Read Online Hush Little Baby by Caroline B. Cooney - Free Book Online Page A

not come to Kit’s, and he’d hold Kit half responsible. And meanwhile, where would Sam the Baby sleep, and would Cinda and Burt, the cousins, be able to take him?
    Kit wanted to drive in the driveway with the new baby and be the one to place the baby in its mother’s arms.
    She loved this picture, and reminded herself to take along a camera or two, because Cinda and Burt Chance would have bought their baby album, and now she, Kit, would take the first roll of film to fill it. What a gift!
    Muffin could hardly believe that Rowen agreed to let her go along. Probably he thought it would be easier to explain to Mom and Dad than violent movies. Or maybe he was assuming he wouldn’t have to explain anything to Mom and Dad, and that was probably right, because Kit and Muffin and Sam the Baby would meet the new parents and then Kit and Muffin would drive back to Shea’s and none of their own parents would ever know anything about it.
    Muffin tucked the disposable camera into the little front kangaroo pocket of her own pink sweatshirt.
    She would take pictures of the new mommy and daddy meeting their new baby.
    Kit brought the baby carrier downstairs. It seemed designed for a larger person, who would sit up and take notice. Sam the Baby just folded into a ball and slept in his carrier the way Muffin slept in her kangaroo bag.
    “Why didn’t the baby’s new parents come to the hospital?” asked Muffin. In second grade, the teacher had read out loud a book about adoption. It was beautiful. But Muffin didn’t know anybody who was adopted. Now she did. Sam.
    “I guess there was a mix-up,” said Kit.
    Muffin hated this kind of answer. That was the trouble with being nine. People knew so much more than you did. What kind of mix-up? Muffin felt grumpy. Then she looked at Sam.
    When you were nine, it was crummy to know nothing, but when you were new, like Sam, it was awesome and miraculous.
    “I would love to have you for a brother, Sam the baby,” whispered Muffin. “I could be the older one, instead of Rowen always being the older one. And you would think I knew everything, instead of Rowen always telling me I know nothing. And I would make my mother change you, because you’re too disgusting for me. I would take care of you when you were clean and beautiful.”
    Sam the Baby opened his eyes, which were very large for his face, while his nose was way too small, just a perky spot in the middle of his stare. He blinked his eyes, and long dark lashes swept his cheeks, and Muffin laughed at him, and she thought, His lucky, lucky mommy and daddy.
    She could hardly wait to meet them, the way she loved to meet all her friends’ parents, because the dads would pick you up and pull on your ponytail, and the moms would listen to your stories and fix you snacks and fix your hair, and they remembered what vegetable you had not wanted to eat last time.
    She hoped, and it was treason, that Sam the Baby’s new mommy and daddy liked all food, the way Aunt Karen and Uncle Anthony did, instead of no food, like Mom.
    Kit seemed to have lost the camera she’d been using, which was annoying, but that was how disposable cameras were. They disappeared for months, but eventually turned up and the pictures were developed, and you had the additional treat of photos from a forgotten occasion.
    Kit got another camera from the stack while Rowen hefted the carrier out to his car, so he could drive Kit to her car. Sam noticed nothing. He went right on snoozing even as they shifted his little body. He won’t know who changes him, thought Kit, or who loves him, or who his mother is, or who adopts him.
    It was a strange, even terrifying thought: Sam the Baby had no thoughts about the things that were happening to him.
    She took six photographs immediately, in case she never found the other camera, so that she would still have a memory of Sam to keep.
    Rowen drove them to Kit’s house. Mom’s sporty red Miata and Malcolm’s heavy champagne BMW were not