Lightning That Lingers by Sharon Curtis, Tom Curtis

thirty preschoolers barked and balanced balls on their noses.
    Getting stiffly to her feet, walking around helping out little seals, she asked cheerfully, “How many of you have met Jinx, our new gerbil? I’m going to bring him out so that you can say ‘hello.’ ”
    Lydia, who had been helping her, was waiting with a very peculiar expression on her face beside the low pine table that held the refurbished aquarium where Jinx lived. Under her breath, out of the corner of her mouth like a B-movie mobster, she muttered, “Philip is here.”
    “I saw him.” Elaborately calm, Jennifer removed the wire cage cover. “Maybe he wants to check out a book.”
    “Hum. You must not have noticed the way he’s watching you. He wants to check out a librarian. I’ll take the rest of the hour. You go talk to him. If he stands around much longer like that, one of us may go and attack him. We’re only human. Oh, my Lord, you aren’t really intending to pick that … that
thing
up, are you?”
    “Yes.” Jinx dove under a pile of bedding as Jennifer tried awkwardly to scoop him up. “It’s important for me to show no fear. Positive early experiences with animals are essential to a child’s development of—” She broke off, and said
sotto voce
into the cage, “Quit the funny business, you furry little fink, or I’ll trade you in on a hamster.”
    Lydia laughed surreptitiously. “I don’t see how you can touch it. It looks like a—”
    “I know what it looks like,” Jennifer said grimly, lifting Jinx. “If Mr. Greenjeans can do it, I can do it.” Turning to her innocent audience, she tried to let nothing show in her face except warm delight in and tolerance for the unique varieties of animal life on the green earth. “Jinx is a lot like a mouse. In fact, he comes from the same family,” she exclaimed enthusiastically, as if that were a great thing. She loved animals; studying andwatching them had always seemed to her one of the chief pleasures in life, but she knew her strong feelings had the dewy-eyed sentimentality of a Bambi-syndrome dilettante. When it came to practical experience, she had virtually none.
    “You may come up one at a time and say hello to him by petting him very carefully with one finger.” She stroked his back with her forefinger to illustrate. Jinx, meanwhile, had stepped experimentally out onto her wrist with the cautious air of someone testing a rickety foot bridge. A knee-high towhead with jam on his mouth ran up.
    “Me first! Me first!” he said, poking an inquisitive finger into Jinx’s face. Jinx, deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, skittered into Jennifer’s sleeve and up her arm without looking backward, dashed across the no-man’s land of her chest to her other shoulder, his little body making a wiggly hump before it plunged down her back.
    The children loved it, and in any other circumstances she would have delighted in their tinkling splashes of laughter. But Jinx had tiny sharp little claws, and her tucked blouse prevented his egress. He lost patience, poking his tickling nose, wiggling his body, searching for a foothold at the base of her spine.
    Smiling weakly, with shivers skittering up and down her back, she said, “Silly Jinx. Do you see that, boys and girls? Jinx is playing with Miss Jennifer.” Then, the B-movie mobster aside to Lydia: “Please. Get him out!”
    “Oh no. No way. I feel for you, believe me, but one touch of that glorified mouse and I’m likely to pass out. Untuck your blouse and shake him out.”
    “I couldn’t! Poor little guy, he might get hurt.” Not only the potential fall but an excited stampede of plastic snowbooted feet could be highly dangerous to Jinx’s future.
    “For heaven’s sake then, slip into the staff room and get Eleanor to help you,” Lydia hissed with a grin. “I’ll read the kids a couple of story books. Scoot!”
    Because it was well nigh impossible to maintain any dignity when the person inside the