Authors: Betty Hicks
Get Real
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Contents
I owe my most heartfelt thanks to the many people who made valuable contributions to this book. To my editor, Deborah Brodie, for her always essential insight, expertise, and warmth.
To Betty Godwin at The Children's Home of North Carolina, for taking the time to educate me on North Carolina's adoption laws and practices. If there are any errors concerning adoption, they are mine and not hers. To Rebecca Conner, a former assistant public defender for juveniles, for verifying police procedures involving minors.
To Jennifer Browne, for her neat-child, messy-parents inspiration. To Lauren Wohl, for her words of wisdom and experience at the earliest and latest stages of this story. To Sandra Noelle Smith, for her expert error-spotting and helpful suggestions. To Tracey Adams, for being the best agent a writer could have. To Walt Sherlin, for obtaining the middle school information I needed. To Carol Taylor, for the “Moonlight Sonata” memory.
To Nate Conner, for fixing my computer each untimely time that it crashed. To Lise and David Sherlin, who inadvertently created the need for a Duke-Carolina game. To Will and Kim Hicks, without whom I would never have imagined a rare spotted newt. To Quinn Conner and Eli Hicks, who, just by being two and five, helped me create a very active three-year-old.
To Bill Hicks, for his unwavering confidence and support, even when the writing of this book took control of most of our summer vacation and all of my formerly stress-free disposition.
And to the knowledgeable and dedicated people at The Children's Home of North Carolina, who, sixty years ago, placed me with my “real” family.
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To the memory of my parents,
Nell and Nathan Ayers
And to my brother, Jere
“Come on, Dez. You
have
to help me. We won't get caught.”
It's night. Dark, rainy, and so cold that I can't understand why it isn't sleeting. The last thing I want to do right nowâor everâis steal a street sign.
“It's not even against the law,” says Jil, her eyes pleading with me.
Not that I can see her eyes. Like I saidâit's dark.
“Of course it's against the law,” I screech. “Are you crazy?”
“They're widening this road soon,” she answers in a firm, confident voice, the exact voice I imagine Christopher Columbus using to convince Queen Isabella that the world is round.
Jil's sure-about-everything voice has sucked me into more mistakes than a shark has teeth. It always begins with her saying,
Come on, Dez,
and ends with,
You have to help me.
“They'll put up new signs,” she continues with certainty. “We'll be doing the city a favor by taking this one awayâone less chunk of metal to be hauled off to the dump.”
I don't say anything, so she thumps the post with her fist and adds, “Do you know they charge by the pound to dump scrap like this in the city landfill? Taxpayers' money! I bet this sign is so heavy, we'll be savingâ”
“Okay, okay,” I interrupt, thinking, Maybe it's not stealing. At least not in a criminal way. I dig around in my coat pocket for a Kleenex. It's so cold, my nose is beginning to run.
All this trouble. Just because Jil's boyfriend's name is Graham, and she thinks he needs this particular green sign, with Graham Road in neat white block letters, for a Christmas present.
“I mean, what do you give somebody who has everything?” she had argued earlier, throwing up her hands in frustration.
“A street sign?” I'd asked doubtfully.
“Exactly,” answered Jil.
I blow my nose and wonder what he'll give her. She pretty much has everything too. But where would Graham find a sign that says
Jil?
I mean, give me a breakâone
L?
That's not how you spell it.
I wipe my nose again and wonder why cold weather always makes it drip. I should ask my mom, the scientist. She'd know.
What
I
know is that
Jil
should be spelled with two
L
s. As in
Jack and Jill.
Because she reminds me of a fairy-tale-type person. Okay, maybe
that
Jill is not actually in a fairy tale. She's a nursery-rhyme character, but hey, they're all related.
Anyway, the Jil who is standing here nowâin the wet, freezing nightâis just like the beautiful fairy-tale heroine, the one the bad guy always gives the
Do not
instructions to. You know.
Do not
set foot into that really tempting room with all the diamonds in it or a three-headed monster will eat you. Or
do not
take a single bite out of that juicy red apple or you'll fall asleep for a hundred years.
But Jil-with-one-
L
always does it anyway. And, big surprise, her three-headed monster inevitably turns into a gorgeous genie with six-pack abs, who grants her any three wishes she wants just because he thinks her energy and spunk are awesome.
That would be the same energy and spunk that, right now, is helping her jerk and shove a ten-foot-high signpost that's buried, solid, in deep dirt.
“Could you please help me here?” she begs, slightly out of breath.
I blow my nose again and scan the neighborhood for witnesses. Or police. An SUV swishes around the corner, its headlights exposing us for the criminals we're about to be. Two bright high beams pierce my eyeballs like sharp, cold knives.
“Stop pushing the sign!” I hiss.
Jil drops her hands and leans against the post, as if we're just hanging out here for the sheer joy of it. Except that it's thirty-three degrees and raining.
The big vehicle swooshes past, spraying icy water up over the curb and onto my ratty, not-even-remotely-waterproof sneakers. Jil has on new, dry Gore-Tex boots.
I want to glare at her, but my eyes aren't up to it, and besides, she can't see them.
By now, the tissue I found in my pocket has soaked up all the runny nose it can hold, but I use it again anyway. Yuck. At least it beats using my sleeve.
Come on, Dez, I say to myself. Don't blame Jil. Didn't I sneak out here on my own two stupid, wet feet?
Come to think of it, I shouldn't criticize her name, either. With a name like Destiny, who am I to talk?
“You need a screwdriver,” I say.
“What?”
“A screwdriver,” I repeat. “You don't need the post. Just the sign.”
Like I said, it's dark, so I can't see her eyes, but I know that they're blinking about a hundred miles an hour. Then they stopâI can feel it. A lightbulb moment.
“Dez!” she exclaims. Then she whacks her forehead, a dull thump that I assume is made with the palm of her hand, and says, “Duh. What would I do without you?”
Go to jail? I wonder.
Stealing a street sign is not as easy as you might think.
Correctionâ
removing a no-longer-needed street sign
is not as easy as you might think.
First, we have to slog over to my house and find a screwdriver. Which is about as easy as locating a grape seed in a Dumpster full of garbage.
While Jil warms herself in front of a toasty fire, she chatters enthusiastically to my mother about the possibility of snow and school closings. Mom answers her with precise, expert commentary on barometric pressure, global warming, and the motion of molecules. My mother's favorite TV program is the Weather Channel. To Jil, this makes her interesting. To me, it makes her strange.
Meanwhile, I fumble my throbbing-and-thawing fingers through our rusty toolbox. My parents keep it in the hall closet, which is half filled with piles of my father's antique book collection of insanely old poetry. The toolbox has been shoved in the other half, under a stack of rectangular air filters that fit our old furnaceâthe one that died two years ago.
None of these disposable filters fit our new furnace, but my parents never throw anything away. Maybe they plan to use them as place mats.
The jumbled-up box is full of everything but tools: a wad of muddy string, a broken chain, one torn paperback book on how to identify trees in the winterâwhen the leaves are goneâa twisted tube of dried-up Super Glue, a toothbrush with no bristles, one faded red refrigerator magnet that used to say
Pizza Palace,
and a cockroach hotel with last century's expiration date on it.
And,
ick!
The smell! Musty books. Dead mice.
Mentally, I place the toolbox, and the closet, on my list of things to clean out. Also, to air out. Soon.
“Mom!” I shout. “Where's the screwdriver?”
No answer.
“Mom!”
“Hold your horses. I'm thinking.”
Mom is a scientific genius, butâthis is so weirdâshe says old-fashioned things all the time, like
hold your horses.
Sometimes I think she belongs back in the time of George Washington. Or Moses.
Maybe it's because she was raised by her grandmother. A perfectly normal sentence for Gram was “I'm tickled pink that you're as sharp as a tack, but don't bite the hand that feeds you, 'cause there's no such thing as a free lunch.”
Clichés at my house are almost an art form.
“Why's Dez looking for a screwdriver?” I hear Mom ask.
Jil's Christopher Columbus voice answers. I can't make out exactly what she says, but the tone gets an A-plus in Convincing.
“Did you look in the bottom drawer in the kitchen?” Mom shouts back. “The one with the napkins?”
Why would I do that? I wonder. Then again, my house is the disorganized clutter capital of the universe, so why not look in the wrong place? Why not search the medicine cabinet or the sugar canister? Why not look up the chimney?
Jil and I trudge back out into the wet, icy night. Me carrying a screwdriver with a sticky, lint-covered handle that really was hidden in the napkin drawerâunder a ceramic chicken and a six-year-old picture postcard from my great aunt in Salt Lake City.
Jil is tugging her left earlobe because that's what she does when she's nervous. Which makes me want to ask, if what we're about to do isn't stealing, then why are you acting twitchy? But I don't.
“Your mother said this will turn into snow,” says Jil.
“Enough to close school?” I ask, hopeful.
“According to the weekend weatherman, one or two inches. According to your mom, at least four.”
“Wahoo!”
I cheer. In Durham, North Carolina, even a half inch is enough to call off school. I would love to have no class tomorrow. It's only December, but eighth grade is already old.