Read Online Dusssie by Nancy Springer - Free Book Online

Troy, wake up … I could feel a warm breath gasping in his mouth, but his lips felt so hard, so cold. Stone.
    And they stayed that way. All that happened was that the doctors kept yelling. “His body temperature just spiked!”
    â€œHis respiration’s way up!”
    â€œAll his vital signs—”
    I didn’t care. Kissing him like he was Sleeping Beauty hadn’t worked, so what now? Tell him I loved him and I would marry him, like in Beauty and the Beast? But no, I had it backwards, he was Beauty and I was the Beast, so he should tell me .
    I couldn’t think what to do. There was too much yelling.
    â€œHow could he feel that?”
    â€œHe didn’t. She said something to him—”
    â€œHe heard her?”
    â€œYoung lady!” I felt a heavy hand on my arm. “What did you—”
    I hate it when anybody lays a hand on me; it just flips me out. As Troy had discovered, poor guy. I snatched my arm away, and my snakes started to coil. Under its blue velvet hat, my head started to hiss. Voices inside my skull started to chorus worse than the voices in Troy’s hospital room.
    Predator!
    Roussse! Roussse! Deploy necksss!
    Deploy fangsss!
    Prepare to ssstrike!
    No! Ssslither away!
    Essscape!
    Good idea. Doctors and nurses grabbed at me from all directions.
    Dusssie, essscape! urged the scarlet king snake.
    I wrestled myself free and ran.
    There was nothing else I could do.
    Hanging onto my hat brim with both hands, I put my head down and scuttled between their legs like a—like a salamander or something. Sometimes being smaller has advantages. I scooted, I darted, I wormed and squirmed, I snaked right through the crowd in Troy’s room and sprinted down the hallway. I jumped in front of some poor lady with a cart full of food trays and grabbed her elevator. The service elevator. I hit the close door button and the ground floor button and stood panting, trying to catch my breath, as the elevator lumbered down, down. It dumped me in the kitchen, and I took one look and ran for daylight. Out back of the hospital someplace, I dashed up a street, saw a bus pulling into a stop, and hopped on.
    The bus rolled. I’d gotten away.
    I slumped in a backseat for a long time, trying to think, wondering whether Troy … had his heartbeat gone up because he liked me as a girl, the way those doctors seemed to think?
    Or because he was terrified of me?
    Did he know I was trying to help him?
    Did he know I … I had no idea how to do it?
    I guess my snakes knew I didn’t want to talk, because they kept silent. They weren’t so bad really, sometimes.
    They stayed out of my hair, so to speak, while I got off the bus, caught another, and went home.
    It was still morning.
    Already I had failed.
    I ate lunch—leftover paella, leftover London broil, leftover General Tso’s chicken, scrambled eggs, a can of tuna. I felt bummed, depressed, fat, fit to splat, yet I couldn’t stop eating till I felt like I’d swallowed a pig.
    Then I waddled to the sofa, where I collapsed and turned on the TV. I wanted to forget about my weird, messed-up life by watching cartoons or something, but the indigo snake commanded, Sssnake show!
    And they all started yammering.
    Sssnake man!
    Python!
    Boomssslang!
    Sssidewinder!
    â€œOh, for God’s sake,” I complained. We’d caught a couple of segments of the animal channel the night before, that was my mistake. I was in no mood to watch any insane biologist dancing with reptiles. I whammed the power button to kill the TV, jumped up, yanked on my coat and an ugly head scarf, and slammed out.
    I started walking with no idea where I was going. Thinking about Troy had me so bummed that even going nowhere felt better than sitting still. There was nothing much to see except chichi restaurants, big snooty art galleries, and expensive stores. And skyscrapers in the distance, dark against a smoggy gray sky.
    My mood was pretty