“Oh, Robert!” Cass Minter rolled her eyes.
“No, cows can explode if enough gas builds up inside them. It’s a medical condition. They produce all this methane gas when they digest grass. If they don’t get rid of it, it can make them explode. There was this whole article on it. I guess it’s like what happens to milk cows if you don’t milk them.” He took another drink of Coke and belched again. With Robert, you never knew if he was making it up. “Think about what could happen to us if we stopped belching.”
“Maybe you should give up drinking Coke,” Cass suggested dryly. She was a big, heavyset girl with a round, cheerful face and intelligent green eyes. She always wore jeans and loose-fitting shirts, an unspoken concession to her weight, and her lank brown hair looked as if no comb had passed through it any time in recent memory. Cass was Nest’s oldest friend, from all the way back to when they were in second grade together. She winked at Nest now. “Maybe you should stick to tomato juice, Robert.”
Robert Heppler hated tomato juice. He’d been forced to drink it once at camp, compelled to do so by a counselor in front of a dozen other campers, after which he had promptly vomited it up again. It was a point of honor with him that he would die before he ever did that again.
“Where did you read all this, anyway?” Jared Scott asked with benign interest.
Robert shrugged. “On the Internet.”
“You know, you can’t believe everything you read,” Brianna declared, repeating something her mother frequently told her.
“Well, duh!” Robert sneered. “Anyway, this was a Dave Barry article.”
“Dave Barry?” Cass was in stitches. “Now there’s a reliable source. I suppose you get your world news from Liz Smith.”
Robert stopped and slowly turned to face her. “Oh, I am cut to the quick!” He looked pointedly at Nest. “Like I can’t tell the difference between what’s rebable and what isn’t, right?”
“Leave me out of this,” Nest begged.
“Don’t be so difficult, Robert!” Brianna chided, smoothing down her spotless white shorts. Only Brianna would wear white shorts to go fishing and somehow manage to keep them white.
“Difficult? I’m not difficult! Am I?” He threw up his hands. “Jared, am I?”
But Jared Scott was staring blankly at nothing, his face calm, his expression detached, as if he had removed himself entirely from everything that was happening around him and gone somewhere else. He was having another episode, Nest realized-his third that afternoon. The medicine he was taking didn’t seem to be helping a whole lot. At least his epilepsy never did much more than it was doing now. It just took him away for a while and then brought him back again, snipping out small spaces in his life, like panels cut from a comic book.
“Well, anyway, I don’t think I’m difficult.” Robert turned back to Brianna. “I can’t help it if I’m interested in learning about stuff. What am I supposed to do-stop reading?”
Brianna sighed impatiently. “You could at least stop being so dramatic!”
“Oh, now I’m too dramatic, am I? Gee, first I’m too difficult and then I’m too dramatic! How ever will I get on with my life?”
“We all ponder that dilemma on a daily basis,” Cass observed archly.
“You spend too much time in front of your computer!” Bri-anna snapped.
“Well, you spend too much time in front of your mirror!” Robert snapped right back.
It was no secret that Brianna devoted an inordinate amount of time to looking good, in large part as the result of having a mother who was a hairdresser and who firmly believed that makeup and clothes made the difference in a young girl’s lot in life. From the tune her daughter was old enough to pay attention, Brianna’s mother had instilled in her the need to “look the part,” as she was fond of putting it, training her to style her hair and do her makeup and providing her with an extensive wardrobe of matching outfits that Brianna was required to wear whatever the occasion-even on an outing that centered around fishing. Lately Brianna had begun to chafe a bit under the constraints of her mother’s rigid expectations, but Mom still held the parental reins with a firm grip and full-blown rebellion was a year or so away.