Read Online One of the Guys by Jessica Strassner - Free Book Online Page B

shoes on.
                She came to a bit of a clearing, and
found Breakfast rooting her way through the dirt towards the road. Kate ran in
front of the pig and tried to push her back towards the direction of the house,
but Breakfast seemed to ignore her and just kept moving. Kate pushed the pig on
her shoulder, on her rump, but Breakfast slowly kept trudging forward.
                Kate had an idea. She sprinted
towards the house, relieved to see that Chris was getting Lunch closer to the
gate and that Dinner was still stretched out in his pile of mud. She pushed
through the gate and ran to the house. She flew up the steps to the back door
and slid on the mudroom floor, her feet leaving muddy streaks on the linoleum. She
hurried into the kitchen and looked around for food, for something to tempt the
pigs with. She grabbed what was left of a loaf of bread off the counter. What
else?   She grabbed a bunch of bananas. She
opened the refrigerator and grabbed a head of lettuce and a bunch of celery out
of the produce drawer.
                Hoping her idea would work, she ran
back out into the yard. To her dismay, it was starting to drizzle again.
                Chris had gotten Lunch to the gate,
but the pig didn’t want to seem to enter the yard. Kate tossed him the head of
lettuce, which he quickly started to unwrap. With her hands full of food, she
burst through the palmettos, feeling her arms getting scratched by the fronds. She
hurried to the clearing where Breakfast was snuffling around in the dirt and
tore open the bag of bread. “Hey, Breakfast!” she called, approaching the pig
calmly. “Check this out!” she tossed a slice of bread so that it landed on the
ground just to the right of the pig’s snout.
                Breakfast sniffed the piece of bread
and gobbled it up, then quickly lifted her head to see if Kate had any more. Kate
ripped a piece of bread in half and tossed it in front of Breakfast. The pig
turned and started making her way towards Kate. Slowly walking backwards, Kate
kept tossing a trail of bread pieces and Breakfast followed her, gobbling them
up.
                As she reached the gate, Chris
jogged up to her, his face and t-shirt smeared with dirt. “Lunch headed right
for the garden,” he said, gasping for breath.
                Kate whirled around. “What?”
                Chris threw his hands up helplessly.
“It was like as soon as she saw it, she took off.”
                Kate stuffed the bread into Chris’s
hands and ran into the yard. “Lunch!   Piggy!   No!”   She hurried to the garden,
just in time to see the pig pull a ripe, juicy tomato off of a plant and squish
it in her mouth, juice and seeds dripping down her chin. Kate groaned. There
wasn’t anything she could do about it. The only way they could keep the pigs
from roaming around would be to keep them in the yard, which meant… they’d demolish
the garden.
                She turned and marched back towards
Chris and Breakfast. She squeezed through the gate past them and realized that
the woods seemed pretty quiet. She hoped that Dinner was still lying in his
pile of mud. She stopped short. She couldn’t hear anything except for a distant
roll of thunder. She took off running past the chicken coop, past the tool
shed, and through the palmettos to where Dinner had been resting.
                As soon as her bare foot hit the
slick, black mud, Kate’s feet flew out from underneath her. The celery and the bunch
of bananas she’d been holding went flying. She landed hard on her tailbone alongside
Dinner. The back of her head smacked into the mud puddle. When she lifted it,
her head felt heavy from all the muck instantly caked in her hair. The dirty,
mud-crusted pig lifted his head and stretched, just able to reach the bananas. He
started munching on them, peels and all, and in seconds, they were gone. Then
he gave