The Art of Being Emily - Katie MacAlister Page 0,140

room we came to had a sign pinned on the curtain that said Oddities of the Animal World.

“I don't see what's so horrible about this,” I said, glancing at a display case that had a bunch of stuffed animals sitting around a tea table. Kind of a teddy bear's picnic, except these were kitties and squirrels and stuff. I was about to say something else to Holly when I looked back at the case, stepping closer and bending down so I could see in it. “OH MY GOD! Those aren't stuffed animals, they're...stuffed animals!”

Holly stood beside me, doing that wringing the hand thing. “It's not that, look over there. That's what I want you to see.”

I stared at the display, my whole body getting reading to start screaming. The first scene in the case was of kittens—real live kittens, or real dead kittens, kittens that had been alive and were now dead and stuffed—sitting around a small round table that had doll's cups and saucers and little cakes and a teapot and stuff. The kittens were wearing little dresses and hats and OHMICROD they were dead kittens! “This is awful! It's got to be illegal or something!”

“Over here, look over here!” Holly said, just about dancing behind me. I looked in the second half of the case. There were two squirrels in little smoking jackets with those red fez hats, smoking pipes.

“Jeezumcrow, who did this? They ought to go to jail!”

“Please, Emily, I can't stand its poor little eyes!”

“Just a sec, I have to see...oh my God, look at that! It's a marching band made up of mice! That's just sick! And what are those? Guinea Pigs? Are they playing cricket? Whoever did this is a monster, a certifiable monster!”

“EMILY, PLEASE!”

I looked in the next case and screamed. “Will you look at what they did to the poor little innocent bunnies? This is terrible! I'm going to complain! All those poor little dead bunnies dressed up like Victorian school kids...it's just repulsive, that's what it is. This isn't an oddity, it's a blight upon human...um...existence! Yeah, that's it, it's a blight!”

“EMILY WILLIAMS!” I looked up at Holly, surprised she could yell that loud. We weren't the only ones in the Museum, but we were the only people in the animal area.

“What?”

She pointed at a small terrarium-type cage, the kind like you had when you had the lizards. The bottom of it was filled with grass and little shrubby things, and dirt mounded into what looked like a tiny cave. It didn’t look at all nice, like someone hadn’t cleaned it in a long time. It smelled awful.

“Tristan,” she said.

“Tristan?”

“Tristan!”

I walked over to look. I figured nothing could be worse than dead little bunnies and kitties dressed up in clothes and posed in cute little scenes.

I was so wrong.

I stared at Tristan for a few seconds, my mouth hanging WIDE open. “My...God! Is that...does that have...am I seeing it...”

Holly nodded, her lip quivery as her eyes got all puddly looking at it. “Look at its poor little eyes, Emily. It's suffering.”

I looked at its little eyes...and its little eyes. I looked back and forth. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, and was just about to tell her it was fake when one set of the eyes blinked, and the head moved.

The left head.

Tristan the Two-headed Hedgehog the sign over the cage read.

“What're we going to do?” Holly asked, her fingers curled through the metal framework holding the lid on the cage.

“Do? Well...uh...we can complain to someone.”

“It's suffering! It doesn't want to be in a dirty little cage, stared at by thousands of people just like it was a freak, it wants to be free. Can't you see that?”

“Yeah, OK, but I don't know what we can do.”

“You can do something,” Holly said, giving me one of her you can do anything looks. “You tell me what to do, and I'll help. I can't stand seeing Tristan suffer like that.”

“Yeah, but it's just a hedgehog...and a half.”

Holly's fingers stroked down the front side of the glass near one of Tristan's heads. “I never told you this, but I had a pet hedgehog when I was a little girl. Her name was Emily.”

I stared at her in surprise. “No!”

She nodded. “That's why I liked you right away, you reminded me of my Emily. She died a couple of years ago. I'm...I'm still not over it.”

“Really?” I felt my eyes go a bit misty. You know how I am about animals. I still