“No, sir,” she said. “I wouldn’t dream of it. This is your sad day.”
“Good,” I said. “Because I’m still sad.”
After Congo, Calista picked the reptile house, which was warm warm warm—so warm that the glass in front of the snakes and turtles was half steamed up. But that was okay by me. Me and Calista peeled off our coats and shook all the slushy snow out of our umbrellas and got to work being sad.
“Albie, look at this!” Calista shouted all of a sudden while I was watching some tortoises. That was another good thing about going to the zoo on a gray, gray day—no one cared if you shouted. “You have to see this.”
I ran over, and I saw it. Probably the grossest, coolest thing I ever saw in my whole life. Behind the glass where Calista was pointing, there was a python, big as a tree and long as one too. And I’d never believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, but I swear that python was eating a pig. The pig was already dead—Calista said the zookeepers probably put him in frozen, like a giant pig pop—and that was a good thing for him, I bet, because he was getting swallowed. The python had his jaws stretched wide, way way past his eyeballs, and the pig was already halfway down. All you could see was the pig’s back legs sticking out past the python’s fangs, plus its pink piggy tail.
“Whoa,” I said.
We watched for probably a full hour, till our breath steamed up the glass too much to watch much more and our feet started to get sore. That python was such a slow eater that he still hadn’t even finished by the time we left the reptile house.
“Bye, snake,” I said as we left. “Bye, pig.”
“I think you mean ‘bye, lunch,’” Calista told me.
For a second that got me laughing so hard I almost forgot it was a sad day.
• • •
On the subway ride back home, I told Calista, “That was a good sad day.”
She smiled. “I’m glad, Albie.” She looked at the zoo map in her hand for a second and then held it out to me. “You want to keep this, as a souvenir?” I took it. And I was looking for the reptile house on the map when Calista told me, “You have to go back to school tomorrow, you know. This was your only sad day.”
“I know,” I said. Because I did. You couldn’t let every day be a sad day.
“It’s probably going to be tough,” Calista told me, “at school tomorrow. But you’ll get through it. You can be brave, right? You’re good at that.”
I pushed my nose closer to the map. “Caring and thoughtful and good,” I said.
“What was that?” Calista asked.
I shook my head.
“Hey, Calista?”
“Yeah?”
“Should I tell Mom and Dad?” I asked her. “About going to the zoo today for my sad day instead of going to school?”
Calista bit her bottom lip for a while before she answered me. “I would never tell you to lie to your parents, Albie,” she said at last.
“But if I don’t lie,” I said, thinking things through, “then they’ll probably be mad at you because you didn’t make me go to school.”
“Probably,” Calista agreed.
“And you’ll probably get in trouble,” I told her.
“I would imagine so, yes,” she said.