hand. He still crouched beside it, staring into its face. He put a hand on the creature’s neck. He didn’t say anything. That filmed-over eye stared up into nothing.
“I don’t want to,” he said.
“It’s all right,” she said.
“I thought it would be easy to do, but it doesn’t feel like I should do it.”
“It’s all right. I don’t even want one. Not really.”
“The roof of his mouth,” he said.
“What?”
“The roof of his mouth is just like mine. Ruffled like mine. Or like yours.”
He got up and stood for a bit. Joel glanced down at the spoon in his hand and frowned at it, as if he didn’t know what it was. He put it in his pocket.
“Maybe they’ll give us a tooth,” he said. “As part of our reward. It will be better if we don’t have to pull it out ourselves.”
“Not so sad.”
“Yes.”
He splashed out of the lake, and they stood looking at the carcass.
“Where’s Ben?” Joel asked, glancing off in the direction Ben had run.
“We should at least find out how long it is.”
“We’d have to go get a measuring tape, and someone might come along and say they found it instead of us.”
“I’m four feet exactly. To the inch. I was last July when my daddy measured me in the doorway. We could measure how many Gails it is.”
“Okay.”
She lowered herself to her butt and stretched out on the sand, arms squeezed to her sides, ankles together. Joel found a stick and drew a line in the sand, to mark the crown of her skull.
Gail rose, brushed the sand off, and stepped over the line. She lay down flat again, so her heels were touching the mark in the dirt. They went this way down the length of the beach. He had to wade into the lake to pull the tail up onto shore.
“It’s a little over four Gails,” he said.
“That’s sixteen feet.”
“Most of it was tail.”
“That’s some tail. Where is Ben?”
They heard high-pitched voices piping through the blowing vapor. Small figures skipped along the beach, coming toward them. Miriam and Mindy sprang through the fog, Ben wandering behind them with no particular urgency. He was eating a piece of toast with jam on it. Strawberry jam was smeared around his lips, on his chin. He always wound up with as much on his face as went into his mouth.
Mindy held Miriam’s hand while Miriam jumped in a strange, lunging sort of way.
“Higher!” Mindy commanded. “Higher!”
“What is this?” Joel asked.
“I have a pet balloon. I named her Miriam,” Mindy said. “Float, Miriam!”
Miriam threw herself straight up off the ground and came down so heavily that her legs gave way and she sat hard on the beach. She still had Mindy’s hand and yanked her down beside her. The two girls sprawled on the damp pebbles, laughing.
Joel looked past them to Ben. “Where is Mrs. London?”
Ben chewed a mouthful of toast. He was chewing it a long time. Finally he swallowed. “She said she’d come see the dinosaur when it isn’t so cold out.”
“Float, Miriam!” Mindy screamed.
Miriam flopped onto her back with a sigh. “I’m deflating. I’m deflat.”
Joel looked at Gail with a mix of frustration and disgust.
Mindy said, “It stinks here.”
“Do you believe this?” Joel asked. “She’s not coming.”
Ben said, “She told me to tell Gail if she wants breakfast to come home. Can we buy my cowboys today?”
“You didn’t do what we asked, so you aren’t getting anything,” Joel told him.
“You didn’t say I had to get a grown-up. You just said I had to tell a grown-up,” Ben said, in a tone of voice that made even Gail want to hit him. “I want my cowboys.”
Joel walked past the little girls on the ground and grabbed Ben’s shoulder, turned him around. “Bring back a grown-up or I’ll drown you.”
“You said I could have cowboys.”
“Yes. I’ll make sure you’re buried with them.”
He kicked Ben in the ass to get him going. Ben cried out and stumbled and glanced back with a hurt look.
“Bring an adult,” Joel said. “Or you’ll see how mean I can get.”
Ben walked off in a hurry, head down, legs stiff and unbending.
“You know what the problem is?” Joel said.
“Yes.”
“No one is going to believe him. Would you believe him if he said we were guarding a dinosaur?”
The two little girls were speaking in hushed voices. Gail was about to offer to go to the house and get her mother when their secretive whispering caught her notice. She looked down to find them