Small as an Elephant Read Online Free Page B

even asking.
    By the time he got to the brownies, he was feeling full, but no way was he going to refuse these. He took a bite and lay back in the sand, letting the chocolate melt in his mouth.
    “There’s a herd of elephants,” Jack said, pointing straight up.
    “Huh?” asked Aiden.
    “In the sky,” Jack told him. “A herd of elephants.”
    “I see one there!” said Julie. “Look, there’s its trunk!”
    Everyone tried to see where Julie was pointing.
    “I see it!” shouted Aiden’s mom.
    “There’s an elephant stretched out on its belly!” said Aiden.
    “That’s so weird,” said Aiden’s dad. “If you think about elephants, you see them everywhere.”
    Jack smiled. He and his mother could point out elephants for hours. Sometimes they even found them alphabetically: Airy Elephant, Balloon Elephant, Curly Elephant . . . He missed his mom so much at that moment, that moment of cloud watching, that he could almost
feel
his thoughts traveling to her, and finding her, and making her pick up her phone.
    “Excuse me,” he said suddenly, jumping up and walking back up the boardwalk, in the direction of the restrooms. He didn’t stop. He walked right past them and ducked into the woods. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, his heart pulsing with hope, and —
    “No!” he shouted.
No! No! No!
How could he have been so stupid? He had forgotten. Forgotten that his phone was in his pocket. Forgotten and gone swimming! The phone was totally soaked. He pushed a few buttons, but it didn’t even make its familiar beeping sounds. He held the On button for what seemed like three minutes with no luck at all. Totally soaked and totally dead.
    The battery! He remembered that cell phones have a patch that tells whether they’ve been damaged by liquid. Whether the phone can be saved. He turned his phone over and slid his battery out. The patch was red. Ruined.
    “No!” Jack threw the phone — screamed and threw it as far as he possibly could.
    It was one thing to be able to leave his mom messages and wonder if she got them. But now she’d have no way of reaching him. What if he got kicked off the campsite tomorrow? How would his mom know where to find him? How would they possibly connect?
    Jack lay down at the base of a tree and bawled.

Jack could tell that Aiden’s parents knew something was wrong when he returned to the picnic. He tried to stay as close to the truth as possible, saying he was worried about his mom — her not feeling well and all.
    “What was I thinking?” said Aiden’s mom, whose name, Jack had learned during lunch, was Diane. “I should have checked in on her, asked her if she needed anything.”
    “Oh, that’s OK,” Jack said quickly. “It was just a migraine . . . I think.” He had added that last bit, the “I think,” because he didn’t exactly know what a migraine was. But he’d seen commercials on TV, and it seemed like a sort of headache, but a really bad one.
    “Well, I’ll definitely check on her when we bring you back,” Diane said.
    Great, Jack. Now what?
    It was impossible to have fun for the rest of the afternoon. He hated being away from the campsite now that he didn’t have a phone. What if his mother returned and he wasn’t there? What if she tried to call? He doubted she’d be able to reason, to stay put, to wait patiently as he had.
    And then there was Diane’s determination to check up on his mother. There was no way she’d keep his mom’s disappearance a secret, no matter how hard he tried to convince her. She’d be just like the social workers and the guidance counselor and everyone else who thought they were helping when they were just making things worse.
    He thought the veins in his head were going to burst as Aiden and his mother walked him back to his campsite.
    “Huh. The car’s gone,” Jack announced as soon as they were in sight of his tent, hoping he sounded genuinely surprised. “She must have gone to get more medicine. She said she