looked up at him, as if assessing whether she should ask him what she wanted to ask him.
“Hey Max, you ever feel like you’re, like, stuck under other people?” she said, squinting up at him, seeming immensely relieved to have said it. “Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped under people … like in a bad way. You know what I mean?”
Max began to formulate an answer but she didn’t seem to need one.
“I don’t know,” she continued, “I feel like I’m constantly burdened by everyone’s issues. You know?”
Max thought he knew. Or did he? He wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter. He just liked being with her, alone with her. She seemed interested in him, in being only with him and talking only to him, and he was having trouble breathing.
She smiled at him. “I was about to go crazy before you showed up. You’re different, you know? You’re …” She seemed on the verge of saying something very serious but then retreated. “You know, you’ve got less hair, you’re cleaner … You smell better. You don’t smell great, but better.”
Max laughed.
“King?” It was a distant voice, maybe Carol’s, from far below. “Max?”
Max jumped off Katherine’s stomach and tried to peer through the treetops to find the parade. He knew he needed to get back.
Katherine sighed. “Yeah, I know. You’re the king and all. I’m sorry for taking you away from your kingly subjects. Hold on. I know a shortcut.”
Max again held onto the scruff of her neck and immediately Katherine leapt from her platform — thirty feet up, a hundred feet forward, and then descended into what seemed like a mess of trees twenty feet down. But as they fell closer, another platform became visible, and Max realized they would be landing on it. He braced himself for painful impact but at the moment they touched the platform, they were high in the air again. Katherine had managed to touch the platform’s surface the tiniest fragment of a second before bounding off again, onto the next tree and the next platform. She leapt and bounded this way, more agile than any kangaroo or frog, for six more trees, each journey more thrilling than any roller coaster or bungee jump Max had ever known or seen and the only problem was the barf on his wolf suit. He threw up twice, yes, but it was a good kind of throwing up.
Finally Max felt them descending farther, down, down. He could see the lagoon ahead, a green body of water in the shape of a sleeping dog, and just before the lagoon he could see the group of beasts making their way there.
CHAPTER XXVIII
They came to earth slowly, as if tied to a hundred parachutes. They had beaten the group to the lagoon and Katherine made sure everyone had taken note of their entrance. No one was impressed, and Carol did not seem pleased at all. His face was twisted into a scowl.
Max ran over to him.
“Hey! You ready to swim?” he asked.
Carol shrugged.
“What’s the matter?” Max asked.
“Where were you guys?” Carol asked.
“Who? Me and Katherine? We just took a different route.”
“But you were supposed to lead the parade.”
“I did.”
“And then you didn’t.”
There was a new sharpness to Carol’s tone that Max couldn’t figure out. Was he really mad about something?
“Well, that’s when I had to see something with Katherine. Now let’s swim. Do you like the water?”
“No,” Carol said flatly. “And I don’t like sailing, either. Remember?”
Max didn’t remember.
“I heard you were talking about building a ship with everyone else. Why would you do that?”
“How do you mean?”
“Why would you need a ship, Max? You’re thinking of leaving already?”
“No, no,” Max said. “This would just be for fun. Or emergencies.” Carol’s face had darkened and his eyes had gone small. His expression scattered Max’s brain so much he started babbling: “It’ll have a trampoline. And a big aquarium. An aquarium under the water, inside the ship, where we keep the fish and squids and stuff we like …”
The explanation was doing no good.
“But I thought we said we were bored by sailing,” Carol said. “Isn’t that what you said just this morning? We talked about killing anything boring but now you want to sail? The most boring thing of all?”
“Well,” Max mumbled, but he hadn’t a clue how to reconcile the two states of mind. “We don’t have to build it. It was just an idea.”
“And why would you build it without me? I’m the one here who knows how