Her eyes water and a tear slips down her cheek, which she quickly wipes away. This is not our carefree, pain-in-the-butt, smelling-up-the-bathroom-on-purpose Ivy. This is a stressed-out, scared Ivy. Seeing her this way makes me feel a little scared, too.

“It’s going to be OK,” I say again. “Mom and Dad will work it out.”

She nods as another tear slips down her cheek. “OK.” She gets up and walks to the door. “Thanks again for today,” she says. “And sorry about the sunburn.”

“It’s fine,” I tell her.

“Today was fun, right? Other than the burn?”

“Yeah, it was.”

“I wish every day could be like this, except for the Mom and Dad part.”

“Me too,” I say.

I listen to her shuffle down the hall to her bedroom. George pads into my room and jumps on the bed. He slowly walks up to me and stretches his nose to my face, sniffing. Then he walks in a careful circle and plops down next to my head. I rest my cheek against his soft fur and listen to his reassuring purrs until I finally fall asleep.

Chapter Eight

Sierra invited us to a party, Micah texts me the next morning. She has a pool!

I get that jealous feeling again. Why didn’t Sierra invite me personally? She could get my number from Sam. Or even Micah. Instead of replying, I take care of Rainbow and then go over to the Townsends’.

Even though it’s on the early side, it’s already hot and muggy and the animals seem to move in slow motion.

When it’s time to gather eggs from the chickens, I scatter their feed in their outdoor pen first, then unlatch the doors to their coop. They all shuffle out in a line. Poor Bashful staggers out last. I quickly toss some feed to her before the others can reach it.

Inside the coop, I start my egg search. Each nest has one egg, which I carefully place in the basket. Some of them are kind of gross because they are slightly wet and I don’t want to think about why, and some have a little chicken poop on them. When I get to the last nest, I pick up the egg, but it slips out of my hand and lands on the floor and cracks open. The bright-yellow yolk spreads across the floor. While I’m still wondering how the heck I’m going to clean it up, a chicken appears in the doorway, then another, and suddenly they are all attacking one another to get to the cracked egg to eat it. The biggest one pecks at me to get out of the way. A horrible urge to throw up rises in my throat, and I cover my mouth and rush outside, quickly closing the latch behind me. I nearly drop the whole basket as I run away from the coop and the sound of their feeding frenzy.