B004XTKFZ4 EBOK (14 page)

“Fraidy cat.”

“I’m not. Stop calling me that. Anyway, how would we get out? Your mom would hear the front door.”

“Ha.” Lucy leapt up in the darkness and moved to her bedroom window, slid it open. The night air was cool. She reached to the window screen and in one smooth, silent motion, pulled it out.

“Lucy! You broke it!”

“I didn’t break it, Spazzy-Spaz. It fits right back in. I’ve done this before.”

I got up, stood with her next to the now gaping window, the night breeze on my face.

“You know I’m scared of the dark, Lucy.”

“But you’re not scared when I’m there, right?”

“Yeah…I guess,” I said doubtfully. “But…what if we—you know, get separated or something?”

“We won’t,” she said, taking my hand. “I’ll stick by you every second. I swear. Really. I’m sincere.”

“Lucy,” I said, trying to turn away, “I don’t know…Why don’t we just…”

“Come
on,
Franny!”

I looked at her in the darkness. Her silvery eyes shone brightly, waiting. Finally I nodded.

She climbed out first—an easy thing, the window was low—and then stood waiting for me, her arms up to take my hands as I clambered through. In a moment we were outside, in her tiny backyard, blackness everywhere around us.

“Come on!” she said, excited. Holding my hand, she led the way, running around the corner of the house and onto the sidewalk.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see!”

We ran for maybe a block. She led us straight to Mr. Griffin’s house and his brown VW Bus at the curb.

“Lucy,
no
!”
I gasped, remembering her story.

“Yeah! C’mon!”

“What if he
hears
us?”

“He’s not home, you dip. Look. His car’s gone.”

“But—Lucy—”

The street was silent. There was no traffic, no movement at all. We might as well have been drifting in outer space.

“C’mon. Get in. You didn’t believe me before. But I’ll prove it. I
have
driven this van.”

“I—Lucy, I believe you. I really do. Now let’s—”

But she turned away, opened the driver’s side door, which was indeed unlocked. And to my horror I could see the keys sitting in the ignition. She hopped onto the seat.

“C’mon,” she said. “Get in the other side.”

“Lucy…Lucy, you said you wouldn’t leave me alone in the dark…”

“And I
won’t.
Just get
in.
”

Sighing, trembling, I ran around to the other side, climbed into the van. We closed the doors softly. The interior of the vehicle had been completely gutted; there was little inside it at all. A few blankets, a thin and torn carpet on the floor. Mr. Griffin used it to collect the bureaus and beds and tables he sold in his second-hand furniture store.

“Watch,” she said.

She turned the key and the engine rumbled into life. It sounded like a bomb blast to me, like a sound that would send everyone out of their homes into the street to see what was happening. I looked around frantically, terrified.

But suddenly we were moving. Lucy pushed down the clutch and eased the van into gear and we were actually in motion, sliding slowly along the street just like any other car. She switched on the lights then. They looked like luminous ghosts in front of us. Lucy looked over at me and laughed.

“Stop being so
scared,
Franny! I told you, I know how to do this! My mom let me drive her car around a parking lot a couple of times.”

Just as she said it, however, a pair of headlights appeared, coming toward us. I sank down in my seat, clenched my eyes shut, tried to shrink, tried to disappear. I realized that I was about to pee in my pants and I tensed my legs, pushed them together tight, willed myself not to do it.

“Lucy—oh my God, Lucy—”

I was positive that it would be a police car, that its lights would suddenly flash and its siren blare, but no: it was just another car, after all. It passed us without incident.

Somehow, after that, I relaxed: not much, but a little. My breathing was still fast and my eyes darted this way and that; I was positive that someone would rush out to point at us, shout
Car thieves! Arrest those car thieves!
But no one did. I watched the neighborhood pass by, everything looking strange and different now. I was riding in a stolen car, I realized. Lucy had
stolen
it—we both had. Yet with the fear there was an exhilaration too, a feeling that as long as I was with Lucy, everything was all right. Nothing would happen. As long as she was there, the darkness was safe.

Soon enough she had driven around the block and pulled up in front of Mr. Griffin’s house again, exactly where the van had been parked before. We came to a very sudden stop, Lucy hitting the brakes too hard; I pitched forward in the seat, bumped my head against the dashboard.

“Sorry,” she said. “I gotta practice stopping.”

“Lucy, let’s get out of here!” I pushed open the passenger door, dropped onto the sidewalk, ran around to the other side. Lucy was just stepping out.

“Nice drive, huh?” she said boldly, looking at me. “Now do you believe me?”

“I believe you, I believe you! Let’s get out of here! My uncle is probably there by now!”

We charged back to Lucy’s house and clambered through the window as quietly as we could. As Lucy replaced the screen I looked at her clock and realized that the entire adventure had taken hardly twenty minutes. My uncle wasn’t even due for half an hour.

I collapsed breathlessly onto the bed, my fear returning even as I realized we’d done it: we’d gone out into the night against the rules, we’d
stolen a car,
we’d returned and not been caught. The thought was unbelievable. And we’d done it together: however reluctant I’d been, I was there, I’d done it with her. She could never deny me that, never call me a
fraidy cat
again.

After she’d closed the window, Lucy dropped down on the bed next to me. She was breathing hard too, from the excitement, from the run home. In a moment she started to giggle. It was contagious: soon I was giggling too. Then we burst into laughter, crazy laughter, we threw our arms around each other rolled around and jumped up and down and laughed, laughed as if we would never stop laughing, never in this world.

If Lucy hadn’t gotten the sniffles, things might have ended completely differently.

But she did, and a couple of days after our daring auto heist I found myself in the uncomfortable position of being at school without her. Melissa, Susan, and Miriam noticed this immediately, of course, yet on the first day they did nothing more than offer a few furtively whispered
Lezzie!
or
Where’s your girlfriend?
remarks in the hallway. I kept to myself, stayed away from the bathroom, made sure I wasn’t too far from a teacher during recess and lunch. I minded my own business, and they went about theirs.

But on the second day, too, Lucy didn’t appear at the bus stop. I’d seen her the night before, though Ms. Sparrow suggested I not spend too long there, and I didn’t. It was just a cold; Lucy’s eyes were red and her nose was congested.

“I’ll try to be back tomorrow,” she said. Then, smiling: “Not that I’m in a big hurry.”

“School’s no good without you,” I said, and I meant it. My life-long love of learning, my feelings of pride with each A, had largely evaporated. The day before I had actually received a C—
a C!—
on a Math quiz. I didn’t care. I just wanted to be near Lucy, no matter what. I’d stopped caring about much else.

But she wasn’t there that second morning, so I resigned myself to another day of dreariness. But the dreariness ended during recess, when the teacher on duty was distracted by a scuffle happening between boys on the football field. Melissa, Susan, and Miriam took this opportunity to corner me by the Social Studies classroom, where no one else could see. The three of them backed me against the wall, careful to not touch me, never actually hurting me.

“Well, look here. It’s
Frances
,”
Melissa said.

“It’s
Concentration Camp
,”
Susan amended.

“Where’s your big ugly girlfriend?” asked Miriam.

“Shut up,” I said, trying to peer around the corner to see if the teacher had returned, but she hadn’t.

“Well, you’ve got a
mouth
,”
Melissa said.

“She learned it from her lezzie lover,” Susan said. “She talks like that too.”

“I said shut
up
,”
I repeated. I could hardly believe the words were coming out of me, but I’d changed in the past weeks, become bolder. Before, my reaction might have been to burst into tears; but Lucy always said I cried too much. I wasn’t going to cry this time.

“Hey,” Miriam said, punching me on the shoulder, “who do you think you’re talking to, anyway?”

“Shut your stupid face!”

They were genuinely taken aback. They looked at each other, considering. Then they realized that they outnumbered me by a wide margin, and recovered.

“You’re
rude
,” Melissa said, slapping my lightly on the cheek. “Does your mom know you talk like that?”

I batted her palm away, enraged.

“Yeah,” Susan said, shoving me in the chest, “does she?
I
heard you don’t even
have
a mom.”

“
Shut up!
”

They all giggled, completely in control again.

“She’s probably dead,” Miriam speculated. “Probably she killed herself when she realized she had such a dork for a kid.”

“Is that it, Frances?” Susan shoved me again. “Did your mom kill herself because you’re such a dork?”

What happened next happened very quickly. I heard footsteps running toward us and I knew, somehow I
knew,
whose they were. The three girls all turned simultaneously. Lucy came charging up, the look on her face so furious that even I was scared, and yet I knew she was there to protect me.

“You’re
absent
,”
Susan said, her voice suddenly pleading in a
No fair!
kind of tone.

“My mom let me sleep late,” Lucy said quietly. I could hear that her nose was still stuffed up. “I’m here now.”

If they’d backed off then, as they obviously should have, things would also have been different. But they couldn’t face the prospect of being humiliated in front of someone as unimportant as me, and so, disastrously, they took the plunge.

Melissa said, “So you came to help out your little girlfriend, huh, Lucy?”

Lucy looked at her, her eyes hard, cold. “Melissa,” she said, “you are a worthless piece of shit.”

Melissa’s eyes widened.

“Hey,” Miriam protested, “you can’t—”

Things blurred; I never knew who moved first, but Susan shoved me against the wall hard and someone pushed me down. There was scuffling. A foot kicked me. Then I heard a huge
crack
and everything, for one seemingly endless moment suspended in time, went completely silent.

I looked up.

Melissa was standing there, mouth agape, arms dangling in mid-air. Blood ran from her nose, a nose that suddenly looked different, bent to the side, off-center. Lucy stood close to her, also frozen, her face registering the shock of what she’d just done.

Panic. Two girls rushing off:
Lucy hit Melissa! Lucy hit Melissa! Melissa’s bleeding! Lucy hit Melissa!
Melissa bursting into tears mixed with wailing screams, blood running down her chin and her hands on her face and then coming away covered with blood, blood on her shirt then, blood everywhere, and I, even I feeling desperately sorry for her, for her obvious pain, frightened at the sight of the blood leaking out of her face, and Lucy frozen there for a moment, breathing hard, her fists still curled so tightly that her knuckles had turned a ghastly white.

She looked at me then, her eyes huge.

“Lucy—” I whispered.

But she turned and ran away then, back up the hall toward the street. Melissa had stumbled away toward the playground, toward the teacher, and I was left alone, halfway between the world of school, responsibility, and the world of Lucy—whatever world that was. Of course it was no competition. I got up and ran after Lucy.

—Nine—

AS I WOKE I turned to drape my arm over Donald, as always, and found that he wasn’t there, as always; but the absence felt different this time, smelled different. Something was wrong.

I opened my eyes, and remembered.