Runaways (12 page)

“He what?” Dani said.

Stormy was shaking his head but Pixie didn’t seem to notice. “Didn’t you, Stormy?”

“No, I didn’t. Not anymore I didn’t.” He gave Dani his guilty, squinty-eyed look. “We changed our minds about that. Now we’re going to go on the bus.”

Pixie looked a little disappointed. “Oh,” she said, sighing. “I thought the stowaway idea sounded exciting.” She sighed again, but after she glanced from Stormy to Dani and back again, she began to nod. “Oh. Okay,” she said. “On the bus.” Going over to the daybed, she climbed up and smoothed herself down the way she always did when she wanted to take time out. She was wearing safari-type khaki shorts and a blouse today, the kind with lots of extra straps and pockets. When she got all arranged she said to Dani, “Tell me about the bus. What’s it like on a bus?”

“What’s it like?” For a moment Dani thought she must be kidding, before she realized that poor little rich girl Pixie, who rode around in fancy custom-built cars, probably didn’t know much about bus riding. “What’s it like to ride on a bus?” she asked in a sarcastic tone of voice. “Well, for one thing you have to pay before you get on. So that’s kind of the problem right now. We don’t have enough money for tickets.”

“Oh?” Pixie was definitely interested. “So what are we going to—?”

“We did a lemonade stand,” Stormy interrupted eagerly. “We made three dollars and ninety-eight cents. But we had to stop because of Ronnie.”

“Ronnie? Ronnie Grabler from school?” Pixie asked, and that really got Stormy started. He was jumping around like he always did when he told a story, but when Dani tried to stop him Pixie said, “No. Let him tell me. I want to hear about it.”

So Dani went into the kitchen, dumped what was left of Stormy’s cornflakes in the garbage and sat down at the table to wait until Stormy’s “Gus the Hero” story was finished. But while she was waiting she began to get a new idea. The idea had to do with how adding a rich kid to their plans might actually be helpful. She was still fooling around with some new possibilities when Stormy and Pixie came into the kitchen.

Pixie was still laughing about Ronnie and the grease pit, but she stopped when Dani asked her how much money she had.

“Money? How much do I have?” Pixie asked. Fishing around in the pockets of her khaki shorts she brought out some change and started to count it. “Thirty-four, thirty-five,” she said. “I have thirty-five cents.”

Dani sighed. “No. I didn’t mean in your pockets. I mean, don’t you have some saved up at home, like in a bank or something?”

Pixie shook her head.

“How about an allowance? You have an allowance, don’t you?

Pixie thought for a moment before she shook her head again.

“You don’t?” Dani made it clear she found that hard to believe.

Pixie looked thoughtful. “I did once,” she said. “But they kept forgetting to give it to me and I kept forgetting to ask for it, unless I wanted something. So now I just ask when I want something, and they give it to me.”

Stormy was looking excited. “Could you ask for enough for the tick—” he’d started to say when he saw that Dani was laughing. “Stop that!” he yelled. “I didn’t mean tell them it was for tickets. I meant she could say—she could just say …”

Dani decided to come to his rescue. “Okay, okay,” she said. “I know what you meant.” Then she said to Pixie, “I think he means could you ask them for the money for something else, something kind of expensive, like a bicycle maybe, and then take the money and buy tickets instead?”

Pixie nodded thoughtfully. “Umm, maybe,” she said. “Maybe. I could try it anyway. How much does a bicycle cost?”

Stormy was all excited. “I know. I know,” he started yelling. “Wait. I’ll get it. I’ll go get it.” He dashed away, out the back door and down the steps.
Slam, clomp, clomp, clomp, slam
and a bunch more
clomps.
For a kid who could be so quiet when he tried, it was amazing how noisy he could be when he wasn’t trying.

“Where’s he going?” Pixie asked. “What’s he going to get?”

Dani led the way into the living room. “Who knows. Something about a bicycle, I guess.”

It was a good guess. In about three minutes the slamming and clomping started all over again and Stormy burst into the room, carrying what looked like a magazine but turned out to be a bicycle catalog. A ragged, worn-out catalog full of pictures of beautiful, expensive bikes. Climbing up on the daybed beside Pixie, Stormy opened it to an illustration of a really fancy Schwinn bicycle. Someone, Stormy no doubt, had underlined and circled that particular bicycle in red and black crayon and had drawn yellow shooting stars all around it.

“See. That’s it,” he said. “That’s a Black Phantom. It’s my favorite. My favorite for a long time.” He sighed, a long sad sound. “Costs too much.” He pointed to where, under the picture, it said $175.00.

“A hundred and seventy-five dollars. Holy moly!” Dani said. “I didn’t know a bicycle could cost that much. Linda didn’t pay that much for our truck.” She and Pixie looked at the picture and then at each other and then at Stormy. He was staring at the bicycle with the same kind of glassy eyes he got when he listened to a story.

Dani took the catalog away from him and slammed it down on the coffee table. “So,” she said to Pixie, “I suppose if you asked your folks for a hundred and seventy-five dollars to buy a bicycle they’d say, ‘Sure thing. How soon do you want it?’ ” She laughed, expecting Pixie to laugh too. But she didn’t.

Instead she nodded solemnly. “They might,” she said. “My mother used to ride bicycles and she wanted me to learn how, but mostly I live with my grandmother and where she lives there isn’t any flat place to ride so I never did learn.”

“You mean you don’t even know how to ride a bicycle?”

Pixie nodded. “Only a little. I tried a few times on a friend’s.”

“And you think they might give you that kind of money to get you something you don’t even know how to ride?”

Pixie tilted her head thoughtfully. “Maybe. I think so. I didn’t know anything about chemistry when they bought me a very expensive chemistry set. My dad said I would learn by doing. But my grandmother took it away from me when I set the basement on fire.”

Dani sighed and changed the subject to some other money-raising ideas she’d been thinking about, halfway reasonable ones like baby-sitting or dog walking.

So that was more or less the end of the bicycle conversation, and as far as Dani was concerned the end of even thinking about it. But when the Smithson tank pulled up in front of Dani’s house that afternoon and Pixie ran out to meet it, she must have taken Stormy’s bicycle catalog with her. At least when Stormy went home he couldn’t find it. He made such a big fuss about it that Dani had to read an extra chapter of
The Jungle Book
just to calm him down.

The next day was a Thursday and Pixie didn’t show up all day long. It was just about the only day she hadn’t since school had been out and Stormy was really worried. He didn’t exactly say so but it was obvious that he was afraid that Pixie’s parents had already started collecting some body parts. Usually nothing could distract Stormy while he was listening to a story, but that afternoon he kept jumping up and running to the window every time he heard a car go by. And there wasn’t any use trying to get him to think about moneymaking plans, not even for a minute.

It was fairly late in the afternoon, almost time for Linda to come home, and Dani was just about to finish a chapter when she heard the squeak of the gate hinges and then slow, unsteady footsteps on the front porch. When she opened the door there stood Pixie. Nothing else in sight. No tank-car out on the road. Just a messed-up, dirt-smeared Pixie whose face was tear-streaked—and whose hands and knees were smeared with lots of bright red blood.

“What—what happened?” Dani gasped.

Holding out her bloody hands, Pixie managed a strange, tearful smile. “I fell off my bike,” she said.

R
IGHT AT FIRST THE
bike thing didn’t really register with Dani. All she could think about was getting Pixie into the house and getting her hands and knees cleaned up and painted with Mercurochrome, so the skinned places wouldn’t get infected. Pixie kept whimpering and trying to push Dani’s hand away, and Dani kept trying to tell her it wouldn’t hurt so much if she’d just hold still. So, for Dani, the bike question got put on hold for a while. Actually it was Stormy who began to get the picture first.

Stormy, who had been squatting in front of Pixie staring at her bloody knees with a horrified look on his face, made a sudden gasping noise and got to his feet. Dani looked up at him.

“Bike,” he was whispering, “bike.” But just then Pixie let out a particularly pitiful moan and Dani went back to trying to be very gentle while she got the Mercurochrome on one of the worst places. She’d forgotten about Stormy until a little later, when there was a loud clattering noise, the front door flew open and Stormy came into the living room pushing a bicycle. A big shiny black bicycle with streamlined fenders, big fat tires and a very fancy paint job. It obviously was brand new, and even more obviously had cost somebody a whole lot of money.

“What? What on earth …?” Dani began when Stormy said something in a strange kind of a gasping whisper. “It’s a Black Phantom. A real Black Phantom. I found it in the road.” He looked at Pixie accusingly. “You left it right out there in the road?”

Pixie sniffed and wiped her eyes. “I left it right where I fell off,” she said. “Where I fell off the stupid thing.”

But Dani’s mind had gotten back on track by then and what it was telling her was really making her angry.

Getting to her feet, she stared at Pixie, hands on hips. “So!” she said. “So you said you’d ask your folks for money to buy a bicycle and we could use the money to buy tickets.” Doing her sarcastic head wobble, she went on, “And then you just up and decided to ask for the bicycle instead.”

“No. No, I didn’t,” Pixie said. “I just showed my mother the picture in Stormy’s catalog and—”

“Aha!” Stormy said accusingly.
“You
took my bicycle magazine.” But Pixie just nodded and went on, “—showed her the picture of the Black Phantom bike. And when I said I’d like to have one, my mother said she’d talk to my father about it. Then she went back to the lab and I went to bed. My father had to go into Las Vegas very early this morning and by the time I got up he’d already gone. But I guess my mother gave him the catalog to take with him. So when he came back”—she shrugged and motioned toward the bicycle—“when he came back he had that with him. So then my mother came out of the lab and they gave me a riding lesson. Both of them. Both of them were out there with me for a long time.”

She paused then and seemed to drift off, as if she were reliving some great experience.

“Out where?” Dani asked.

Pixie came out of her spell and said, “Where? Oh, you know, out in that parking area by the windmill. They helped me get started and then they watched me ride. But then, after I was riding really well, they went back to the lab to set up some new equipment. So I decided to ride down here and—and show you what happened.” She sighed again. “Except I fell off.”

“Did you hear that?” Dani asked Stormy. “Did you hear what happened to all that ticket money we could have had?”

But Stormy didn’t seem to be hearing much of anything. Instead he was kneeling beside the bicycle, running his fingers over the fenders and pedals and mumbling to himself.

“Stormy!” Dani yelled. “What are you doing?”

His eyes did their squinty thing. “Looking,” he said. “I’m just looking.” Then he turned to Pixie. “It’s a boy’s bike,” he said. “Why’d you tell them to get a boy’s bike?”

“I told you,” Pixie wailed. “I didn’t tell them to get
any
kind of a bike. My father just bought one like in the picture. He probably doesn’t even know about girls’ bikes.” Pixie shrugged and sighed. “It’s not the kind of thing he notices.”

It was beginning to occur to Dani that maybe, for once, Pixie was actually telling the truth. Maybe she really hadn’t expected her folks to buy the bicycle instead of giving her the money. But if that was true it still left a whole lot of interesting questions. For instance—why would some mad-scientist parents who were planning to chop their kid up any day now decide to buy her such an expensive present? Dani would have asked that question and probably a few others, except that just at that moment Linda came home.

Of course Linda was all upset about Pixie’s injuries. So for several minutes all that got talked about, or even looked at, was Pixie’s hands and knees. Pixie had stopped sniffling and was saying that she wasn’t hurting much anymore but it wasn’t until Linda had examined everything and asked all sorts of questions that another problem came up. And that was how Pixie was going to get home.

“Can’t she go back the way she came?” Dani asked, but Pixie was sure she couldn’t.

“I’m not very good at it,” Pixie told Linda. “That’s why I fell off. And even if I didn’t fall off again, pedaling all that way would make my knees start bleeding all over again. I know it would.” She looked around. “Someone else has to do it. Someone else has to ride the bicycle out there and tell my folks to come for me in the car.”

It wasn’t until then that Linda began to notice the bicycle, which wasn’t too surprising since Stormy had been kind of wrapped around it ever since she came in. She went over and pried Stormy away long enough to get a good look at it.

“My! It is a beautiful bicycle, isn’t it?” she said to Stormy. Then she asked Dani if either she or Stormy could ride out to get someone to pick Pixie up. “Would that be all right?” she asked Pixie.

“I guess so,” Pixie said. Then she whispered to Dani, “Does Stormy know how to ride a bike?”

“Oh, sure,” Dani said. “He rode mine all the time till it fell apart.”

“That’s right,” Linda said, “Stormy is a great bicycle rider. Stormy. Could you ride the new bike out to …”

Stormy looked up, blinking like he had just awakened from some kind of bicycle fantasy. “Could I ride the Black Phantom?” He jumped up with his eyes sparkling like crazy. “Yes, yes. I can.” He turned to Pixie. “Can I? Can I ride the Black Phantom?”