How to Outrun a Crocodile When Your Shoes Are Untied by Jess Keating Page B

couldn’t say that to her. She was way too nice and didn’t deserve snark from me. The tiny line between her eyebrows when she glanced at me made me want to cry. All I wanted to do was stop looking at my ugly, dark project with my tiny stick person and get out of there. It wasn’t me, was it? I couldn’t get my mouth to work.
    â€œTell you what,” she said when I didn’t respond. “I don’t have to have your grade in until next week. If you want to try again, you can get it to me by the dance on Monday. I’ll be a chaperone, so you can find me there. Sound good?”
    I nodded, grateful for a quick way out of this conversation. My skin felt like it might catch fire I was so ashamed. “If you do stick with this one, do I have your permission to display it with the others?”
    I snatched the project from the desk. There was no way I wanted people seeing it, my true self or otherwise. “Um, no,” I said. “If that’s okay. I’m going to, um, keep it for now. I’ll get something back to you soon.” I rolled up the poster with shaky hands and stuffed it into my backpack. I’d have to think of something else. Just looking at this one made me feel sick.
    She hopped off the desk and followed me out the door. “Have a good night, Ana!” She called out as I scurried down the hall.
    I didn’t think it was possible to feel worse than I had after my butt became front-page news. But this day was turning out to be one big low after another.

chapter 9
    â€œA chimpanzee can recognize itself in a mirror.”
    â€”Animal Wisdom
    So, really what they’re saying is that’s one more animal that is smarter than Daz. Because I’ve seen him preening in the mirror, and boy, it is not pretty. There’s no way he’s self-aware.
    Tap tap tap.
    The sound of fingernails on glass made me drop my pen onto my homework and shuffle over to the window of my new room.
    Argh! “Can I help you?” I asked, squinting against the bright sun. A group of six or seven teenagers were standing outside my window, obviously thinking I was part of an exhibit. “The lion exhibit is around the other side, where the sign is!” I slammed the window shut, mumbling to myself. The smell of hay and dampness wafted in after me.
    It was official: we’d been living in the zoo for one day, and I was already sick of it.
    Top Three Things about Living in a Zoo That You Don’t Realize until You Move In:
    1. No matter how many pillows you pile over your head, you will not be able to drown out the sound of lions grumbling all night long like they’re noisy guests on a late-night talk show that’s filming in your backyard.
    2. In a normal house, if you hear screeching, it means something bad is happening. In the zoo, if you hear screeching, it just means it’s feeding time at the African Birds Pavilion. Those birds are squawkier than the Sneerers playing dodgeball.
    3. Despite what I thought, the zoo is actually a great place to disappear. Who’s going to look at me when they can look at zebras? Or giraffes? Or polar bears? It is an anonymite’s dream here.
    That didn’t mean there weren’t some things I had to get used to. So far, I’d had six random groups of zoo visitors tapping on my window, and the resident pelicans that have free rein of the area have decided to strut around like they own the place, attacking me with their floppy beaks whenever I leave the house. I was already regretting picking the larger room. It was also the one with the cross breeze from the hippos.
    Barf.
    Slogging into the kitchen for some homework fuel of milk and cookies, I nodded to Mom at the kitchen table and ignored Daz, who was running upstairs with a hedgehog in his hands. This house was much smaller than our normal one, so there were still some boxes of unpacked dishes and cutlery left on the floor. I grabbed a glass from an open box and