Guinea Pig Killer by Annie Graves

T his isn’t really my story, Kate said.
    It happened over the summer to a neighbour of mine called Sandy. But I’m going to tell it anyway.

    Sandy had a sister called Dolly.
    She was a teenager.
    She didn’t really want to be hanging out with us kids.
    She was boring anyway.
    All she cared about was school and people she knew from school and what they said and what they did and who they were annoyed at and why.
    Though I suppose that wasn’t completely all.
    You see, she had this guinea pig.
    Princess Snowflake was the guinea pig’s name, and Dolly loved her more than anything else in the world.
    When Dolly was sad, she would take the little princess out of her cage and tell her all about her problems.
    She would scratch the guinea pig’s soft white fur until Princess Snowflake made deep, happy noises.

    Sandy was jealous of Her Royal Highness.
    That is not how he would see it, of course.
    He would just say the guinea pig was gross and boring.
    Well, I suppose if I had a sister and she preferred an animal that sometimes ate its own poo, then I would be a little put out as well.

    Anyway, time came and went, and during the school holidays Sandy’s family all went away.
    Mr and Mrs Mount went on holiday. They did that every year, without Sandy, and he said it was very unfair.
    He had to stay with us, and it rained and rained all the time and we never got to the beach, even for one day.
    Sandy’s sister wasn’t on holiday with their parents, though. She was at Irish college.
    And she had left very strict instructions for Sandy about how he was supposed to look after her beloved guinea pig while she was away.

    He was supposed to go home every day and feed Princess Snowflake and make sure she was all right.
    We didn’t know this.
    We’d forgotten all about the wretched guinea pig. She wasn’t in our house, so we never gave her a thought.

    Now, Sandy was pretty bitter about being abandoned by his family.
    The way he thought about it, it was all Princess Snowflake’s fault.
    If she wasn’t around, he reasoned, he wouldn’t have to stay home and mind her and feed her and change her hay and all that stuff.

    He would be able to go on holiday with his parents and not have to stay with a silly girl (me) in a house that smelled funny.
    (My house doesn’t smell funny at all, but it does smell different to Sandy’s house because Sandy’s house has a weird, mustardy smell that I don’t like very much.)
    Anyway, he was wrong to blame Princess Snowflake, because she was only a guinea pig.
    What could she do about it?
    Make Sandy’s parents take him with them on holiday? I don’t think so.
    I mean, her favourite treat was cabbage leaves and she hid under her bedding whenever the television was turned up too loud.
    How much more harmless can you get?

    I still don’t know if Sandy did what he did to that poor animal on purpose or not.
    But this is what he did.
    He stayed with us all that time, and he never said he was supposed to go home every day and feed her.
    Not until the day before his parents came back from their cruise.
    And by then, of course, Her Highness was already dead.
    He called me over to the house to show me the body.
    He wasn’t sad at all, just worried that he would get into trouble.
    The cage door was all nibbled, as if she’d tried to escape.
    Her bowl was empty and dry as bones.

    I had never seen a dead body before and it was all stiff and pointy.
    Her long white teeth were bared, as if she had been just about to bite or let out a guinea pig scream.

    Sandy put the body in the bin and I went home angry.
    I didn’t speak to him for ages after that.
    I kept thinking about my little black puppy, Rock.
    His big, soft eyes and snuffly coal-black nose.
    What if someday I had to go to Irish college and somebody ‘forgot’ about him?
    Thinking about it made my eyes all stingy.
    So that was why I didn’t really get the