Read Online The Gallery of Lost Species by Nina Berkhout - Free Book Online Page A

first secret I kept from my sister.

TWELVE
    L IKE H OUDINI , V IV DISAPPEARED from the last pageant of her life.
    This was nothing new. My sister wandered at a young age, and as a kid Viv was in the habit of getting lost. After panicked searches, we’d find her asleep in a cardboard box in the garage or in the attic under a pile of clothes, or farther off, in a concrete pipe in the playground blocks away.
    Once, at Sears after closing time, Viv had the department store in lockdown for two hours before security found her concealed by a rack of vents in the hardware aisle. Another time, during the Santa Claus parade, she slipped from our mother’s grip. We tracked her down hours later, sitting on the curb of a deserted parking lot. Her arms were loaded up with bottles, which she’d been collecting to trade in for change to call home. She wiped her sticky hands on my snowsuit and Con was livid because her ski jacket smelled like beer.
    Her most impressive hideout took place in elementary school during the scratch-and-sniff sticker craze. Somehow Viv got hold of the most bankable of all stickers, the dry martini: a tipped and grinning martini glass with big eyes, containing a single olive.
    Stephanie, the most popular girl in school, offered to swap ten packs of smellies for Viv’s page of dry martinis. Viv refused. She offered her allowance for a month. She offered her lunches of Pop-Tarts and pudding and pizza. When she said she’d bring Viv a real martini, my sister agreed.
    The next day at lunch, some fourth-graders gathered behind the school. Stephanie extracted a jam jar of cloudy liquid from her purse. A gust of Pine-Sol hit the air as my sister pulled the dry martini sheet from her album.
    Viv sat on her knapsack, unscrewed the metal lid, and took a sip, spitting most of it out in the dirt. Stephanie and her friends squealed. Plugging her nose, Viv took another gulp then transmitted the jar to the boys, who’d formed a circle around her. Daphne and I watched from further back, leaning against the schoolyard fence.
    Miss Rogers, who was on outside duty that week, and who also happened to be Viv’s teacher, caught on as the bell rang. She broke up the group and dragged Viv by the hood to the infirmary, where she passed out. When our mother got there, Viv woke up and vomited on Con’s pink patent shoes. Both girls were suspended for a week.
    That was the year Miss Rogers told my parents she thought Viv had psychological issues. Her concerns were based on the smelly sticker incident and the annual poetry contest.
    Each spring, students had to write a poem for English class. A jury of teachers chose the winners, which were read out loud at assembly. My rhyming couplet about bubbles and kittens went unnoticed. Viv’s poem was more troubling: “The monster my mother / crawled out / from under the bed / and crept inside my head / through my ears.”
    â€œWhat’s this rubbish, Vivienne?” Constance shook the scrap of paper in front of her after she’d met with Miss Rogers. “Where did you copy this from?”
    When Viv went back to the elementary school after her suspension, her fourth-grade classmates teased her and called her Sauceface and Wino. She hid every lunch hour so she’d be left alone. Then came the twenty-four-hour stretch when she went missing. Police roped off the premises and scoured the neighbourhood. News crews converged near the flagpole, waiting for the principal to answer questions about pedophiles. My parents were frantic and we stayed up through the night with an inspector and his assistant. They discussed tapping our phone in case we received a kidnapper’s ransom call.
    The next afternoon, a maintenance worker found Viv in the school’s subterranean boiler room, which was no longer in use. Nobody ventured down there. Everyone believed the underground tunnels were inhabited by the ghosts of students who died in the flu epidemic of