Runaways (18 page)

Closing the door behind him, Stormy held his finger to his lips and kept it there while the click of high heels was followed by the sound of another door opening and then closing. It wasn’t until several minutes later, when the clicks had returned to pass Stormy’s door again and continue down the stairs, that Stormy took his finger away from his lips. And it was then that, staring into his wide eyes, Dani began to understand where her own mysterious attack of fear had come from. She’d caught it from Stormy.

I
T WASN’T UNTIL SHE
was home again, back in the cabin with the front door locked and a chair pushed up against the broken lock on the back door, that Dani had time to start thinking. She thought first, of course, about Ronnie and whether he’d come looking for her at the cabin. She didn’t think he would, but the locked door and the chair under the doorknob were just in case. With that taken care of there were many other things to consider, some of which she’d have preferred not to think about if she’d had the choice.

The part she really tried not to think about was what Ronnie had said about raising Linda’s rent if she refused to sell her property, because that brought up a lot of other questions. Questions like what Linda would do if she had to pay more rent right now when she was about to lose her job at the bookstore. Dani tried her best to put the whole subject out of her mind by telling herself that what Linda would do was her business and nobody else’s. She was the one who had chosen to stay in Rattler Springs and so how she was going to manage it was her own business. Dani had her own problems to think about. Problems like how she was going to manage the long, complicated bus trip to Sea Grove. Especially now that she knew for almost certain that no one would be going with her.

But her mind wouldn’t cooperate. When she reminded herself of the big fight she and her mother had just had about selling the ranch to the Grablers, and how the whole thing had been Linda’s fault from the very beginning for not doing enough to get them out of Rattler Springs long ago, her mind just kept coming back to the same questions. Questions about what would happen to Linda when she had no job and no place to live.

It was another unbearably hot day. Ordinarily Dani would have been out on the front porch by then, but because of the Ronnie problem, the best she could do was stay in the kitchen, where a wet towel draped over an open window could bring the temperature down a degree or two. By early afternoon what she was doing was trying to keep her mind on the right track by making a list of all the things she would need to take along on the trip. Which shirts and blouses, and maybe even a keepsake or two if they weren’t too heavy. She hadn’t gotten very far with the list when someone knocked on the front door.

Dani froze. Stormy, and Linda too, usually came in the back door. It might be Pixie, of course. Dani started to the living room. Or what if it was Ronnie? She stopped and went back to the kitchen, looking for something hard and heavy. When the knock came again she was headed for the door again, carrying a small cast-iron frying pan. Just as she got there she heard an impatient voice calling, “Dani! Let me in.” It was Pixie after all.

When Dani unlocked the door Pixie kind of exploded into the room. She was wearing her khaki shorts and matching safari vest with lots of big stretchy pockets. As always, she was talking nonstop. “Dani,” she said. “Where were you? Why didn’t you let me in? My folks just have to make some phone calls in town and then they’re going back, so I can’t stay very long, but I have something to tell you. Something very important. What are you doing with that frying pan?”

“Oh, that.” Dani looked down at what she had in her hand. “I guess I was getting ready to hit Ronnie Grabler over the head.”

“Really?” Pixie looked delighted. “Could you? Could I help?” She stopped to catch her breath and added, “Why?”

“Because he chased me this morning. I made him mad so he chased me down the street and right through the store and under the lunch counter into the kitchen. I was going to run out through the service door only it was locked so I …” She paused. “I hid in … Well anyway I hid and got away from him. But I was afraid he might come here looking for me. When you knocked on the door I thought maybe he’d come.”

“Really?” Pixie ran to the window and looked out. “I don’t see him. Do you really think he’ll come? I hope he comes before my folks get back. Before …” Suddenly she put her hand over her mouth. “I forgot. I almost forgot what I came to tell you.”

Reaching into one of the big pockets in her vest, she pulled out a fat envelope. “It came early,” she said. “My birthday package from my grandmother. She always gives me a bunch of presents and a ten-dollar bill for every year, so there’s eleven of them this time. Eleven ten-dollar bills. See. She usually gives it to me on my birthday but she mailed it early because she didn’t know how long it would take to get here.”

Staring at the fat roll of money, Dani opened her mouth to say—she didn’t know what. After a moment she closed it again.

“Here.” Pixie was holding out the money, pushing it toward her. “It’s for the running-away fund.” She shrugged. “If I was still at Grandma’s I’d have to put most of it in the bank but here—well, nobody will notice what I do with it. It’s not as much as the bicycle money would have been, but it’s enough, isn’t it?”

Holding Pixie’s birthday money in her hands, Dani sat down on the edge of the daybed, and Pixie sat down beside her. Dani looked at the money, folding and unfolding it. It was more money than she’d ever before held in her own two hands.

“It’s enough, isn’t it?” Pixie was still asking. “Can we all go? All three of us?”

It was quite a while, maybe almost a minute before Dani said, “Yeah. It’s enough.”

“Then what’s wrong?” Pixie asked. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

Dani nodded. “Yes, something’s wrong.” She didn’t know how to tell Pixie. In fact she didn’t even know exactly what she was going to tell her until that moment when she admitted out loud that something was wrong with her decision to run away. She took a deep breath and, reaching over, she shoved the fat wad of money back into Pixie’s lap. “What’s wrong is,” she said, “that I guess I can’t go.”

“You can’t go?” Pixie’s big eyes were electric with surprise. “But—But you said you had to. You said you were going to go no matter what.”

“I know,” Dani said. “I know.” How could she explain? How could she explain in a way that someone like Pixie would understand? Someone who had never had to worry about whether there would be enough money to buy groceries at the end of the week or pay the next month’s rent. There was no way she’d ever understand. And least of all would she ever understand about Linda. How could a kid who had parents who owned custom-built cars, not to mention a rich grandmother in San Francisco, understand about a mother who handled money problems by putting unpaid bills away out of sight and checking out another mushy novel?

“Dani?” Pixie was squirming impatiently. “Why don’t you want to go anymore?”

“Look,” Dani said. “It’s not that I don’t
want
to go. It’s just that …” She stopped and started over. “Look. I’ll tell you why I don’t want to go if you tell me why you
do.
Okay? Just the truth this time. Stormy isn’t here so you don’t have to drag in all that Frankenstein stuff. Just tell me why you really want to run away. Okay?”

Pixie stared at Dani and went on staring for a long time without moving or saying a word. For one of the longest times, in fact, that Dani had ever seen her sit with her mouth shut. And when she finally began to talk it was in a slow, uncertain voice, so that she hardly sounded like Pixie at all. “Why I want to run away?” she said slowly and thoughtfully. “Well, I guess it’s just because I want to go back to my grandmother’s.” She looked at Dani and nodded and then went on sounding a little more like her normal self. “See, I thought I wanted to come out here and live with my parents but nobody else wanted me to. They all said I’d hate it. So I had to show them I meant it.”

“How did you do that?” Dani asked.

Pixie’s lips twitched and the fiery flicker was back in her eyes, at least for a second. “Oh, lots of ways,” she said. “I stopped eating for one thing. And laughing. And talking too. I stopped talking to anyone.”

Dani couldn’t help smiling. “Wow. That must not have been easy.”

“It wasn’t,” Pixie said. “But it worked. I think it was the not talking that did it. That really worried them.”

“Yeah, I guess it would,” Dani said. “So—you won and they let you come. And then you found out they’d been right, and you really did hate it?”

“Um, not really. I liked Rattler Springs and the school all right. I liked how different it all was. I thought school was kind of exciting. And you and Stormy. You and Stormy were the best part. But the part I hated was living with my parents. Living with my parents is absolutely the worst thing in the world.”

Dani didn’t get it. “Then why did you want to do it?” she asked. “You must have known what they were like.”

Pixie shook her head. “No,” she said. “I didn’t. I guess I really didn’t know. They’ve usually been off somewhere like Arabia or Brazil or Antarctica, at least since I was old enough to remember. They usually went someplace where kids weren’t allowed. So I’ve been mostly with my grandmother. And I’d only see them at Grandma’s house when they were home visiting for a little while. But then they came out here and it wasn’t so far away, and it sounded all right to me, so …”

“Yeah, but what I still don’t get,” Dani said, “is what’s so bad about them. I mean”—she grinned—“they’re not really going to try to chop you up for monster parts or anything, and you don’t get starved or—”

“Shhh. Listen.” Pixie was cocking her head. “That’s it. That’s the car.” On her knees on the daybed, she pushed back the drape. “Yes, there it …”

Dani looked too. It was the Smithsons’ big black car, all right, coming up Silver Avenue. Coming up—passing the cabin—and going right on past.

Pixie jumped to her feet. On her way to the door she said, “See. They’re forgetting about me. That’s what’s so awful. They’re
always
forgetting about me.”

She was gone then. Out into the middle of Silver Avenue, where she jumped up and down and waved her arms and yelled until the car came to a stop and slowly backed up. Backed up to where Pixie was waiting, with her hands on her hips.

When the huge black hulk of a car had disappeared up the avenue, Dani turned away from the window and collapsed. She lay there for a while thinking about what Pixie had told her, and also about what she’d told Pixie. And
why.
The
why
was what she thought about most.

It wasn’t until she finally got up off the daybed that she noticed a big fat wad of ten-dollar bills lying on the floor not far from where Pixie had been sitting.

I
T WAS SOME TIME
later that Dani realized how long she’d been standing there. Just standing there in the middle of the room, staring at all that money. She glanced at the clock. Linda might show up at any minute. Dani hurried to her room then and, after counting the eleven bills once more, she tucked them away next to the running-away-fund envelope at the back of her underwear drawer. She would give it back to Pixie the next time she came, all one hundred and ten dollars of it, but in the meantime it needed to be where it wouldn’t be noticed and have to be explained.

Back in the kitchen she just had time to throw away the packing list she’d been working on and pull the chair out from under the doorknob when Linda came up the back steps.

Dinner at the O’Donnells that night was polite enough, but not exactly relaxed. It probably had something to do with the fact that both Dani and her mother were working so hard at not talking about certain subjects.

The subject that Dani’s head was full of, but that she absolutely couldn’t bring up, was her decision not to run away. You couldn’t just come out and tell your mother that you’d decided not to run away after all, especially when she’d never known that you were planning to in the first place. And you certainly couldn’t tell her why you weren’t. At least not until you’d finished figuring it out for yourself.

And as for Linda, she was probably trying not to mention the terrible fight they’d had the night before and all the mean things they’d said to each other. And both of them were trying to not even mention the Grablers’ offer and what Linda was going to do about it. So they couldn’t talk about the quarrel, or about the ranch, or the Grablers. Or even about the bookstore, because of the fact that Linda was about to lose her job there. It was as if they’d made this silent agreement that they weren’t going to mention anything that might start another fight. But the trouble was, that didn’t seem to leave very many topics. Dani didn’t know what on earth they would have had to talk about if it hadn’t been for Stormy.

The subject of Stormy came up as soon as they sat down to eat. Linda suddenly looked around and said, “Still no sign of Stormy? Was he here at all today?”

“No,” Dani said, “but I found out why he hasn’t been here. He’s been sick.”

“Sick?” Linda looked worried.

“Oh, he’s better now,” Dani said quickly. “He said it was something he ate.”

“I’m not surprised,” Linda said. “He seems to live on the most awful trash. I don’t think his mother ever cooks for him.” She sighed. “But then maybe there’s no way she could. I don’t suppose they even have a kitchen of their own.”

“No, they don’t. They just have two hotel rooms. Stormy’s is about as big as a closet.”

Linda looked at her curiously. “Have you seen their rooms? I thought you said he didn’t ever let anyone see where he lives.”

“That’s right,” Dani said quickly. “He never did want me to see it.” She considered mentioning how she’d happened to wind up there and the whole thing about the Ronnie problem. But that would involve telling what she’d said to Ronnie that made him so mad. In the end she decided to say simply, “I never did see it until this morning. That was how I found out about him being sick.”

Linda smiled. “It was good of you to visit him, Dani,” she said. “I should at least have asked Gloria about him, but I didn’t want to go looking for her and risk running into the Grablers until …” She stopped and got up quickly to light the burner under the teakettle. When she came back to the table she asked, “But you’re sure he is getting better?”