I can’t resist pulling her chain. “It’s out of my hands. Nimbus makes the rules around here, not me. If you don’t have rules, you’ve got chaos.”
She looks like she’s about to cry, which justifies my opinion of her. Anyone who can get this worked up over a slimy little finger chomper is three-quarters gaga. On the other hand, I already know she’s gaga, since she loves the Oasis.
I sigh. Making a crazy person cry—that’s not being very whole.
Tyrell speaks up before I get the chance to. “Don’t worry, Grace. He’s not going to turn us in. He’s just messing with you. Right, Jett?”
“Right,” I confirm. “Who hates rules more than me? Nimbus says no pets? I say we adopt a hundred lizards. And a Shetland pony. And a couple of giraffes.”
“No giraffes,” Tyrell deadpans. “The shed isn’t tall enough.”
I regard Tyrell with newfound respect. Maybe I underestimated him.
“So what’s the next step in Lizard 101?” I ask.
“We’ve been trying to figure out what he eats,” comes a new voice from behind us.
I wheel in time to see that tall girl with the glasses—Brooklynne—slipping in through the door of the shed.
I shoot Grace a resentful look. “She’s in on it too? You trust her and not me?”
Brooklynne laughs. “Last time anybody trusted you, you bought a hovercraft.”
My eyes click into super focus—a trait I inherited from Vlad. When he concentrates, his gaze is like the targeting system on an F-16. “How did you hear about the hovercraft?” I demand. “Only Nimbus, Ivory, and Matt know about that.”
“Word gets around,” Brooklynne explains evasively.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” My eyes narrow. “Has Matt been complaining about me?”
Tyrell grins. “Everyone’s been complaining about you.”
I shrug modestly. “Fair enough.”
“Guys, we’ve got more important things to do,” Grace insists. “Needles must be starving.”
Tyrell reaches one of the celery stalks into the paint tray, dipping it into the water directly in front of Needles. The lizard ignores it, even when Tyrell bumps it up against the reptile’s leathery snout.
Next, Grace scoops a little mashed turnip onto a Popsicle stick and offers it. The needlelike teeth nibble at it for about half a second. Then the blob of food sinks to the bottom of the paint tray, ignored.
Brooklynne goes last. She’s brought a Dixie cup filled with brown rice. Using a pair of wooden chopsticks, she plucks a few grains and holds them just above the surface of the water. Needles seems to find this the least appetizing of all. He actually turns his snout away. I’m pretty sure he’d be making a face if he had one.
“You guys are such idiots,” I tell them. “If you want to know what lizards eat, google it.”
The look they give me plainly says that I’m the idiot, not them. There is no Google here, no Yahoo, no Fuego Search. We are 100 percent unplugged. “We’re doomed,” I groan. “We’ve got no way of even finding out what kind of lizard he is. For all we know, he eats nothing but cherries jubilee!”
The others stare at me hopelessly. They may not like me much, but they see that I’m right.
At that moment, a small moth flaps its way over the paint tray. Needles rises up out of the water and snaps his jaws at it, missing by at least three inches. The moth does a U-turn and disappears out the door.
“Well, we have our answer,” Grace says in a shaky voice.
I shrug. “So he eats bugs. So what?”
“He’s a carnivore,” Brooklynne concludes in that flat, informative tone of hers.
That’s when it hits me. The dining hall is fully stocked with every fruit, vegetable, grain, starch, and protein in the food pyramid. There’s only one missing piece: meat. There’s nothing in that entire kitchen that you could feed a carnivorous lizard.
I put it into words. “I guess I’m not the only creature who’s going to starve in this place.”
9
Tyrell Karrigan
It’s an insect the size of a small jeep.
They call them palmetto bugs down here, but back home in Pennsylvania they’re just plain roaches. There’s nothing “just plain” about this guy, though. If there’s a Guinness Book of Roach Records, he belongs on the cover.
I nudge Jett, who’s half asleep on the pool recliner beside me.
“Leave me alone,” he mumbles. “I’m in a better place—like there could be a worse one.”
“You’ve got to see this,” I insist.
He opens one eye and follows my pointing finger to the giant bug, which is marching across the pool deck like it owns the place.
“Wow,” he muses. “Where I come from, anything that big would get its own exhibit in the San Diego Zoo.”
“Or,” I counter, “it could feed a small lizard for a week and a half.”
Isn’t it just our luck that Needles turns out to be a carnivore? He only eats meat—the one thing you can’t get here at the Oasis. That leaves just bugs. They’re meat, in a gross kind of way.
Jett spills out the contents of his water cup and gets up beside me. We stalk the palmetto bug for a few steps. Jett drops to his knees and places the cup gently over it. We exchange a fist bump. Needles isn’t going to starve anytime soon. After this meal, he might even have a weight problem.
We’ve barely finished congratulating ourselves on our hunting skills when the cup begins to move. It scrapes along the apron of the pool as the big bug struggles for freedom. We follow in amazement, unsure of what to do but unwilling to lose our prey.
And then a pair of bare feet steps protectively around the fugitive cup. We look up to see Grace standing over us. “What are you doing?”
“Needles’s dinner is in that cup!” I exclaim.
“And breakfast. And lunch,” Jett adds. “And maybe the catering for his bar mitzvah.”
“We don’t kill at the Oasis,” she lectures. “That’s how Magnus first came to vegetarianism—with the belief that all life is precious.”
“Yeah, but what about Needles’s life?” I argue. “He can only eat things that used to be alive.”
“There are plenty of dead insects around,” she reasons. “They only live a few days. But we’re not killing anything.”
“Fair enough.” Jett reaches out a foot and stomps the paper cup flat. “Oops.” With his toe, he flips the cup away, revealing the crushed palmetto bug underneath. “Well, what do you know? Dead insect.” He scoops up the carcass with the flattened cup. “Needles, this is your lucky day.”
Grace has a few thousand things to say about that. She calls Jett every insult in the book and even a few that I haven’t heard before. But I think Jett did the right thing. What are we supposed to do? Scour the whole property for fruit flies that died of old age and ants that got stepped on by mistake? It was the right thing for us and definitely the right thing for Needles. It just didn’t turn out so great for the palmetto bug.
Jett weathers the storm without flinching. I guess he’s pretty used to getting yelled at. “If you’re done,” he says finally, “I’ve got a starving lizard to feed.”