Us and Uncle Fraud by Lois Lowry

and dry. You can call me there if you need me."
    "High and dry," Stephie said, grinning. "High and dry." She reached for a drumstick.

11
    In the morning Father wasn't at the breakfast table. Usually he was there, freshly shaved and checking for errors in the paper; lately, with the weather as an excuse, we had wheedled him each day into driving us to school. But today he was still in bed.
    "He's exhausted," Mother explained. "He didn't get in until three this morning."
    "Did the National Guard come? Did they sandbag the cemetery wall?" Marcus asked.
    "Did they move the Mareks' cows?" I wanted to know. Alexandra Marek was going to be the center of attention in school today, I speculated enviously. Her family's farm was the closest to the river; they were the first real victims. And Alexandra was a show-off, given to drama; I knew she would be telling a tale of danger and terror, embellishing it all day with new details.
    "Take a look," Mother replied, and handed me the paper. There, on the front page, was a picture of frightened cows being herded across a road that itself looked like a river. Then I looked further, and groaned with jealousy; there was another, smaller picture, of Alexandra herself, wrapped in a blanket, being carried by a strange man through knee-deep water.
    "Read the article," Mother said. "They moved the whole Marek family out. The water's up to the first floor of their house."
    "I don't need to read it," I said, sulking, and set the paper aside. "I'll be hearing about it all day in school."
    "What about the cemetery?" Marcus asked, with his mouth full of toast.
    "There's an article about that, too," Mother told him. "They gave up on the cemetery because there are so many houses threatened down in the lower end of town. So they're sandbagging down there—they have been all night, I guess. They had to let the cemetery go. Your father said that the wall caved in entirely, in the middle of the night."
    "Are bodies floating out?" Marcus asked, his eyes wide.
    Mother wiped Stephanie's egg-smeared face with a damp cloth. "Of course not," she said matter-of-factly. "That side of the cemetery is almost a hundred years old. Anyone who was buried there that long ago would have decomposed and become part of the earth by now. Don't fill your sister's
head with wild nonsensical ideas." She lifted Stephie out of her high chair, and my sister padded away in her pajamas with flannel feet attached.
    Marcus whispered to me in the hall as we pulled on our rubber boots and slickers. "There would still be bones," he said. "I bet anything that leg bones and arm bones are floating out. Wouldn't it be neat to see that?"
    I simply made a face. The macabre specter of old bones sliding out of the earth into the river didn't interest me at all. I was much more concerned about the fact that Alexandra Marek had had her picture on the front page of the paper, and I never had.
    We called good-by to Mother and headed out into the pelting rain.
    To my relief, Alexandra wasn't in school. Many more children were absent today than previously; there were only fourteen kids in my class, and Mrs. Higgins cancelled the spelling test she had planned. Instead, she announced, we would spend the day studying flood-related things. In geography, we would learn about the Nile Delta and how its floods each year enriched the earth (which puzzled me, since
our
flood was washing our farmlands away) ; for science, we would turn to the chapter about weather; and for current events, we would each stand and tell about how our families were affected by this catastrophic rain.
    Great, I thought, gloomily. Looking around the room, I could see that there were kids present whose homes were in that low, threatened part of town by the river. They would have wild stories to tell, I was quite sure. And I? I made up my report in my head:
    "My sister's sandbox turned into a boat and floated over against the side of our shed. There is about one inch of water in our