Runaways (3 page)

Suddenly realizing how hungry she was, she threw the hammer down beside the bank and headed for the kitchen. Dinner that night was quiet and boring. It was boring because the food was mostly boring leftovers, and it was quiet because—well, because Dani didn’t feel much like talking. Linda chattered away as usual, though, about the weather and what was happening to the people in her favorite soap operas, and then about what had happened at the bookstore that day.

The bookstore, or Cooley’s Book Rental, was in a little building next to the Rattlesnake Bar and just across the street from the Grand Hotel. Actually it was a sort of cross between a bookstore and a library without really being either one. Some of the books were for sale and some could be rented for ten cents a day, but they were mostly secondhand and pretty beat-up looking. And old Al Cooley, who owned the store, was as old and worn out as his books. Which was a good thing actually because just about the time Dani and Linda arrived in town, Mr. Cooley decided he needed a helper and Linda got the job. Not much of a job really, but along with the little bit of money the government gave Dani because her father had died in the war, it was enough to keep two people more or less alive. But according to Linda, not nearly enough to move two people and all their belongings back home, where they’d have to rent a house and buy food to live on until Linda found another job.

Dani had just about finished her boring corned beef hash when Linda leaned over and said, “Dani. What is it? You’re a thousand miles away tonight. What’s on your mind?”

Actually, the “thousand miles away” stuff was kind of a jolt. It was almost as if her mother had read her mind. Had guessed that she was planning on being, well, maybe not a thousand miles away but at least a few hundred, very soon now. Dani couldn’t help feeling a little guilty as she said, “On my mind? Nothing much. I’m just … It’s just that I told Stormy I’d read to him tonight, and I don’t want to.”

“Oh?” Linda tried to put the last of the hash on Dani’s plate. “You don’t want to? Why not?”

Dani pushed the spoon away. “Because. Because I’ve got other things to … And just because I hate it. I hate reading.”

“Oh?”

Dani glared. She’d said she hated reading to make Linda angry, and all she’d gotten was that soft, wide-eyed, “Oh?” That, Dani told herself, was what she really hated. The way Linda always made “Oh” into a question.

“Well,” Linda said, “it’s too bad you hate it, because you’re really exceptionally good at it, you know. I was listening to you the other night when you were reading
Doctor Dolittle
to Stormy and I was fascinated. You were changing your voice just a tiny bit for each of the animals, and you were every bit as good as that woman who reads on the radio. You know, the one who calls herself the Babbling Bookworm?”

Dani got up from the table very carefully and deliberately. She put her dish in the sink and then turned slowly around before she said, “Well, I
do
hate it. And what I
really
hate is when people sneak around listening to things they weren’t invited to listen to.” She was still standing there at the sink just waiting for Linda to do the “Oh?” thing, and thinking how she was going to hate that too, when without any warning the kitchen door crashed back against the wall. No sound of footsteps on the back porch, no knock on the door, no warning of any kind. Just
bang
as the door flew open, and there he was in the middle of the room, clutching his precious book in one hand and a greasy bag of Beer Nuts in the other.

Dani jumped, gulped and then glared. He’d done it again. Snuck up on her, and this time on her mother too. Linda was still clutching the bowl of hash. Her startled gaze turned into a smile. “Well, hello there, Stormy,” she said. “Do come in.”

“H
I.” STORMY’S GRIN ALMOST
split his face in two. “You guys finished eating?”

“Just about,” Linda said. With the spoon still poised above the bowl, she turned to Dani. “You’re sure you don’t want the rest of this?”

Dani probably would have said no again, or she might not have, but before she could say anything at all Stormy said, “Hey. That looks good. I’ll eat it.” And then he did. Plopping himself down at the table, he began to eat right out of the serving bowl, shoveling the hash into his mouth at an incredible rate of speed. Over his head Linda caught Dani’s eye and made a face that said something like “poor hungry kid.” Dani shrugged. A person who was about to take off on a long, probably hungry, journey didn’t have any sympathy left over for a kid who, at least, always had plenty of pretzels and Beer Nuts. Turning her back on the disgusting scene at the kitchen table, she headed for her room, but a second later Stormy was right behind her, stepping on her heels as he called back to her mother over his shoulder.

“Bye,” he mumbled over the last mouthful of hash. “We’re going to read now. Thanks for the …?” He swallowed, poked Dani and whispered, “What was it?”

“Hash,” Dani said.

“Oh yeah. Thanks for the hash.”

As she opened the door of her room she could hear her mother telling Stormy that he was quite welcome. But at that moment Dani remembered what she’d left lying right out in plain sight in the middle of the bed. The broken-legged pig bank, and beside it—the hammer.

For a moment Stormy was too busy arranging Dani’s beanbag chair to notice. Dani’s chair, a huge canvas bag full of dry beans, could be shoved and punched into different shapes to fit the rear end of the person who was going to sit on it. Stormy always rearranged it violently before he sat down to listen to Dani read. So while he was still punching and shoving, Dani started to slide the pig bank quietly toward the head of the bed, where it could be hidden under a pillow. She’d almost made it when she heard a voice, a shocked, accusing voice, saying, “Why’d you do that? Why’d you break your bank?”

Trying to sound innocent, Dani said, “Break? Why’d I …” She picked up the pig’s broken leg and put it back where it belonged, but of course it only fell off again. She was about to say that the bank must have fallen off the shelf when Stormy had banged the kitchen door open, when she noticed that Stormy’s accusing gaze had moved to the hammer. He grabbed it up and went on staring, his eyes moving from the hammer to Dani and back again. Even more than usual, his round, flat face looked like a Halloween jack-o’-lantern. Only instead of a grinning jack-o’-lantern it was an openmouthed, owl-eyed one. He gulped once or twice and then his eyes narrowed to a suspicious squint. “You’re going to run away, aren’t you?” he said.

And then it was Dani’s turn to feel shocked, because for a moment it seemed like Stormy had turned into some kind of a weird mind-reading wizard. How else could he know? After all, there were all sorts of things a person could need money for besides running away. He’d watched her shake money out of the bank before. How did he know she wasn’t just going to buy another inner tube?

But then suddenly she remembered something she’d said almost two years before, when Stormy had given her the bank. Something she hadn’t really meant, at least not at the time. But she’d just had an extra-bad day at school, and a quarrel with Linda, and the weather had been even more horrible than usual. So when Stormy insisted on giving her the bank as a bribe to get her to read
Tom Sawyer
over again, she’d told him it was the ugliest thing she’d ever seen, but she would keep it because it would be a perfect place to keep her running-away fund. It was the perfect place because it was so ugly that every time she looked at it, it would remind her of Rattler Springs, which would make her remember to save running-away money. So she got an ugly pottery pig out of the deal, and Stormy got the chance to hear every word of
Tom Sawyer
all over again, starting on page one.

The memory of exactly what she promised that day was just beginning to come back when Stormy said, “You said you wouldn’t break it until you were ready to run away.” He was really glaring now, his face tight as a clenched fist. “You said that. Didn’t you?”

“Wellll.” Dani stretched the word out, stalling while she tried to decide what to say next. Stalling at least until she noticed Stormy’s face, and how he was holding the hammer in one hand, as if he might be getting ready to hit something, or somebody, with it. “Now wait a minute,” she said. “I’m not really getting ready to run away. Not yet, anyway. I was just starting to make some plans.”

The thundercloud face didn’t lighten up. “Were you going to tell me? Were you going to tell me before you did it?”

Dani thought of saying, “No. Why should I tell you?” But instead she sighed and then said, “Yeah. Sure. I’d have told you before I left. Probably I would.”

Stormy shook his head. “No,” he said firmly. “No! Not probably. You
have
to tell me as soon as you start thinking about it because—because I’m going too. When you run away you have to take me with you.”

That was too much. It was all Dani could do to keep from laughing. But she didn’t laugh. She knew Stormy’s quick temper well enough to know that to laugh at him while he was holding a hammer wasn’t a particularly smart thing to do. So she controlled her twitching lips and said, “How could I take you with me?” She pointed at the bank. “There’s probably not even enough money in there for one person’s tickets, leave alone two. And besides, what about your mother? She’d have a fit.”

“What about yours?”

“That’s different.”

“Different? No, it isn’t. What’s different about it?”

Dani didn’t know if she could make Stormy understand but she decided to try. “Well, in the first place, I’m older.”

Stormy’s eyes got squintier. He always hated any mention of the fact that Dani was older than he was.

She went on hurriedly. “And in the second place, if I disappeared my mother would know why, and she’d probably guess I’d gone back to Sea Grove. So, if she was really worried, all she’d have to do is come after me. But if you disappeared your mother wouldn’t know why, or where or anything. So she’d be a lot more apt to get hysterical.”

Stormy only shook his head, glowering up at Dani from under his eyebrows and muttering something under his breath.

“Mutter, mutter, mom, mutter, mutter, care,” it sounded like. Or possibly, “My stupid mom wouldn’t even care.” Dani thought of asking him if that was what he’d said, but on second thought … Everybody in Rattler Springs, at least everybody at Rattler Springs school, knew better than to say anything at all to Stormy about his mother. They knew because a few of them had tried it, and one of them had lost a front tooth. Stormy wasn’t very big but he was tough and determined and where his mother was concerned he could get pretty violent. He’d slugged a boy once just for calling her Gorgeous Gloria, which was what everybody called her, at least when Stormy wasn’t around. So Dani changed the subject to why. “Why on earth do
you
want to run away? I thought you said you liked Rattler Springs.”

At first Stormy only shrugged and scowled, but at last he said, “I don’t really
want
to. Not for good anyway. I just want to go along till you get there. Then I’ll probably come back.”

Dani couldn’t help laughing. “That’s crazy,” she said. “You mean you just want to go along for the trip? Like a tourist or something?”

Stormy didn’t laugh. “No!” he said loudly, and then more softly, “Yeah, maybe.” His squinted eyes rounded a little. “Well, why not? What’s so funny about that?”

“What’s so funny?” She was laughing again. “Well, for one thing.” She struggled to straighten out her face. “For one thing it’s not going to be the kind of trip you go on for fun. It will probably be the kind where you might have to walk part of the way, or stow away in the back of a truck. And it might even be dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” Stormy’s eyes were really round now.

Dani nodded.

“Who …? What …? What kind of dangerous?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Because of dangerous people, I guess. Like maybe people who pick you up when you’re hitchhiking. Or just because it takes too long to get there and you run out of money and starve to death.”

The starving bit was good, she thought. Anybody who liked to eat as much as Stormy did would be sure to hate the idea of starving. But to her surprise it only seemed to make him more stubborn than ever. “I’m going,” he said. “If you go you
have
to take me too.” He wasn’t raving now or whispering. Just speaking in an ordinary dead calm voice. Dead calm and determined.

But Dani could be determined too. She shook her head and was still shaking it when Stormy said, “Promise. Promise I’m going too. If you don’t I’ll …”

“What? What will you do?”

Dani was still sitting on the edge of the bed with the broken pig bank in her lap, and Stormy was standing in front of her holding the hammer in both hands. Hands that were clenched so tightly the knuckles were turning white. Keeping the hammer in the edge of her vision, Dani asked cautiously, “What will you do if I don’t promise?”

Stormy’s face had turned back into an angry mask. “If you don’t promise—I’ll tell.”

Dani couldn’t believe it. Stormy Arigotti wasn’t exactly perfect. She’d always known that he was a sneak and a shin kicker, for instance, not to mention a hyperactive nonreader. But it was hard to believe that he was actually threatening to snitch on her running-away plans. Sitting there silent and blank-eyed as a statue, Dani told herself she didn’t believe it. But at the same time, her mind was racing around like crazy. Around and around, picking up ideas and then putting them down again.

First of all she thought of telling him what people thought of snitches. How snitches were just about the lowest of the low and … But then she realized that wouldn’t help at all. Stormy didn’t care what people thought of him. Some of the time he didn’t even care what Dani thought of him.

Then she had a great idea. At least for a moment, it seemed like a great idea. “If you do,” she started, making every word count. “If-you-tell-I’ll-never …” She stopped there. What she’d been planning to say was that she’d never read to him again. But, of course, that was pretty stupid because if he didn’t tell, she would go ahead and run away, and there’d be no more reading anyway. Stormy might not have been the smartest kid in the world, but he was smart enough to figure that out.