Eggs by Jerry Spinelli Page A

pushed his head in. “What do you think? Just okay?”
    David was amazed. Instead of the bright green paint that he himself had helped to lay on, the interior was covered with wallpaper. There were birthday cakes and kettle drums and prancing horses in feathered bonnets.
    “Did I hear you say wow?”
    “Wow,” said David, meaning it.
    “I got sick of that green after two days. It was like,
eech!
Fridge took me to the wallpaper place. I picked it out myself.” She ducked in for a peek. “Bee-yoo-tiful.”
    David said, “Is that why you told me to come over?”
    Primrose came out with her socks and sneakers. She sat on the lawn chair. “Nope.”
    David stood over her. “So why?”
    Primrose brushed dust from the bottom of her foot and pulled on a sock. “We’re going somewhere.”

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    Telling him, not even asking.
    And what does he do? He follows her like some dumb little puppy dog, till here they are walking along some dumb railroad track, probably get themselves killed, and he
still
doesn’t know where they’re going.
    So for the tenth time he asked her where they were going. This time she answered: “To the city.”
    “The big city? Philadelphia?”
    “Yerp.”
    David was excited. He had never been to Philadelphia. The only big city he had ever been to was St. Paul, Minnesota. Once. And he heard Philadelphia was bigger than St. Paul.
    He was also a little scared. He had never heard of two kids going to a big city by themselves. She was wearing a backpack. He wondered how long they would be gone. He looked back. There was no sign of Perkiomen, only two steel rails going around a bend.
    “Why are we going this way?” he said.
    “ ’Cause I’m not old enough to drive.”
    “You know what I mean. The tracks.”
    “It’s the only way I know.” They were walking on the railroad ties, Primrose stepping on every other one. David had tried it, but the steps were too long for his legs. “I did this before,” she said.
    “You did?”
    “Yeah. Well, not all the way to the city.” She stepped up on the rail, her arms out like a tightrope walker. “There’s a place up ahead where you can see the skyscrapers.”
    Skyscrapers. He remembered them from St. Paul.
    “Is that why we’re going? To see the skyscrapers?”
    She teetered off the rail. “Nopey dopey.”
    “So why then?”
    She climbed back on. “Tell ya later, gator.”
    David was getting mad. He hated when she acted goofy like this. “I want to know now.”
    “Guess you’ll just have to trust me,” she breezed.
    “I
don’t
trust you,” he growled. “I don’t even
like
you.” To show her, he pushed her from the rail.
    She stumbled along the ties, laughing her laugh. When she turned back to him she seemed about to say something, when suddenly her eyes shifted. She was looking past his shoulder. Her eyes were bulging, her mouth a silent scream, and that was all David needed to know to figure out what was coming behind him. And when she cried, “Jump!” and leaped from the tracks, that’s what he did too — he jumped.
    He landed on his side, he kept rolling, getting as far away as possible, stones digging into his skin. When he came to a stop and dared to look, what he saw was not a thousand-ton train roaring by, but a ropey-haired girl on her hands and knees, heaving so violently that he would have thought she was throwing up if he didn’t know she was laughing.
    After a while she tried getting upright, staggered tear-blind into the tracks, and fell back to her hands and knees. In time she tested her feet again and found that she could stand. She wiped bucketfuls of tears from her eyes.
    “You shoulda seen —,” she started to say to David, but he wasn’t there. Or there. Or there. Not down the tracks. She turned and looked back the way they came, and there he was, in the distance (How long had she been laughing?), walking the ties between the rails, walking slump-shouldered down the middle of the tracks around the bend. . .