Overnight (4 page)

But nobody was safe from Martha.

Leticia zipped up her jacket and stepped outside. The night spun a shiver through her. When she looked up, the stars twinkled and the moon looked full and soft as a cushion in the sky. Through the dining room window, Leticia watched Martha return to her seat and reach across the table for somebody else’s goody bag. The back of her head looked small and lonely as an unpicked flower.

Leticia looked away. “Serena!” she called. She twirled her flashlight, which caught Serena’s gingery hair like a sunlit wave in the light’s beam. “Hey, come be my pair! Let’s find Gray together, you and me!”

The search stopped being fun almost as soon as it started. For one thing, the temperature seemed to drop every minute. Also, anytime a pair of flashlights moved too far down the street, Topher called them back. Leticia stayed close to the pack. She watched as Mrs. Donnelley, Ty’s hand gripped in hers, flitted from door to door, knocking, ringing bells, alerting everyone. Her phony voice:
“Hello! Sorry to bother you, but we’re looking for a little girl…”

Soon a few of the neighbors had joined in to help. Over and over, in answer to their questions, Leticia described Gray. Brown hair, chin length. Brown eyes. Wearing jeans with a navy and white snowflake sweater.

Nobody had seen her.

“Maybe she got stolen by a pack of wild dogs,” Leticia joked.

“Woof! Woof! Pftew! This girl is too bony!” barked Caitlin.

“Don’t say that,” chided Mrs. Donnelley, overhearing them. She turned. “That’s a terrible thing to say.” Her features, normally pulled into this or that agreeable expression, all fell together into a hard glare. A glare aimed not at Caitlin, but Leticia.

Right there, that’s Mrs. Donnelley’s real face, Leticia thought. Uncertain, panicked.

What a phony.

Oh, sure, on the surface Mrs. Donnelley was nice enough. Usually her expression was a nearly perfect mask, pale eyes shiny and her smile stretched wide, right from the start. “Leticia, honey, what can I get you to
drink?”
“Leticia, honey, Caitlin says both of your parents are
lawyers!”
“Leticia, honey, I understand you were at
Rotterdam
last year?”

Always so extra-polite. Always with the
honey, honey.

Phony, phony.

Last spring, Leticia had left Rotterdam Elementary as one of the most popular kids in her class. She had stood out as the girl with the quick jokes and throaty laugh, as the girl who could kick a soccer ball past any goalie, as the girl who could think up a million fads—like wearing gel stickers on the bottoms of her sneakers or gold Magic Markering her fingernails.

This past fall, when Leticia had started Fielding Academy, she’d stood out only as the black girl. Actually, the other black girl. But Daria Moore was ignored to the point where she seemed invisible. That was what Fielding girls did, Leticia’s sister, Celeste, had told her. Fielding girls ignored. Ignoring was their specialty. Celeste had graduated from Fielding last year, and she knew everything.

Right away, Leticia had spotted the cool group. Martha Van Riet’s group. As a whole, they were bigger than their parts. They joked the most. They laughed the hardest. They had the best time. They rubbed shoulders in an enchanted circle.

Martha was their leader, and the way in. Martha had a wide flat face like a freckled toad, and at first she did not smile at Leticia’s jokes or care when Leticia laughed at hers. Martha did not seem to care about anything except being noticed. She was always sassing back at teachers or running in the hall or wearing nonregulation clothes with her uniform. Martha seemed fearless, and everyone was in awe of her.

It was during language arts class that Leticia made her move. She turned around in her chair, flipped Martha a Post-It note with a squiggly face drawn on it, and, with all the other girls listening, said, “Dare you to stick this note on Miss Bruce’s butt.”

Martha received the dare coldly. But she did it. Slapped on the note quick and perfect when Miss Bruce walked down the aisle, handing back homework.

That same day, right before the bell rang for history, Martha came back at her.

“Hey. Uh, Leticia. Dare you to pull down Mr. Wolferson’s map of North America.”

Mr. Wolferson was not in the classroom yet. Leticia acted fast, jumping up from her chair to rip it down with both hands and all her strength. Her stomach churned. The class chortled nervously. When Mr. Wolferson came in and demanded a culprit, nobody told because it was Martha Van Riet’s dare.

They teamed up, Leticia and Martha. Dares were more fun to do together.

They made animal noises during chorus practice. They started a Tater Tots food fight during lunch. They faked injuries, limps, and spasms to annoy the gym teachers. They got detentions together.

Leticia slipped inside the loop of Martha’s group. Soon after, Zoë nicknamed them the Lucky Seven. Inside the loop was everything in the world. Leticia felt home safe.

Only nothing is ever really safe, Leticia thought as she swept her flashlight back and forth like a lighthouse beam. She watched as Mrs. Donnelley and Ty crossed the street to ring another doorbell. Mrs. Donnelley was not really safe. She was too phony, and her home was hot and pink and bright and strange and slightly unwelcoming, no matter how many times Leticia had stayed over.

And Martha was not safe, either. Martha would do anything to get her way.

Suddenly, Serena squeezed her elbow. “Teesh, I’m scared!” she said. “It sounds weird. Listen.”

Ty and Mrs. Donnelley and Topher and some of the neighbors were calling Gray’s name. Gray’s name was a single sound that did not stop.

Graaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

A lost, lonely sound, thought Leticia.

She hoped Gray was safe, wherever she was.

Leticia tucked Serena’s hand more firmly into the crook of her elbow. “Nothing to be scared of,” she, said, though her thoughts skittered nervously as she took a long breath and then added her voice to the night.

A
LL OF GRAY’S FAVORITE
characters were brave and not like her. Brave Alice in Wonderland and Anne of Green Gables and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Jo March and Heidi and Pippi and Nancy Drew and Becky Thatcher and Dorothy in and out of Oz. Brave, all of them. None of those girls would have liked Gray much. She was not the kind of girl Tom Sawyer or a stray dog would follow home. She was not the kind of girl who could summon that scrap of bravery that raised her just a tiny bit above the other girls. The feisty girl in the bittersweet adventure who was an inspiration, who made everybody clap and who gave everybody a bit of hope to cling to at the end.

No, Gray was not that kind of girl. Gray was a too-scared girl, and she knew it. Too scared of too many things. Of boys and stray dogs and the dark and bringing the wrong sleeping bag. She was scared of bigger things, too, of the smell of hospitals and of her mother maybe dying. She hoped that one day she would outgrow her fears, but so far, fear seemed to be sticking with her.

So when the strange lady who might be from Helping Hands offered her hand and ordered Gray to hurry up, and when she clamped her fingers around Gray’s wrist and did not let go, Gray did not do anything brave. She decided to trust the lady because it was easier. If the lady had asked Gray to close her eyes and fall backward into her arms, Gray might have done that, too.

She tripped along at the lady’s side. Out the sliding glass door into the freezing air and down the driveway and a left at the end of it, to where the lady’s car was parked. An old car, too dark to see the color it truly was.

In the back of Gray’s jumbled thoughts, one idea burned bright and kept her from turning and running. The lady did not look like someone from Helping Hands, but she did look like someone her mother might have met at the hospital.

She tested it. “You know Mom from the hospital?”

“Well,” said the lady, “I don’t like when people call it that.”

“Are you sick?”

“The door’s unlocked,” the lady answered.

Gray touched the car door handle and looked around, hoping for a glimpse of a neighbor. But it was cold, too cold to be comfortably outside, and all of the brick or stone fortress-thick houses on Caitlin’s street were set back from the road, for privacy. There was nobody to see or to be seen by. Gray did spy Bumpo standing at the edge of the property because his electric collar did not permit him to escape his generous run of lawn. His head was cocked and quizzical.

“Can the dog come?” Gray asked.
Yes! Bumpo! It would be easy for me to take off his electric collar and say come on come on Bumpo come in the car for a ride! Just in case maybe things don’t turn out all right maybe Bumpo saves the day! Because dogs do that yes sometimes on TV. Sometimes they do.

“Don’t be silly!” said the lady.

Oh, of course she was being silly. Gray opened the door and slid into the backseat of the car, and she buckled her seat belt, for Safety.

She would be gone and back before anyone noticed. She would get her sleeping bag and her mother would not have had to do all that driving, because she had sent in her place this odd lady, this “piece of work” who might be a friend or might not, who might be from Helping Hands or maybe not.

And even if her mother had not sent this lady, it would turn out okay, because the lady did not seem dangerous, in her glossy lipstick and feathery coat. She just looked a little bit confused. She would be happy to take Gray home and return her to the Donnelleys’ before cake time.

Bumpo whined, then turned and trotted back to the house.

The car was rattling and noisy, as if it had swallowed a handful of coins. The lady took roads that Gray knew. But the ride was uncomfortable, unheated, and the tires slipped loose on the road. The lady drove as if she had only just learned, hunkered forward and her lower lip caught hard in her top teeth.

Out of the corner of her eye, Gray stared at the lady. Her face in the light-by-light reflection of the streetlamps was made up with eye shadow and rouge and a papery, sparkling powder smoothed over like a glittering fish skin to hold everything in place.

Maybe the lady was not one hundred percent real? Maybe she was a fairy, or an angel-ghost, and she was taking Gray on an adventure that would turn out to be a dream.

Gray touched a finger to the lady’s feather-tufted coat collar.

“Don’t do that!” the lady snapped. “Don’t frighten me when I’m driving!”

Gray winced. That did not seem to be a very angel-y thing to say. “There’s a price tag hanging off your coat sleeve,” Gray said as she noticed it.

The lady shook her sleeve to see for herself, then bit it off, snapping the tag and little plastic tail in exactly the way Gray’s mother told her not to because it damaged the fabric. The lady spit the tag and tail at the door. “Thanks,” she said.

“What’s your name?” asked Gray.

“Katrina.” The woman thought for a moment, then added, “Just Katrina.”

“I don’t mind how fast you’re driving,” Gray said. “Since we have to get back to the Donnelleys’ house soon. It’s almost time for pizza and cake.”

“I haven’t driven a car in a while,” said Katrina. “I liked driving, but it’s not coming back easy. And I’ve been on the road so much today. All the way into town and around and around. When we get back, I’m going to take a nap.”

“Back to my house, right?” When Katrina did not answer, Gray said, “I thought we were going to my house? If you want to take a nap on my bed, you can.”

“My house first.”

“Okay.” Gray wished she didn’t sound so scared. By now Nancy Drew would have found the important clue about Katrina, a clue to solve the mystery, and her story would have been called
The Clue in the Rattletrap Car.
Alice in Wonderland would have said “Curiouser and curiouser” without a trace of worry in her voice.

Driving down a dark road in a dark car with a strange lady seemed worse than curious. Gray decided she would try to imagine it in a friendlier and safer way, as an adventure.

Yes, that was how she would see it.

As an adventure!

Katrina lived at a turnoff at the end of a back road that Gray had never been down, but it was close to the same road that turned onto Knightworthy Avenue, which led to Fielding Academy. Gray had marked all these points in her mind.

Memory pebbles, she thought, which will lead my way back to Safety.

The house was small and paint-chipped, surrounded by shaggy pine trees peaked at the top like witch hats. One amber lightbulb burned above the stoop. Moths flew out of nowhere to fall against it.

Katrina got out of the car and slammed the door behind her. She seemed to have forgotten about Gray, who trotted behind. Gray was hungry. She made a plan. As soon as she was inside, she would use the phone first to call home, then the Donnelley house. She could give pretty good directions to this area, and people might be worried by now.

And after the phone calls, she would find something to eat.

She joined Katrina, who stood on the stoop, fumbling with her keys. They both stamped their feet to keep warm as Katrina drove key after key into the lock and jiggled the doorknob. The last key let them in.

Katrina clicked the lights and plowed ahead of Gray into a room that was small and cluttered with the kind of lightweight furniture most people used on their lawns or patios. It was even messy like a patio, littered with soda cans and magazines and ashtrays and clear plastic glasses and stacks of fast-food napkins.

“I need to make a phone call,” Gray said. “Everyone is allowed a phone call. Isn’t that some kind of rule of the law?”

“The phone is turned off, I guess the bill wasn’t paid,” said Katrina. “Do you want to watch television?” She pointed to a television positioned on a table against the far wall. It was square and old-fashioned, with bunny-eared antennae tips padded in aluminum foil.

“No,” Gray answered. She looked around for a telephone. Maybe Katrina was lying? When she did not see a telephone anywhere, a new, raw nervousness hummed in her throat and ears. Her eyes pricked with the tears that never were too far away. “I made a mistake,” she admitted out loud, “and I want to go home. You said you would take me home.”