“Yeah.”
“I guess that was pretty nice of her to give you this, then. I guess I take back what I said.”
Theo flipped the cover of the book back and began reading.
The first chapter was only about six pages, and they weren’t even full pages. Stewie had counted them carefully, noticing that the drawings took up nearly half the page. On some of the pages, anyway. Except page four, which was all words. It had made his heart sink to look at page four.
An uncomfortable minute or two passed. Theo just kept reading. It struck Stewie that it might have taken no more time for his brother to just read the chapter to him out loud, which felt frustrating.
“This doesn’t seem very hard,” Theo said, still reading.
“Seems hard to me.”
“Maybe Stacey will read it to you.”
“I hate to bother Stacey.”
Which was a true enough thing. But there was another, deeper truth, and Stewie wished to skate over the top of it. Stacey was more likely to ask questions about why he found the reading hard. There was a small chance of the same problem with Theo, but small enough that Stewie had felt inclined to risk it. Theo was not a deeply curious sort, and never acted like Stewie’s boss or teacher or parent.
Theo closed up the book and handed it back, seeming to want to end the discussion and get back to his schoolwork.
“Maybe save it for a year,” he said.
“But she wants us to talk about it.”
“Oh. Well, tell her it’s hard for you. Maybe she’ll read it to you.”
“Maybe,” Stewie said. But he knew he could never bring himself to admit to her that he couldn’t read it on his own. “Did you read the whole chapter?”
“Pretty much. I skimmed toward the end.”
“Can’t you just sort of tell me what happened in it?”
Theo sighed deeply, and tore his attention away from his schoolwork again.
“Okay. Let’s see. These two people had a baby, but he was really small and looked like a mouse. And then I guess when all was said and done, it turned out he was a mouse.”
“Wait,” Stewie said. “His parents were people?”
“Seems that way.”
“People had a baby that was a mouse?”
“What part of that couldn’t you understand the first time I said it?”
“All of it, I guess. It’s just weird. People don’t have mice babies.”
“It’s just a pretend story,” Theo said.
“I know. But still. And I thought the mouse having a first and a last name was going too far. Even for a made-up story. So, was that it? For the whole chapter? They just had him and then noticed that he was a mouse?”
“No, there was more. The mother dropped her ring down the drain and couldn’t fish it out, so they put the mouse on a string and sent him down the drain after it.”
“That doesn’t seem very nice.”
“Well, nobody else was small enough to do it.”
“Still. What did Stuart Little think about that?”
“He wasn’t too thrilled about it. He said it made him feel slimy. But he didn’t say it out loud, though. He didn’t tell his parents he minded. He just took a shower and put on some kind of perfume or something. He never complained.”
It made Stewie squirm slightly to hear this about the fictional mouse, though he could not have put his finger on exactly why.
“Okay, thanks,” Stewie said.
He was halfway to Theo’s bedroom door with his book when his brother’s voice stopped him.
“Stewie. Wait.”
He stopped. Turned back.
“What?”
“I’ve been trying to decide whether to show you this or not.”
“What?”
“You’re not going to like it very much.”
“What is it, Theo?”
“I never want to be that person who steps all over your dreams or anything. Especially since I was the one who got you going on it in the first place.”
“Theo!” Stewie shouted. He hadn’t meant to shout. It filled him with a pang of guilt, but he had no time to stop and process it. “This is making me really nervous!”
“Sorry,” Theo said. He sounded ashamed. “Come over here and I’ll show you.”
By the time Stewie had crossed the room and leaned his shoulder against his brother’s chair, Theo had a video up and playing. It was some kind of clip from a local news show. But it didn’t seem to be local to them. He heard the news anchor say they were going to go live to the fair.
A moment later a news reporter was talking to a girl. She was about Stewie’s age, and she was holding a hen. She told the reporter the hen’s name, which was Brown Sugar. Stewie didn’t think that was a very good name for a hen.
“Oh, it’s a chicken flying contest!” he said, his chest and voice all full of excitement.
“Just wait, though,” Theo said.
Only in that moment did Stewie remember that this was supposed to be a bad thing, something he had been told he wasn’t going to like.
Meanwhile the girl had handed her hen to a man who held the poor bird with her wings pinned to her sides.
“I wouldn’t want to have to give Elsie to somebody else to hold,” Stewie said. “I don’t think she would like that. She doesn’t even know that man. I’d want to get her flying myself.”
“Just wait,” Theo said again.
The man lifted the hen and placed her inside what was clearly a mailbox. The flap door was down in the front, allowing him to put the hen inside. But it had no back to it. Then the man picked up a plunger. Just a regular rubber plunger on a stick, like the kind you use when your toilet stops up.
“No!” Stewie shouted. “Don’t push her out! Let her go in her own time.”
The man pushed the hen out with the plunger.
The poor bird flapped wildly in the air, falling fast. Stewie hadn’t realized the mailbox had been up on a high platform, but the way the camera followed the hen made it clear. It was a long way down.
The bird hit the ground with a sickening thump. A crowd of kids raced in and tried to catch the poor frightened thing, who ran like her life depended on it. But she got picked up anyway.
Then the news cut back to the anchors sitting inside, in the regular news studio. They were smiling broadly.
Stewie was not smiling. He just stood a moment, feeling all the blood drain out of his face.
“Sorry,” Theo said. “But I figured it was better if you found out now.”
“Maybe that’s just one chicken flying contest. Maybe there are others that are better for the chickens.”
“’Fraid not, kiddo. I looked at, like, three or four of them.”
Through his horror, as he stood there feeling it move through him, Stewie found another emotion. Relief. He still had that awful picture in his head of Elsie falling as he tried to practice with her—of racing in to catch her and almost missing. Now they didn’t need to practice anymore. It felt like a great weight had been lifted away.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Elsie can just be a laying hen. She doesn’t have to be a star. She doesn’t have to do anything special to get me to love her.”
When he was done talking, he just stood for a moment, letting the shock of the violence he had just witnessed move through him. Then he noticed his brother was staring at his face.
“What?” Stewie said.
“Nothing.”
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I don’t know. I guess I was just thinking that you’re different from most people in a certain way. But I can’t quite put my finger on what way it is.”
“Different good or different bad?”
“Neither, I guess,” Theo said. “Just different.”
Stewie sat outside, cross-legged, in the dirt of the hens’ yard, holding Elsie on his lap. The other hens wanted to cluster around, in case he had treats for them. Stewie didn’t want to be rude to them, but he had wanted a moment to talk to Elsie more or less alone.
In time he gave up and decided he would just have to share the moment with all the girls.
“I just want to make sure you know you didn’t disappoint me and it wasn’t your fault,” Stewie said quietly.