Bigger than a Bread Box (12 page)

Evidently a lot of people
, I thought. Out loud I said, “Thanks.”

I shuffled up the stairs behind the red pouf of Megan’s hair and into school. I trudged through the sea of kids whose names I mostly still didn’t know to what now felt like my doom.

When we got inside, there was Hannah, standing at her locker with her back to us. We walked up the hall toward her. I felt like I might puke. The jacket was weighing on my shoulders, pulling me down.

“Hey, Hannah!” Cat called out eagerly.
“Hannah!”

Hannah whipped around, her hair fanning out, her eyes wide open. She began to say, “Guess what! Someone stole my—” Then she took everything in—she saw
me
.

She stopped speaking.

She closed her perfect mouth.

She looked me up and down.

She crossed her arms and smiled, suddenly much calmer.

“I was just saying,” she said, “that someone stole my coat.” She laughed. “What’s up, Becky? Are you
someone
now?”

“No,” I said, not thinking.

“You’re
not
someone?” She smiled meanly. “I didn’t think so.”

“No. I mean, I didn’t steal it. I—I—”

“What, you were only borrowing it?” she asked with a smirk.

“No, really. I bought it. Online.”

“
Sure
you did,” whispered Cat.

The other girls were enjoying this. I glanced over at Megan. She avoided making eye contact with me. She chewed her thumbnail and looked at her hand intently as she did it.

I squirmed. “No, but … well … maybe someone else stole it and posted it on eBay, and then I bought it without knowing,” I said.

“I had it yesterday,” said Hannah flatly.

“Maybe it’s not the same coat!” I said, grasping at straws. I tried to keep my voice from rising or shaking. I didn’t want to cry. I wouldn’t be able to stand it if I cried now. “And it’s just a coincidence that you got yours stolen when I happened to get mine.”

“Unlikely,” said Hannah. “Since mine was one of a kind. Mine was special.”

“We told her that,” Maya rushed to say, looking proud of herself.

“Yeah,” said Cat. “We told her.”

I felt like I might have a heart attack. Did twelve-year-olds have heart attacks?

The other girls backed away slightly as Hannah, still laughing, moved in on me to inspect the coat. She ran
her finger along the red stitching. Then, with a quick jerk, she pulled the neck of the coat out and peered down at the tag.

I went limp. “It’s not yours!” I bleated, hoping against hope. “It’s a knockoff.”

Hannah stopped laughing.

“I didn’t steal it—”

“Oh, Becky,” said Hannah, her voice serious, cold, thin, and as sharp as a razor. “It’s mine—look!”

The other girls craned their necks and bunched around me to see, like dogs in a pack. They all stared at the back of my neck. Then they all stepped away from me.

“You’re a thief,” said Hannah in that same steely voice, “and a liar, but at least now we know it. To think I almost felt bad for you yesterday. I
almost
apologized for saying that stuff about your dad.”

Hannah jerked at the neck of the jacket, and I closed my eyes. The coat came off inside out, spilling those stupid plastic coffee cards everywhere. I heard them fall and hit the ground. When I opened my eyes again, I saw what everyone else had seen a minute before—her name,
Hannah Ross
, ironed neatly onto the tag by some mother who did things like that for her kid. Hannah’s mother.

I looked around me. All the girls were smiling. Except Megan, who just looked surprised.

I ran, pushing my way down the hall, through crowds of kids who would never be my friends.

Behind me, someone yelled out, “Now I wonder where all that candy was coming from too!”

A second voice chimed, “Yeah!”

I pushed open a door and dashed into a stairwell, down into the basement, where nobody ever went. When I thought I heard footsteps on the stairs behind me, I turned a corner into a dark hallway. Quickly I grabbed for the first door I saw and threw myself inside. I looked around and saw that I was in a janitor’s closet. I locked the door.

Then I sat down on an overturned bucket and waited silently.

I
wasn’t
going to cry. I refused. I couldn’t give someone like Hannah—someone so shallow, so horrible, so dumb—any more of me. I wouldn’t waste my tears on her. I just sat in that tiny room, under those greenish fluorescent lights and surrounded by mops, and felt like crying.

I wasn’t sure how long I could stand to sit there. It reminded me of that first day in Atlanta, in Gran’s attic. How long could I go without doing anything?

I reached into my backpack for a pen and a notebook. At first I thought I might try to write a poem, but that just felt too … silly. I wasn’t a poet, and I didn’t have any idea how to write a poem, not a real one. In school back home, whenever we were supposed to write a poem for an assignment, I just made a list of words that sounded good together, words that were kind of emotional—dark, cold, rain, night, blah blah blah. I usually got an A, but the poems
weren’t very good, not really. I knew that. Especially not after hearing the poems in Mr. Cook’s class.

Instead I decided to just write down everything that had happened, as best I could, because it was something to
do
and because I thought it might be a little like talking to someone—even if I was only talking to myself and a piece of paper. I wasn’t trying to make it sound good. I was just trying to get it all down. All the things that had happened so far. I wrote about Mom, and Dad, and the night the power went out. I wrote about driving to Atlanta, and about Gran, and the bread box. I wrote about everything I’d wished for and about my walks with Lew. I wrote about Megan’s poufy hair, about laughing at all Hannah’s stupid, mean jokes, even when it felt wrong. I wrote about telling Hannah off. I wrote for hours in that funny closet that smelled like bleach, but then, when I got to the part about the jacket, I felt myself start to get all prickly and upset again.

I tried to push that down. I clenched the pen in my fingers and gritted my teeth and stared at my feet. I said under my breath, “She isn’t worth it. No crying. Dad would never cry over someone like that.”

I was
not
going to cry over her. I was going to keep writing. I took a deep breath and wrote down, “So what? I took a jacket. Big deal.” I added, “It was an accident and I am not a thief.”

But staring at what I’d just written, I began to think
about whether that was true. If the bread box had magically whisked the one-of-a-kind jacket away from Hannah’s house, then where had all the
other
stuff come from? In fact, maybe I
was
a thief. The candy and the chips—maybe
everything
was stolen. I closed my notebook, chewed my pen, and thought.…

The fries
had
come from Jimmy’s Diner, after all. I’d wished for them to be from Jimmy’s specifically. Of course, I’d only been imagining they’d be exactly like Jimmy’s fries. I hadn’t meant to steal them from Jimmy himself, but maybe they’d flown right off the table under some poor guy’s nose, just as he was about to take a bite. Was that what had happened?

Wow.

If that was true, I guessed the chips and cookies had been whisked to me from other places in Baltimore. I imagined Lew’s Kandy Kakes flying off a rack in a 7-Eleven, right in front of some startled teenager who was reaching for them. I thought of a bag of chips, blinking out of sight at the Royal Farms.

Of course, the keys really
had
been my mom’s, so they’d been taken from wherever Mom had left them. Why hadn’t that occurred to me at the time? It wasn’t like there were two identical sets of keys floating around the world, each with a worn leather tag that said
OCEAN CITY, MD
. The box had just retrieved them.

Then … what about the spoon? Mom had said it was
expensive. Who had I taken that from? I remembered it being cold. Where had it been the moment before I found it? Who were Adda and Harlan?

And what about the TV? Had I stolen a TV? The magnitude of what I’d been doing all these weeks hit me. Wow. I really was a thief! I was almost impressed with myself. Ashamed too, but wow.

Of
course
the phone hadn’t worked for long, because whoever the number really belonged to had probably gotten a new one and canceled their service.

And the iPod filled with songs—whose was it? Who had picked all those songs carefully, only to have me take it?

At last I thought about the money, and I wanted to fall over. I had stolen a
thousand
dollars!

And a diamond! I was a diamond thief!

I didn’t want to cry now, not at all, but I also didn’t want to write anymore. I only wanted to run home and bash the bread box to pieces. Throw it into traffic to be hit by a truck. I
knew
not to steal. I knew I had to return everything. But how? How could I possibly do that? How could I make this right? How could I figure out where it had all come from? There was no way to know, was there?

I remembered all the crumpled ones and fives. Were they even all from the same place? Maybe they were from different places, from the pockets of people who really needed that money. Maybe they’d come from Gran! Had I stolen from Gran? I groaned out loud.

Too loud I guess, because right after that, I heard someone call out, “Who’s in there?”

Moments later, someone was banging on the door. And when I opened it, a white-haired lady with a huge ring of keys, someone I’d never seen before, peered in. She asked me where I was supposed to be. When I didn’t answer, she dragged me up to the main office, where Mrs. Cahalen gave a deep sigh as I walked through the door. Then she motioned me into a chair for a little talk about how everyone knew I was having a hard time but that I needed to try harder, for Gran’s sake.

“You don’t want to be a burden to Ruby, do you, dear? Not when she’s opened her home to you?” Mrs. Cahalen raised her eyebrows at me and peered into my face.

I
didn’t
want to be a burden, actually, but I also didn’t think Gran would ever say that about me.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll try harder.” I glanced over at the white-haired lady, who was still standing by the door to the office. Didn’t she have anything better to do?

“Well,” said Mrs. Cahalen with a sigh, “I
guess
we can give you one more chance without bothering your
poor
grandmother, or Principal Harding. As long as you promise to try …”

I did not like Mrs. Cahalen.

With an irritating glance at the white-haired lady, Mrs. Cahalen opened the door to her office. “Can you be sure that Becky makes it to Mrs. Hamill’s class, please?”

Mrs. Hamill? Third period already? Had I been in the closet that long?

Perfect.

The next thing I knew, I was headed back down the hall with my arm clenched in the white-haired lady’s skinny fingers. She had a mean grip.

The old lady opened the door on a roomful of kids with their heads bent over their desks, bent over the big unit test on mass and matter. She raised her eyebrows at Mrs. Hamill, who beckoned me in with a concerned look.

Hannah looked up from her paper as I slid into the seat beside her. She slitted her eyes and smiled as she whispered, “Thief.”

I just looked down at my test. I stared hard, until the letters got all blurry, and I said to myself,
No crying, no crying, no crying
. It worked. After a while, the letters unblurred and I could read the first question. I took a deep breath.

I was starting to scribble “Epicurus” when the meaning of those words hit me.

I reread the sentence: “The sum total of all things was always such as it is now.” I scanned farther down and saw the words “in a closed system, matter is neither created nor destroyed.” I couldn’t read any further. The letters swam and blurred as I thought about the magic, about the unicorn horn the box never gave me, and the keys it did. I thought about where everything had come from.

Of course I’d been stealing. I’d been stealing all along. Things couldn’t be wished from thin air.
Of course, of course, of course
. We’d been talking about it this whole time, in school of all places. I just hadn’t been paying attention. The more I thought about it, the crazier I felt. Everything was coming undone inside and outside me. So I decided to stop thinking altogether and concentrated instead on simply trying not to scream. I stared out the window and left the whole test blank. It didn’t matter anyway. It was just a stupid test some girl named Becky was taking in a school she didn’t really go to that was full of people who hated her, because she really was a thief and she deserved it.

When the bell rang, I flew out of that room. I flew out of the building. For the first time in my life, I cut school. I didn’t think twice about it. I was never going back, not ever. I didn’t care what my mom said. Becky was gone, and Rebecca was lost, and nothing made good sense because nothing made sense at all.

C
HAPTER 13