them with one foot.”
Finally, the boy spoke. “I don’t think they’d want to do that. I bet they’re all friends.”
Stevie shot a glance back at the boy, and then returned his gaze to the rhinos. “Nah,” he said. “I bet Ethan’s right. The birds are too fast.”
The boy backed away from the conversation, not because he was admitting defeat—he didn’t especially care why the rhinos didn’t crush the peacocks—but because he had spied a bench a few feet behind him and he wanted to sit down. When he was seated, he took out his supplies once again, and looked at the list. His friends obviously favored the rhinos and their brute strength and vast size, but the boy liked the peacocks. They were beautiful, and graceful, and elegant. He looked at his list again, got out his pencil, and altered it.
Penguins – Enjoy life
Peacocks – Beautiful
Rhinos – Strong
As he pondered his list, and judged whether he could fit the rest of the animals they would see on it, he felt a presence sit down next to him on the bench.
“What’s that?” Ethan asked him.
The boy closed the notebook and pushed it inside his backpack. “It’s a list,” he replied. “Of animals.”
“Ah,” Ethan said, still looking straight ahead. “What for?”
“No reason,” the boy answered.
The boy expected additional pressure from Ethan but he was thankful when Ethan gave up his questioning. There they sat, resting their legs, and their mouths, watching the rhinos and the peacocks do just about nothing at all.
In truth, the boy was making the list because of a dream he had had. Well not because of the dream exactly, but he was inspired by the dream you might say. In the dream, he was in a cage at the zoo. Visitors passed by and smiled at him. They fed him nuts and popcorn. They pointed at him when he moved around the cage. The boy obviously was not a boy, but with no other animals in the cage, he couldn’t figure out what he was.
It wasn’t a bad dream. He didn’t awake with a start and call out to his mother like he did sometimes when he was younger. And he wasn’t at all sad about being in the cage, or angry with the people coming by to stare at him. The part that concerned him was the part where he didn’t have the slightest idea which animal he was.
And this was why he was making the list.
He wanted to figure out which animal he would want to be, if he could be any animal at the zoo. It seemed like a reasonable question to an eight-year-old boy and to help him answer it he was making the list of all the animals he encountered and next to each animal, writing what he thought was their most enviable trait. By day’s end, he’d have his answer.
The other two boys soon approached and stood over the seated pair. Finally, Ethan rose, and together the group walked on. They took a left at the next bend in the sidewalk and headed past a big sign and into a big brown building. The sign said: Primate Building.
*****
The Primate Building—or Monkey House as Patrick liked to call it—was very dark inside. The foursome traveled through a pair of glass doors into another world of bumpy beige walls curving from room to room and a pungent smell unlike any other at the zoo. As they entered, the boys looked around in amazement as they found themselves surrounded by enclosure after enclosure of monkeys, chimps, lemurs, and gorillas.
Unlike most buildings at the zoo, the Primate Building did not lead visitors in any certain direction. There was no path to follow; it was instead a wandering free-for-all, like one of those videogames the boy was forbidden to play where you can choose which mission your character will complete next. In the beginning, the boy and his friends all chose the same mission.
In the middle of the first huge room was a new exhibit, obviously the crown jewel of the Primate Building, and the boys hurried to this enclosure first, like most young boys would tend to do. They nestled up next to the fence poles made from fake wood and looked through the thick glass down upon the troupe of orangutans. All around the 360 degree open enclosure, visitors were doing the same. They pointed and smiled at the busy orangutans and their laughs reverberated through the vast building and traveled to the anterooms that sprouted like broccoli crowns from the main room where the boy was.
Below the boys, the orangutans were busy. The older apes, with large round faces and shaggy orange fur, fed quietly on orange slices and lettuce greens while the adolescents participated in one sort of game or another. While the rules weren’t clear to any of the humans, it was evident that the participants were enjoying themselves. They chased each other from one man-made branch to another and across a stretch of fire hose to a pedestal where a volleyball hung from a rope. After swatting at the ball, and hooting loudly, they scampered down the other side of the tree and down to the ground, where they orangutans made a couple laps of the pen and sat down, obviously exhausted from their game.
The boys migrated around the orangutan enclosure, following their favorite monkey with their eyes. After the initial excitement toward the orangutans lost its luster, the boys simply wandered off into separate directions, their camaraderie on hold for the moment.
Patrick was the first to detach from the group. He did an about-face and was drawn into an exhibit of primate skeletons near the back wall. Ethan was next. He wandered into an adjacent room, this one holding a small cage of ring-tailed lemurs. And finally, Stevie departed, traveling back to where they had come from, against the traffic of visitors, attracted by the natural light that shined through the glass of the outdoor chimpanzee exhibit. The boy, not sure what to do, stood alone, still absentmindedly staring at the orangutans. With nothing else to do, he took out his notebook and pencil, thought for a minute, then wrote the orangutans in their correct place. He shut his notebook, tucked it away into his bag, and continued his way around the enclosure.
About three quarters of the way around, the boy veered right, through a tiny doorway, down a dark corridor, and into a forgotten room. Inside the room was a cage, no bigger than car, filled with tiny monkeys. There were no other visitors in the room, which made the boy nervous. He boy looked around suspiciously, not knowing if he was doing something against the rules. Finding no signs of prohibition, the boy relaxed, and just watched. He found the monkeys—squirrel monkeys he learned from the placard next to the cage—mesmerizing. They climbed up the sides of the cage and swooped from the dangling ropes. Some attacked each other playfully or groomed a partner in the corner. The boy felt calm here, and he backed against the wall, leaned against it, and watched. He watched and leaned and smiled.
*****
After many minutes, the boy’s reverie was broken by new visitors, who had stumbled upon the cage of squirrel monkeys much like he had. The couple was young, and they held hands and whispered to each other intimately. Now feeling uncomfortable, the boy edged behind the couple and out of the room.
When the boy returned to the main room, he couldn’t find his friends. He peaked around corners and into all of the different caves but he couldn’t find them anywhere. He checked the bathrooms, the supply closets, even behind the giant potted plants that littered the main room. But still he couldn’t find them. Suddenly, panic set in. Had they forgotten him? Did they leave him on purpose? Did they think he had left them? Everything he had been concentrating on throughout the day left him, and a knot in his stomach formed and then twisted tighter.
Quickening his pace to a jog, the boy hurried for the exit. As he burst through the first set of double doors, he caught his foot on the wheel of a baby stroller that was left unattended near the exit, lost his balance, regained it temporarily in an ungraceful two-step of flailing arms and legs, lost it again, and crashed hard to the concrete floor. The boy was still. He was in pain, but nothing was injured. He lifted his head from off the cool concrete and looked around. No one had witnessed his spectacular fall, yet he still didn’t hurry to drag himself from the concrete. He calmly laid there, thoughts racing through his head at a hundred miles a minute.
I’m fine, he thought. There is nothing wrong with me. I am not hurt. I am not lost. The zoo is a small place, I will see my friends again. I was worried for no reason. I will find all of my classmates in time. I’m a big kid. I can be by myself for a while. I need to enjoy my time at the zoo, and not be so worried all the time. I am fine.
Slowly, the boy dragged himself upright. He looked around again and smiled, thinking about how comical he must have looked tripping his way to a headlong slide into a first base made of hard cement. He stood, gathered himself, and walked out the door, leaving the Primate Building and all its wonderful creatures behind.
*****
Outside, the sun was shining mercilessly and the boy squinted down at his notebook as he updated his animal list. He had chosen a bench adjacent to a small enclosure that housed a couple of parakeets and a toucan. The boy lost interest in the birds after five minutes, and remembering his list, sat down to place the birds at the bottom of it. He scribbled in his notebook for a few minutes and put his pencil down to admire his list. It looked almost complete.
Squirrel Monkey – Fun
Penguins – Enjoy life
Orangutans – Majestic
Peacocks – Beautiful
Lemurs – Energetic
Toucan – Interesting
Rhinos – Strong
Parakeet – Annoying
He examined the list carefully, scrunched up his face in a display of disgust and reached for his eraser. He erased the last line he had written, displeased with the fact that he hadn’t followed his own guidelines, and changed the parakeet’s adjective to something positive. It now read:
Parakeet – Tries hard (for attention)
Pleased with this alteration, the boy smiled. He was about to close his notebook when a booming voice made him drop his pencil to the grass below and his head jerk over his left shoulder. “Whatcha working on, son?” the voice asked.
The owner of the voice, the boy could now see, was a very old man, with black skin and grey hair, both on his head and his chin. He wore a brown work shirt, dirty and untucked, and tan pants, the kind the workers at the zoo would most often wear. He worked as he spoke, emptying the garbage bin next to the bench the boy now occupied, not paying attention to the boy, but not paying much attention to the job at hand either.
Startled, it took a second for the boy to respond. “It’s just a list,” the boy repeated. “Of animals.”
But the old man did not give up his line of questioning as easily as Ethan had. “Why are you making a list, son? For school?”
“Well, no,” the boy answered. “Not exactly. It’s for me. Because I want to figure out which animal is best.”
“Which animal is best? That’s a tough question,” the man said. “I don’t know if a little boy like you can answer that one. It’s…what’s that word?.. Subjective.” With this the old man heaved the full garbage bag from the bin into his dumpster. The man was sweating a bit, and wiped his forehead with his sleeve.
“I guess I’m not trying to figure out which animal is best. It’s more of which one I would want to be.”
The boy paused for a second and when the old man didn’t say anything, he continued, “If I had to be an animal, I mean.”
“Well then,” the man replied, “that is a better question. What’s your answer?”
The boy looked at his list but thought better of relaying the information it held. “You’ve worked here a long time right?”
“Yessir. How’d you guess?” The man chuckled and the boy kept quiet. “Almost 30 years, actually. 29 and a half.”
“Well, what do you think?” “Which animal would you want to be? If you had to be one.”
The man paused a second, set his hand on the dumpster he dragged around with him all day, from garbage bin to garbage bin, and looked at the boy in thought. “Well, son, that kind of depends.”
“Why?”
“Because I haven’t always been an old man emptying trash barrels,” the old man replied.
“What do you mean?”
“Well back when I was your age, my answer would have been much different than it is now. And accordingly, my answer would have been different 20 years ago too. And 10. And probably 5.” The man retrieved an empty bag from his cart, tied a knot in one end so it would fit the bin properly, and slipped it into place. “It depends, you see.”
Gaining courage, the boy pushed his questioning. “Okay. Which would you want to be today? Right this instant.”
“Well my young friend, I don’t think I want to tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s MY answer. The answer of a 72-year-old janitor, who has worked at the same zoo for 29 and a half years. Not the answer for a…how old are you, boy?”
“Eight.”
“Not the answer for an eight year old boy who probably lives out on the West end of town and has two dogs and a cat and a momma and a daddy both at home.”
The boy thought for a second, “But maybe it is?”
“Maybe it is,” the man said as he returned the lid to the bin. “Maybe you’re smarter than I give you credit for. But it don’t matter even if it is the same. My answer is for me. Yours is for you. Simple as that.”
The old man gathered his things like he was about to leave. “Now you better run along. Why are you out here all by your lonesome anyway?”
“I’m ok,” the boy replied. “I’m alright on my own.”
The man started pushing his cart away and talked over his shoulder. “I’m sure you are, but there’s probably somebody out there wondering where you are, and maybe even worrying about you.”
The statement was left hanging, as the boy looked down at his notebook and his backpack. The old man was right, there probably were some people wondering where he was. The boy packed his backpack and stood up to leave.
“Sir?” the boy called after the man, who was twenty feet down the concrete path, traveling at a very slow pace.
The man stopped and looked back. “Yeah?”
“Do you know what time it is?”
The old man looked down at his watch and yelled his answer, “It’s right about a quarter past twelve.”
The boy lurched into action as he realized that he was late. He grabbed his backpack, threw it over his shoulder and raced off across the grass. As he ran, he turned back and as he backpedaled he yelled, “Thanks!”
The boy turned again and sped toward the front entrance of the zoo. The old man continued to amble towards the next full trash bin. “No problem, son,” the old man said to himself. “No problem at all.”
*****
The boy ran for awhile, fueled by his tardiness and fear of getting in trouble but eventually he was slowed by heavy legs, burning lungs, and knowledge that the punishment for lateness wouldn’t get any more severe with every minute past the deadline. He still walked with a purpose, his loose backpack swinging from left to right with every stride, threatening to strike the midsections of passing adults. He walked past the peacocks and the rhinos and the pronghorn deer. And past some new animals that he gazed at as he went by—the elephants, the giraffes. A lone leopard that paced back and force, eyes always on the outside world and the funny looking creatures with glasses and hats that inhabited it.
The picnic tables, the boy knew, were just outside the zoo’s entrance, directly on the other side of the small petting zoo that had never piqued the boy’s interest. To get to those picnic tables, the boy now only had to wind his way around the medium-sized lake that gave the zoo one of its few natural habitats. As he worked his way around the lake, he marveled at the new deck that, in his mind, the zookeepers must have constructed. The deck was made from a dark brown wood and ran the whole length of the lake’s eastern shore. From the deck, the boy imagined, you could see a beautiful view of the entire western edge of the park, as well as a chance to look down upon the animals that inhabited the lake itself.
The boy was torn.
On one hand, he was late. He would most certainly be punished. On the other, he liked new decks with views of ponds and ducks and turtles.
The boy veered right, almost instinctively, and it wasn’t long before his old tennis shoes—the ones his mother promised to replace soon—touched upon the wood of the new decks. He quickly, almost suspiciously moved to the deck’s rail, and came to an abrupt stop in the middle, next to an empty garbage bin, probably tended to recently by the old man with the grey hair and the dirty brown pants.
Before him, the boy saw many things. He saw the entire west side of the park; the pathway that wound between trees both large and small; the rose garden that his mom always made him go to no matter how many times he said it was boring; and all sorts of different types of enclosures with different sorts of animals that he had yet to explore. The view made him excited; all of the afternoon’s possibilities laid out before him.
In the foreground, the boy saw the lake, and the small island that seemed to float in the middle. Around the island, and everywhere on the lake, were ducks. Green ducks, brown ducks, grey ducks, all sorts of ducks. Directly below him, ducks swam with purpose as they chased down pieces of bread and other edibles thrown from the hands of deck-perched visitors.
Next to him, one of these visitors, a little girl much younger than the boy, enthusiastically chucked pieces of bread through the slats in the deck’s railing. Her success was varied. Some pieces made it to the water and eventually into the ducks’ mouths, but others dropped to the deck’s floor, only to be scooped up by the tending adult next to her and placed back into her tiny hand to be thrown or dropped again.
The boy watched the little girl intently. He watched her face light up with every success and her eyes shift to her mother in a moment of trepidation with every failure. The boy watched so intently, that eventually the little girl noticed him. She looked back at him, then, noticing he didn’t have anything to throw, waddled up to within arm’s length and offered to him a piece of her bread.
The boy’s smile was wide. He looked up at the mother shyly, and seeing her nod in approval, he took the piece of bread and with genuine excitement he said, “Thank you!”
The little girl didn’t say anything but clapped her hands together and stomped around on the deck towards her mother. The boy laughed and then approached the rail and looked down, barely able to see over it. He spotted his duck, an ambitious target some 15 feet away, and heaved the piece of bread through the air. Almost in slow motion, the bit of bread traveled up into the sun, then slowly down to the waiting ducks below. The intended target saw the bread, but the boy’s throw was woefully short. The duck had to scramble to get close. It flapped its wings and paddled hard with its webbed feet. Other ducks saw the bread too and momentarily there was a frenzy. Six or seven ducks sped toward the bread. The target duck closed in quickly, neck in neck with a few of the others. He was within a bill’s-length of the morsel when suddenly, the piece of bread disappeared.
The birds screeched to a halt where the bread once was, pecking at the water in bewilderment. The boy laughed from above.
“Did you see that?” he said to the little girl. “The fish got it!”
The girl didn’t say anything in reply of course, but laughed instead, and approached the boy again, her hand outstretched, offering another piece of bread.
“Andrew Fisher,” a voice behind them said sternly. Hearing his name, the boy looked back and his smile disappeared. Mrs. Deventure came into view. The boy’s hand, which was about to take the bit of bread from the girl, dropped. He shoved both of his hands into his pockets and with his head hung in shame, approached the teacher.
“Mr. Fisher. Do you know what time it is?”
The boy didn’t say anything in response, as he knew it was a trick question.
“It is…,” Mrs. Deventure looked at her watch, “…12:45. And what time were we supposed to meet for lunch?”
This time, not seeing any way out of the question, the boy answered, “noon.”
“Ahh, you seem to know the rules young man,” the teacher continued, “you just choose to not follow them?”
Again the boy stayed quiet.
“I see you’ve decided to break ALL the rules today,” Mrs. Deventure continued. She retrieved an assignment sheet and read from it.
“The first rule was to always travel with a buddy. Yet you are here alone. Rule number two was meet at the picnic tables. We already went over that. Rule three: Don’t feed the animals. Got that one too; I saw you feed the ducks some bread just a minute ago. Rule number four: Don’t talk to strangers,” Mrs. Deventure looked up at the boy. “Check.”
The boy shifted on his feet and looked back at the happy girl feeding the ducks. He envied her.
“What about rule number five? Do you have your all of your belongings?”
With this, the boy’s heart sank. He remembered the jacket his mom made him bring. He remembered setting it down in the penguin exhibit. And he remembered leaving it behind when he left. His eyes lowered and his head hung once again. “No,” he replied defeated. His mother was going to kill him.
“Excellent,” Mrs. Deventure replied sarcastically. “And finally. Do you have your assignment sheet completed Mr. Fisher?”
The boy shook his head.
“Mr. Fisher, I expect more out of you. Once outside of school you can’t just run around all willy-nilly, with no regard for the rules. This is real life. There are consequences to your actions.”
The boy kept quiet again, understanding that the teacher had a responsibility to tell him these things and to make him feel bad for what he had done. He was of course sorry, but not sorry that he had broken these meaningless rules. He was sorry that he had been caught. And sorry that all of this would eventually get back to his parents and he would be without a bike for a month or two and without TV privileges for even longer. Of course he knew better, but it was a zoo. In the middle of rural Illinois. He wasn’t going to die here. He just wanted to do some research, and solve a mystery that had plagued him all day. And now he was paying the price.
As Mrs. Deventure led him away from the deck, likely back to the bus where his parents would be called and his field trip would come to an end, he looked back at the little girl feeding the ducks and at the ducks themselves, flying to and from the lake, lounging on the tiny island, paddling around the water chasing pieces of bread, and realized he wasn’t quite done for the day. As he walked, he took out his pencil and his notebook for the last time and finished his list. At the very top, above the penguins and the monkeys and the rhinos he wrote his final entry:
Ducks – Freedom
The boy stashed his notebook and his pencil, smiled to himself, and followed Mrs. Deventure out of the zoo.
*****
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“I don’t think they’d want to do that. I bet they’re all friends.” That’s adorable. I really liked this whole thing.