The night Shady got lost, eight-year-old Robbie Penna cried himself to sleep in his mother’s arms. Shady was his pet box turtle, and for almost two years he’d lived in Robbie’s room in a glass aquarium lined with wood chips. Shady would bang his shell against the glass every morning. He was like an alarm clock, Robbie joked, because he seemed to know exactly when Robbie needed to wake up.
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Robbie’s father, Rik, didn’t much like having pets around, and the family already had a cat, but Laurie too was smitten. “He was really cool and prehistoric looking,” she says. She bought him for Robbie for $20. “My husband was pissed. He threatened to cook him.”
The shop owner told them that the turtle was vegetarian, so they fed Lumpy a steady diet of strawberries, kiwis, bananas, and greens. Laurie also put wheatgrass in the tank so he’d have contact with live plants. When she saw him rubbing his head in the wheatgrass she felt bad about confining him to an aquarium, though Robbie sometimes let him explore the bedroom.
Not long after Shady’s break for the alley Rik came up with the idea of attaching a piece of string to his shell with duct tape and tying him to a railing. “He did really well with that for a while,” Laurie says. But then he broke loose, pulling off a tiny piece of his shell. He wandered away but got only as far as the neighbor’s yard before Rik found him.
That Wednesday, Robbie failed a spelling test he hadn’t studied for. He also got in trouble for whipping a pencil across the classroom. Laurie wrote a letter to his third-grade teacher explaining that he was having a rough time.
