Read Online Endangered Species by Barbara Block - Free Book Online Page A

they sometimes do something similar to projectile vomiting, except it comes out the other end.
    Well, this one must have been really nervous, because suddenly he started spraying the room. Before I knew it, kids in the first five rows had lizard feces over their hands and faces and clothes. Everyone was screaming. Kids were dropping down on the floor and crawling for cover. The hall monitor and the school cop ran in and they got a dose of it, too. By the time I managed to get the lizard back in the bag, my hand was bleeding from the clawing I’d received and my shirt and hair were caked with lizard shit, which, let me tell you, smells really, really bad.
    I looked at the teacher who’d asked me to come in. She was standing there with her mouth hanging open, her white shirt smeared with dark greenish-brown excrement. I looked at the school policeman and the principal. They were yelling at each other. I looked at the kids. Some were screaming and some were crying. No one was paying any attention to me. It seemed like a good time to leave. I packed up my reptiles and ran out into the hall. It was crowded with kids and teachers, most of whom were positive someone had been shot—which in a sense was true.
    Tim’s mouth fell open when I walked in the store. When I told him what had happened, he started to laugh. He was laughing so hard the tears were rolling down his cheeks.
    â€œSo much for your educational career,” he said when he got his breath back. Then he thought about it some more and went off into another gale of laughter.
    After a minute, I joined him. Who would have thought one lizard could wreak so much havoc? We both ended up sitting on the floor cackling like maniacs, while I fended off Zsa Zsa, who was trying to lick me clean. When I got my breath back, I got up, went home, and practically sterilized myself. The first thing I did was get a garbage bag and strip off my clothes and threw them in it. Next, I went upstairs and took a long, scalding hot shower, making sure to scrub every inch of myself. My skin was bright pink by the time I was done. Then I washed my hair twice, put on new clothes, and went back downstairs. As I brewed a pot of coffee, I wondered if George had talked to his cousin yet. Belize was sounding better and better all the time.
    I was struck once again by what a nice guy he was and how scary he looked. The scowl he habitually plastered across his face would have made someone who didn’t know him move to another part of the known universe. Maybe it was like the big dogs. Most of the really big breeds are sweethearts, because they don’t have to be mean. Everyone defers to them automatically.
    â€œIt’s not my fault if I’m big and I’m black and I scare the shit out of everyone,” George had once bragged to me five beers into the evening. He’d been grinning at the time he said it.
    But that had been when he’d been on the police force. I wonder if he felt the same way now that he was in grad school. History grad students don’t look like he did. Maybe that’s why he was trying to lose weight and had taken to wearing blue denim work shirts and corduroy pants. Which made me think about the paper he was working on. He’d given it to me to read a couple of days ago. I’d been putting it off, “The function of popular political songs in France in the 1800s” not being what I considered an easy read, but now seemed as good a time as ever.
    â€œI call these songs eighteenth-century rap,” he’d said, tapping a page with his finger. “These were songs made up by the common man to protest social conditions, in the same way that rap protests today’s social ills, by today’s disenfranchised.”
    I took my coffee into the living room, along with the paper, and settled down to read it. Actually, it turned out to be more interesting than I thought. I was on the second page when Tim called to tell me that