Zoobreak

On the night of the zoobreak, Darren doesn’t show up on time. The group is furious, but Melissa suggests they wait longer just in case Darren does show up. While they argue about what to do, they realize Ben is missing. They find him asleep in an old rowboat, and when he asks if Darren is there yet, Griffin doesn’t respond because he’s too busy focusing on the “two wooden oars lying inside the old dory” (90).

After an hour of rowing, Melissa’s cameras pick up the group’s boat, meaning they are close to the zoo. At All Aboard Animals, Pitch and Griffin fashion a makeshift rope ladder, and the group climbs aboard the zoo so Ben can start the rescue mission by sneaking in through the vents. He crawls to where he thinks the monkey is, only to shine his flashlight down onto a sleeping Klaus. In horror, Ben watches as “the security guard’s eyes popped open and stared straight up into the light” (96).

The vent grate comes loose, and Ben falls on top of Klaus, who chases him back up into the shaft. Klaus gets stuck because he’s too big to fit, and Ben finds another grate that leads down into the main part of the zoo. After letting his friends inside, they free Cleopatra, who remains frantic, and Savannah says, “I think she’s trying to tell me something” (101).

There’s a screeching sound, and the creature Griffin, Ben, and Melissa saw on the camera dives for Cleopatra. Savannah recognizes the creature as an owl from one of the exhibits. Mr. Nastase has trained it to terrorize the other animals so they’d be too scared to escape. Savannah convinces the others to rescue all the animals. The group frees the other creatures and takes them out to the boat, only to be drawn up short because “the dory was gone” (109).

The boat floated away because Griffin didn’t tie his knot correctly. The children despair until Griffin opens one of the zoo’s life rafts, which comes complete with an outboard motor and lots of containers they can dump stuff out of to house the animals. Back on land, Griffin sends the raft away, and the children smuggle the animals to Savannah’s house, where the dog and Cleopatra’s joyful reunion frees the guard owl from the tarp Savannah had it in. As the children finish their journey, the owl “circled high above them, exploring this strange new world” (115).

The next day at school, Darren claims he didn’t show up because his uncle came over and Darren couldn’t sneak out. Griffin is exhausted and keeps falling asleep in class, which makes him understand how Ben’s narcolepsy feels. Savannah calls her friend at the Long Island Zoo to help with the rescued animals, but the woman is away in Africa for the next two weeks. Until she gets back, Griffin forms a plan to find suitable habitats for each animal. He starts by noting that Logan’s leaky basement “sounds like a pretty good place for a beaver to hang out for a couple of weeks” (121).

The children move all the animals to one of their houses as illustrated in Operation Houseguest, Griffin’s new plan. All the while, Griffin questions if it really is a plan, since there are so many things that could go wrong and get the police investigating. He puts the freed meerkat in his mom’s greenhouse and feeds the animal some crackers. This seems to cheer up the creature, and Griffin is left to wonder if “maybe a plan didn’t have to be flawless to have a chance of working”