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son’s room and given him so many toys.
    My new cage was smaller than the one in which I lived at Casey’s Pet shop, but at least I didn’t have to share it with any other guinea pigs. Just like before, the bottom of my cage was covered with scraps of paper. It would be Robbie’s job to remove the scraps from time to time as they became dirty and wet. He would have to replace them with other scraps.
    Back at Casey’s, I had first noticed that there were markings on the papers. They were all different, black and strange. I looked at them closely.
    When my mother saw my interest, she explained them to me. “Those are the letters of the alphabet,” she had told me. “There are twenty-six big and twenty six small ones. Together the letters join to make words that humans can understand. They call it
reading
.”
    â€œHow do you know about them?” I asked her.
    That was when I learned that she had been born in a cage inside a schoolroom. “It was filled with boys and girls who were being taught the letters,” she said. “I learned the entire alphabet faster than most of the children,” she added proudly.
    After that, I began to study the bits of paper. My brothers and sister thought that I was weird to want to look at those scraps.
    â€œThey don’t taste good,” said one brother.
    â€œYou can’t climb on them,” said one of my sisters.
    I didn’t care what my brothers and sisters said. Every day, after I finished eating, I shifted through the paper bits. My mother taught me how to recognize the straight and curved linesthat made up the letters. It wasn’t easy, but after a while, I could tell them apart.
    Soon I, like my mother, could read all the letters on the scraps, I read them aloud.
Ne
and
May
and
TI
.
    â€œBut what does it mean?” I asked my mother. “What’s the point of learning these letters if they don’t say something that makes sense?”
    â€œDon’t forget you’re reading scraps,” my mother reminded me. “The children in the schoolroom had books with whole pages of letters that told them fine stories. They didn’t have the little bits and pieces that we have here.”

    I had looked down at the floor of the cage. Perhaps if I pushed the pieces together, I could create a whole page that would tell a story too. But it never worked. All I could read were more scraps that said
Opr
and
Yor
and
Majo
.
    Now in my new cage in Robbie Fischler’s bedroom, I studied the scraps again. The pieces of paper in my new cage were just as small and meaningless as they had been in my old one though. If only they were larger! Still, seeing the books on the shelf in the room gave me hope. Perhaps I would finally have a chance to see one of them open with a complete page in front of me. Then I could read a story.

CHAPTER TWO
In the Dark

    It didn’t take me long to adjust to my new home. One cage is pretty much like another: four sides, a water supply, an exercise wheel. But belonging to Robbie was much more fun than living in the pet store. Because he really wanted a dog, Robbie treated me as if I were one. He didn’t make me stay inside my cage. Instead, he often let me out to explore his bedroom. At first, I was a little timid. But soon Ilearned to run under his bed; I hid inside his bedroom slippers; I walked around inside the dark closet where his clothing hung.
    Maybe it was because he didn’t have any brothers or sisters, but Robbie talked to me a lot. Sometimes he held me up to the window. I could see the street below with the cars going along. And in the distance, I noticed a large area of green. “That’s the park where I go and play with my friends,” Robbie explained to me.What was the park like? I wondered. But my world inside Robbie’s apartment was big enough to keep me busy.

    One day Robbie’s mother walked into his bedroom. Robbie was sitting on his bed and I