B004XTKFZ4 EBOK (21 page)

“Go to your room, Frances,” my aunt instructed.

I did. It was mid-afternoon; the sun was shining through my window. I saw that they had replaced the window screen which I’d removed the night before—but was it really only the night before? It seemed months, years. I felt as if I’d stepped over a threshold, that the person I’d been before was only a little girl; now I was something different. What, I didn’t know. I wasn’t a grown-up. I wasn’t even a teenager. But I wasn’t the same as I’d been.

For hours the house was tomb-like in its silence, a silence finally broken by the low-volume game shows Aunt Louise always watched in the afternoon. I thought I could smell, very faintly, the odor of her Marlboro cigarette. I lay on my bed, hands clasped behind my head, staring at the ceiling. Something had to happen, I knew. Sooner or later. I was hungry; luckily I’d brought my rucksack with me from the van and found it still held a stray banana. I ate it.

Strange. Alone in my room, I no longer felt the embarrassment I’d suffered around the grown-ups. I felt no shame at all at what we’d done. If anything, I sensed within me a certain pride: we’d done something other kids our age couldn’t even dream of. We were wild, crazy. We were rebels. I smiled at the thought, a thrill coursing through me. Where was the bland, obedient, meek little Frances Pastan now? She’d disappeared, gotten lost somewhere between the moment I met Lucy and the moment we surrendered ourselves to the police. I would never be the same, I knew. Not that I had any intention of becoming a car thief or a criminal of any sort; but what Lucy and I had gone through had changed me, turned me into something else, something more than I’d been.

Still, I knew that what had happened was serious—that it was going to have serious repercussions. And then I remembered what had set the events in motion in the first place: the fact that Lucy was moving away. I’d not thought of it for the entire time we’d been in the van. Moving.
Leaving me.

No. Surely her mother would reconsider. She would see what we were to each other. She would know that it would be disastrous to rip Lucy away from her closest friend ever, her best friend. The police could be alerted about Lucy’s father, surely. No, Ms. Sparrow couldn’t take Lucy away. She
couldn’t.

But I saw another side to it, too. Lucy had been in trouble before, but nothing like this. I could see it the way her mother might: how that little Pastan girl who looked so innocent and acted so shy had really been pulling her daughter in a bad direction. Well, maybe not pulling, exactly: surely Ms. Sparrow couldn’t believe that I was some sort of evil influence. But she would see that the two of us together did things that either of us apart would never have done. Would Lucy have broken Melissa’s nose if I hadn’t been there to protect? Would she have driven a stolen car all the way to the beach by herself? No. It was the two of us together who were causing all the problems.

That was how she would see it.

It was certainly how my aunt and uncle saw it, I thought. I knew my aunt’s opinion of the Sparrows, of Lucy. I could almost hear her now:
That damned butch tomboy is who did it. She twisted Frances’s mind. It’s that Sparrow girl that’s to blame.

I heard raised voices in the other room. My aunt was on the phone to someone; I couldn’t make out who. It might have been Ms. Sparrow; perhaps they were hurling accusations at each other. Only a few words reached me behind the closed door to my room.
Damage. Pay. Blame.

Then, later—the sun was setting by now—there was another conversation, a quieter one. It was my uncle this time, his voice low as always, gentle. I pressed my ear to the crack between my door and the doorframe, where I could hear the best. The sound was still fragmentary, but I could hear some of what he said.

Stole a car. Friend of hers. Police.

Long silence.

No, not. Frances. Car.

Long silence.

Decided. Can’t. Too wild.

Long silence.

Have to send home. Check schedules.

I felt myself sliding down to the floor. My breath was short.

They were sending me back to my parents.

The world went black.

When I was awakened by a knock at my window, I wasn’t surprised.

It was dark; long past midnight. My aunt and uncle had gone to bed hours before. Neither had said a word to me all afternoon and evening, and I hadn’t left my room except to go to the bathroom. Around six my aunt had brought in a tray with a hamburger patty, some green beans, and a little pile of Tater Tots along with a glass of milk. She didn’t look at me. She placed the tray on my desk silently, turned and walked out, closing the door quietly behind her.

I surprised myself with my hunger. I’d thought I would leave the food there untouched, but the smell of the Tater Tots (a favorite) overwhelmed my resistance. I would eat just one, I decided. Then I decided that I would eat the potatoes but nothing else. Finally I gave in, cleaned the plate, drank down all the milk. After all, I hadn’t had a real meal since dinner the night before.

I put the tray outside my door. Later I heard someone come and pick it up, take it away.

My mind seemed empty of thought. I let the room grow dark, not bothering to turn on the lights. When it was time for the
Mystery Theater
I turned it on, but only listened to it for a few minutes. It didn’t seem right, somehow, here, now, by myself. I switched it off. The room was silent then.

Finally, clicking on my little desk lamp, I looked at what I’d been working on the evening before: the things Lucy and I had planned to put in our time capsule. I had them all there before me. A photo of each of us. A map of the town (in thirty years we wanted to see if it would be different, or exactly the same). Pictures clipped from Lucy’s magazines (I was only to be allowed one of Donny Osmond, while Lucy got six of John Travolta). A couple of newspaper headlines. And our drawings. I hadn’t yet seen Lucy’s, but mine was in progress: a multicolored sketch of the two of us floating in the air, all smiles, Lucy in her Bachman-Turner Overdrive T-shirt and I in my favorite sloppy yellow sweater. Both of us had angels’ wings sprouting from our backs. Yet the picture was drawn realistically, not in a satirical or cartoonish way; I thought it was my best ever. I’d considered asking Uncle Frank if I could somehow get it copied, maybe even in color; I wanted to give one to Lucy which I would sign in the corner,
For Lucy, With All My Love, Franny-Fran.

But the picture was still unfinished, only half colored-in with the artist’s pencils I liked to use. I took one of them up now, started desultorily to fill in some of the background; but I couldn’t focus on it. I put the pencil down again, switched off the lamp, dropped back onto my bed and stared into nothingness. Everything was wrong now. Everything was flying apart even as I lay there. Grown-ups were deciding things about me, about Lucy. They would determine where we would live and with whom and who we would see and wouldn’t see. Yet the people who were making the decisions knew nothing about me, about us.

I had a fantasy then, about Lucy and me living together in an apartment somewhere. It was a beautiful place with hanging plants everywhere and my pictures lining the walls. There was a sunroof in the middle of the living room that opened straight to the sky and we would sunbathe there in the mornings. We would make meals together, big ones, with everything we liked and nothing we didn’t. On nice days we would go outside, play football on the big lawn in front, chase each other, climb trees. At night we would listen to the radio and sleep cuddled together in a great big bed. There was no one else in the fantasy. No parents, no aunts or uncles, no teachers, no neighbors, no classmates. It was a world of two, complete, unassailable.

I must have fallen asleep, for it was dark when the knocking on the window woke me. My curtains weren’t closed; as soon as I turned to the window I saw her there.

I went to the door, made sure my aunt and uncle had gone to bed, and then opened the window, the screen between us.

We didn’t say anything or even look at each other for a while. Finally Lucy whispered, “Are you in trouble?”

“Sure I’m in trouble. What did you think? I wasn’t allowed out of my room all day.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Me neither.” She stood there awkwardly. “So, you grounded?”

“Lucy,” I said, “they’re going to send me back to my parents. In Fresno.”

She looked at me. “I bet they won’t, Fran. They’re probably just mad—”

“No,” I said. “My uncle called them. They’ve got it all arranged.”

“When do you go?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. They haven’t told me.”

Silence.

“Are you still moving too?”

“Yeah,” she said. “At least I think so. I heard my mom on the phone to some people earlier.”

I leaned my forehead against the screen. I felt utterly empty, defeated.

“Did you listen to the
Mystery Theater
?” I asked finally.

“Nah.”

“Neither did I. I tried, but it wasn’t the same.”

“I know.”

Silence.

“Have you finished your picture?” I asked.

“Picture?”

“For the time capsule.”

“Oh.” She shook her head. “No. I started one, with hearts and stuff in it. But…crap, Fran, I can’t draw anyway. You should do it.”

“I am,” I said. “But it was supposed to be both of us.”

“Yeah. I dunno.”

I moved to my desk, picked up my own unfinished drawing, held it to the screen.

“Oh my God,” Lucy breathed. “Fran, that’s really good. I mean that’s
really
good. It’s beautiful.”

“Thanks,” I smiled wearily. “It’s not finished yet. I have to fill in all the color. But…” I put the picture down again. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll never finish it.”

“You should. It’s great. Really.”

Silence.

“Franny, I—I kinda wish you’d cry or something. It’s weird, you just standing there like that, looking at me.”

“I’m done crying,” I said. “I don’t want to cry anymore. I’m too tired to cry.”

She stood there in the darkness, her hair haloed by the moonlight.

How had I gotten here? I wondered. In this house? In this town? This wasn’t where I was supposed to be. I should never have known anything at all in my life about Quiet, California, or Lucy Sparrow, or anything.

Why do I have to go, Dad?

Mom, what did I do?

“Hey, Franny…I got my bike.”

“What?”

“I got my bike. We could go.”

“Go where?”

“I dunno. Maybe we could find that cave we were talking about.”

“Oh, Lucy. There’s no cave.”

“Sure there are. In the mountains. We could find one.”

“That’s crazy, Lucy.”

“No, this time we’d take food. A lot of it. We could hide out. We could survive a long time.”

“No, we couldn’t.”

“Fran, really. C’mon. Okay, so maybe not a cave. We could ride out to the freeway and hitchhike.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“Why not? There’re cars.”

“Cars that would pick up two twelve-year-old girls? What kind of cars would those be?”

“I’m almost thirteen.”

“You’re
twelve.
”

She stood there for a moment.

“Well, crap, Fran, you don’t have to get mad.”

“I’m not mad,” I sighed. “I’m not anything.”

“We could ride out to the ocean.”

“Lucy, the ocean is twenty or thirty miles away.”

“I’m strong.”

“Not that strong. And even if you were, they’d catch us. It would be tomorrow by the time we got there. They’d catch us, Lucy. They’d always catch us, no matter where we went.”

A flash of annoyance crossed her features. “I thought we were blood sisters.”

“We are.”

“Then c’mon. Come with me.”

“Lucy, no.”

“We’ve got the whole night. We can get away someplace.”

“No. We can’t.”

She stared at me, her silver-gray eyes sparkling in the darkness.

“I don’t wanna go alone, Franny-Fran.”

“You shouldn’t go at all. You should just go home. That’s where you should go.”

“Crap.”

“Or you could come in here, Lucy. Spend the night with me. We’d get in trouble in the morning, but it’s better than going out there in the dark.”

“That wouldn’t get us away from here.”

“No,” I admitted. “It wouldn’t.”

“C’mon, Franny-Fran. Come on out. We’ll go someplace. Together!”

I wondered if I would cry, but no. What I felt was deeper than tears.

“No, Lucy.”

“Come
on.
”

“No. You should go home, Lucy. Get some sleep.”

“I don’t want to. I want you to come out with me.”

“I can’t. You can come in here if you want. It’s okay. I’ll open the screen.”