BLOOD ON THE ASPHALT
by Galen Hardesty
Chapter Six
Sunday passed rather quietly. Jake took a few pictures of Daria with Opie out in the yard. Quinn, normally a shameless camera hog, refused to be in the same shot with Opie. Daria borrowed Jake's camera and took more pictures of Opie hanging onto low branches or peeking out of clumps of flowers, and one of him on his back with his little feet in the air.
Daria offered him some bits of banana at breakfast, and he gobbled them down. At lunch, she tried him on a dab of peanut butter, and cracked up at his hilarious struggles to chew it, get it unstuck from the roof of his mouth, and swallow it. He wouldn't eat a green bean at dinner, though. Daria didn't blame him. She thought Helen cooked them way too much. Daria didn't offer him any lasagna.
He played some with her, but he wasn't as playful as a kitten. His favorite activities seemed to be climbing her and sleeping. So Daria spent a lot of time on the sofa reading, with Opie asleep in her lap or curled up against her leg. Once Quinn asked her to leave the family room so she could watch TV, so Daria went out into the back yard under the tree. She made a quarter for that.
When the sun went down, Daria fed Opie his last meal of the day, pottied him, cleaned up the mess, and put him to bed in his box on the back porch. She stayed with him till he fell asleep, then went back in to watch a little TV. Later, ready for bed herself, Daria finished a diary entry and looked at Quinn's giant Cinderella wristwatch wall clock. It was about four hours after she'd fed Opie. Time to potty him one last time before bed.
Daria was padding down the dark hallway when she heard voices coming from her parents' bedroom. She resolved to go on by and not snoop, but then she heard her name mentioned.
"But Daria's a smart kid, Helen. She's not going to believe that little tiny thing broke out of the box and the back porch all by itself!"
"Honestly, Jake, do I have to spell it all out for you? Tip the box over on its side, as if it had been trying to climb out and the box tipped over, and push out the bottom corner of one of the screens in some out-of the-way place, where she wouldn't have noticed it, just enough for the little rat to have gotten through."
"But it's so small! I don't think it's big enough to survive on its own!"
"It's a wild animal, Jake. It will have just as good a chance as any other wild animal. It got along fine without Daria up until yesterday. Now take it out of town and set it free."
"Up until yesterday, it had a mother to take care of it," Jake half-whined.
"Jake! Whose father are you, Daria's or that damn possum's? Daria is much too young to be trying to raise a wild animal as a pet! She doesn't know anything about them, and neither do we! They could be naturally vicious. They could carry diseases. If they're such great pets, why doesn't everybody have one? Answer me that! Honestly..."
Daria had heard more than enough, and had decided what to do. She turned the knob and opened the door. Her parents, shocked, stood there staring at her like deer in the headlights. Guilty deer. Daria looked at Jake for a second, then turned her accusing stare on Helen.
"Did someone say 'honestly'?" she asked.