The Missing Girl

THE

MISSING

GIRL

by

Norma Fox Mazer

Contents

ix

A Flock of Birds

1

Le Plan

4

Bellyaching

8

A Tune in My Pocket

18

Like Velcro

21

Making Mrs. Kalman Happy

24

Harold and Violet

30

Cabbage Head

34

Her Hair

41

Hissy Fits

44

Beauty and Ethan: The Movie

48

Patterns

53

The One Person in the World

55

Big Mad Bee

64

My Boy

67

The Railroad Bridge

69

Thank You for the Nightmare

74

Something Drastic this Way Comes

79

Walk like a Robot

84

Miss Priss

86

Face like a Potato

91

The Ordeal

94

An Old-Fashioned Virtue

102

The Righteous Path

108

Everybody in the World Cried

116

Gate in Her Throat

119

A Night at the Movies

125

The Kidnapper

129

Things She didn’t Know

132

Cousin Darlin’

138

Running Away to Florida

142

Burned Pancakes

149

Maps

153

157

Sunday Afternoon: Room with a View

159

Sunday Afternoon: Can Anybody Hear Me?

164

Sunday Afternoon: Good and Loud 167

Sunday Evening: Fingers and Toes

170

Sunday Evening: Sure and Positive and Positive and Sure 172

Sunday Evening: Supper’s Served

175

Sunday Evening: Supper’s Served

177

Sunday Evening, Later: Waste Not, Want Not 181

Sunday Night, Late: It was Just a Walk 183

Monday Morning: Feet First

185

Monday Afternoon: Answer Me

188

Monday Afternoon: Everything is Crazy

190

Monday Evening: ’Fess Up

192

Monday Evening: In Nathan’s Truck

194

Tuesday Morning: Sleeping and Crying and Singing 198

Tuesday Evening: My Adventure

200

Tuesday Evening: Fiddleheads

202

Wednesday Morning: Bored Lonely

204

Wednesday, Mid-Morning: Freaks

206

Wednesday Afternoon: Tough Guy

208

Wednesday Evening: When…

210

Wednesday Evening: What Does He Want?

211

Wednesday Evening: Bloody Hell

213

Thursday Morning: Notes

219

Thursday Afternoon: The Duck Pond

221

Thursday, Late Afternoon: The Cot

226

229

Friday, 7:30 A.M.

231

Friday, 8:15 A.M.

234

Friday, 9:44 A.M.

237

Friday, 9:56 A.M.

239

Friday, 10:16 A.M.

241

Friday, 12:33 P.M.

244

Friday, 1:03 P.M.

246

Sit Tight

255

Hiss like a Snake

259

Positive ID

262

Corkscrew Smiles

265

Tell Us Everything

267

You Can’t Stop

271

You Remember

272

Six Months Later: Roses

275

What You Did

279

Funny and Sad and Scary, Too

282

About the Author

Credits

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

AND HOW IT HAPPENS

A FLOCK OF BIRDS

IF THE MAN IS LUCKY, in the morning on his way to work, he sees the girls. A flock of them, like birds.

March is a dismal month, and the man’s spirits often fall during this month of wet clouds and short gray days. He is hard put to remember that soon spring will return, but the sight of a cardinal or a chickadee—or the girls—reminds him of this. He is not one of those strange people who watch birds through binoculars, but the twittering and calls of even the jays, who are abominably noisy, is refresh-ing to him. As is the twittering and chatter of the girls.

One, two, three, four, five. Five of them.
Five
. A grati-fying outcome of changing his route to work. Without
1

being unduly self-congratulatory, because he is a modest man, he can take credit for this, as a result of his intelli-gence and careful planning. When his job description changed, he knew immediately that this meant he should no longer walk the same streets from his house to the bus stop to the store office. And though the route he had used for the past year was decidedly efficient, he changed it, proving once again that he was—he
is
—highly adaptable.

It is the adaptable who survive in this beastly world.

It takes him seven minutes longer to walk the new way, but if one thing changes, then something else must change as well. This is a rule, the only way to maintain bal-ance and order. The proof of the fundamental rightness of this rule is clear: changing the streets he walks to the bus stop each morning brought the girls into his life. An unexpected gift.

A reward, because he has been good for so long.

He has always liked schoolgirls, their open faces, their laughter, their innocence. Despite the fact that he has now seen these particular girls, his flock of birds, nearly a dozen times, not one of them has noticed him. Not one of them has flicked him so much as a glance. This is good. It’s the way he wants it. He doesn’t want to be noticed. It is
2

safer to be, as he knows he is, unremarkable.

Slight of build, stoop shouldered, wearing a gray coat, a gray scarf around his neck against the cold, his wire-rimmed glasses set firmly on his nose, minding his own business, he could be any man, any respectable, ordinary man.

3

LE PLAN

BEAUTY HERBERT, HURRYING down the

hill from Mallory Central School, sliding a little on the slushy sidewalk, considered her age. Today, the snowy fifth of March, she was exactly seventeen and one-half years. The time for
Le Plan
was coming ever closer.

Maybe she’d tell Patrick it was her half-year birthday, and he’d insist that they have a latte from the coffee shop across the street to celebrate.

Patrick Jimenez owned Patrick the Florist, the shop on Costello Street where Beauty worked ten hours a week and where she was headed now.
Seventeen and a half!

enthusiastic Patrick would say.
Great!
The latte, and then
4

work. Patrick had been in the flower business for twenty-five years, and his customers adored him. Beauty did, too, as though he were not only her boss, but almost an older brother, the brother she’d always wished for to share the responsibility that came with being the oldest of five sisters.

The idea of leaving her little sisters, in fact, was the only thing about
Le Plan
that bothered Beauty. She wasn’t too worried about Mim, who, at sixteen, seemed to be okay, but the newly fourteen-year-old sister who had just informed the family that she was changing her name from Faithful to
Stevie
, of all things, was something of a mess, drenching everyone in her out-there, high-speed, top-volume emotions and orders (
from now on, my name is
Stevie and no one in this family better forget that
). As for Fancy and Autumn, well, they were both still kids, and that was the trouble. Who would look after them when she left? Fancy was twelve, had her period and little breasts, and should be growing up, but of course she wasn’t.

And eleven-year-old Autumn? Half the time the child was dreaming about something or other, and the other half crying over nothing. It didn’t look as if she would ever make a plan for her life, as Beauty had done, but at least when she was here, Beauty could keep an eye on her.

5

Last September, when she had turned seventeen and also entered her senior year in high school, Beauty had rejoiced, as she was rejoicing today. Like mile markers on a highway, each month brought her that much closer to her eighteenth birthday, to the moment when
Le Plan
could become reality, when she was a legal adult, legally responsible for herself, legally able to do whatever she wanted—no,
needed
—to do.

Anyway, seventeen was, really,
so
much better than sixteen, which had been
so
much better than fifteen, which had been
so
much better than fourteen, which had been mostly a relief from the pain of thirteen. If there were a pill she could pop, like an aspirin, that would blot out thirteen and cruel seventh-grade humor, she would take it in a heartbeat. Although, she amended, crossing French Street against the light (sorry, Mom), she wouldn’t want to forget Mr. Giametti. So, okay, the magic little pill could scrub her memory clean of a certain drawing, a certain poem, and leave in the good stuff.

Passing Lawler’s department store on River Street downtown, she caught a glimpse of herself in the window and quickly looked away. She’d hatched
Le Plan
when she was thirteen, and she’d been carrying it around all these
6

years. By next March on this date, she’d be long gone.

She’d have a place of her own, a new life, a new job, and a new name (although not a ridiculous one like Stevie).
Le
Plan!
Like the two words, the plan was neat and simple. It was just this: as soon as she turned eighteen, she was getting out of Dodge.

Dodge, in this case, was Mallory, this town of 5,329

people in northern New York State, where Beauty had lived her whole life. When she left Mallory, it would be for Chicago, which she had first heard about from Mr.

Giametti, her seventh-grade language arts teacher, who grew up there. She was going to a place where no one knew her, a place where she could become whoever it was she was meant to be, whoever it was that she could never be in Mallory, where everyone had a tag, a label, a stifling little box into which they were shoved and where they were expected to stay forever.

The label on her little box? That ugly Herbert girl, poor thing, with the so-wrong name.

7

BELLYACHING

WHAT DO YOU DO when you don’t want to go to school? If you’re Autumn and you’re eleven,
only
eleven, as you think of it, and the baby of the family, you shuffle into the kitchen, train your eyes on your oldest sister, and say, with just a little whine in your voice, “Beauty.

Beauty. I have a bellyache.” You hope you look sick. You sniffle up the night junk in your nose and let your mouth fall open a little.

You try to ignore Fancy, who says in her loud, eager voice that she’ll save the funnies for you. “I’m reading them all by myself this morning,” she says. You try not to watch as she takes too big a gulp of milk, burps, and sets
8