Bigger than a Bread Box (13 page)

I
bolted out into the chilly day, down the steps of the school. I ran and ran, barely glancing around me for traffic, just staring at my feet, flashing in a red blur above the cracked sidewalks. I ran away from the school, away from the house. I ran along a hilly street, past the park with the zoo in it and along a bridge that crossed a highway. I stopped on the bridge for a minute and pressed my face and hands against the chain-link fence that was there to keep people from jumping. The metal was cold against my cheeks. Below me, the highway rushed loud like waves crashing. It sounded strangely like the ocean, like home.

A woman walked past me and gave me a concerned look, so I started running again, through intersections. Somewhere along the way, I lost my headband. When I finally stopped, to bend over double and take a deep, painful breath, I looked up and found I was in front of
a deserted gas station, staring across four lanes of traffic at the wall that surrounded the old cemetery. Where I’d walked that day with Lew in his stroller.

I wished I had Lew with me now.

No, I didn’t. I wished I were home with Lew.
Home
home. And I wished that none of this had ever happened: not the box or Mom and Dad fighting or Atlanta or Hannah or any of it. But that was one wish I couldn’t even steal.

A few feet away, on the bench in the old gas station, a man was asleep under a dirty blanket for everyone to see. Surrounded by shopping carts of dirty clothes and aluminum cans. I thought about how tired he must be, to sleep like that, in public. I guess people get to a point where they don’t care what anyone else thinks of them. I almost wished I could feel like that.

I didn’t have anywhere else to go, and I figured the cemetery was as good a place as any to waste time, so I crossed the street and climbed over the brick wall. Then I wandered around for a while, staring at the old names and the overgrown plots, picking up trash and stuffing it into a torn McDonald’s bag I found on the ground. The wind was biting, and I didn’t have a jacket on; plus there was a lot more trash than I could stuff into the bag. What good was it doing? I stopped trying to pick up the graveyard and sat in the doorway of a mausoleum—one of Lew’s “little houses.” The stone floor was frigid
through my jeans, but at least I was out of the wind. I pulled up my knees and hugged myself, shivering.

I tried not to think of all the dead people, or of the jacket, or of Baltimore, or of my dad. I realized I had a lot of things to
not
think about. But the thoughts that kept coming back, the ones I couldn’t shove away, were questions: How could I possibly fix any of this? How could I return what I’d taken? I wanted to feel clean again. I wanted to undo what I’d done. As bad as it had been to be in Atlanta without Dad, it was even worse to be in Atlanta without Dad and feel like a dirty, rotten thief—a dirty, rotten, freezing, lonely thief who couldn’t tell anyone what she’d done.

I couldn’t go anywhere warm, not to the library or to the coffee shop, because I was so obviously twelve years old and supposed to be in school. Kids are never invisible during the day. Everyone knows if you’re alone and you’re not at school, you’re cutting. I couldn’t go home because Gran—and Mom if she was around—would want to know why I was back home in the middle of the day. So I sat there, shivering and thinking about how much my life had changed in a month. What would my old self in Baltimore make of where I was today? I didn’t think she’d believe it.

Then something weird happened. I was just sitting there, cold and awful, stuck and lonely, when I heard a
flapping of wings above me, on the roof of the mausoleum. I didn’t pay too much attention at first, because I was absorbed in feeling crappy. Until, over the sound of my own teeth chattering, I heard a
skrreeee
! I jumped up and spun around. Sure enough, there on the roof of the little stone building sat a seagull, just one.

I didn’t know if it was one of
my
gulls or if it was some other lost bird, but I felt a little better when I saw it, a little less alone. I looked at those ugly, beady eyes just a few feet above my head and remembered a line from English class. One of Mr. Cook’s poems had somehow stuck in my head.

“Hope is the thing with feathers,” I said out loud.

The gull, apparently, didn’t care about poetry, because it flew off. But somehow, the words made me feel better. So I said them again, louder. “Hope is the thing with feathers.” It felt good to say something out loud.

Then I sneezed, and that made me realize how badly my nose was running.

“This is stupid,” I said to the graveyard, as though the dead people were listening, bored in their coffins. “I don’t have to sit here like this. I
don’t
. Even if I am a thief.”

So I headed home, walking now instead of running, and thought about how nothing
here
mattered, none of it. Not Hannah, not the other silly girls at the lunch table, not even Megan. Not the test and not Mrs. Hamill. That school wasn’t my school. This life wasn’t my life. I could walk away from the bread box, and nobody would ever
know a thing about what I’d done, except me. I could walk away from the school, and Becky too. Anyway, we’d eventually go home to Baltimore. Wouldn’t we? It was taking a long time, but we
would
go back in the end. One way or another. Then all of this would lift out of my story, and I’d be okay again. Myself again.

If I got in trouble at home … Well, if I got in trouble, I got in trouble. It didn’t matter. What was the very worst Mom could do to me? So all the way home I planned to tell my mom I refused to go back. I was done with lying. Instead I would simply inform her that I’d left school, and I didn’t care what she thought about it.

“I
will
go to school, to
my
school, at home, just as soon as you can get me there!” I rehearsed the words under my breath.

When I walked through the front door, I found them all in the living room, playing Chutes and Ladders. Mom was there, drinking coffee in her scrubs, and right away she asked me, “What are
you
doing home so early?”

I lost my nerve. I stood there, all sniffly and cold, with my teeth chattering, and I didn’t have the energy for a fight. I didn’t want to argue today. It had been a bad-enough day. I just wanted to be home.

“Um, I’m sick,” I said, without meaning to. “They sent me home.” I didn’t mean to lie. It just kind of popped out.

“Really?” asked Gran, looking up from a seed catalogue. “
How
sick? What
kind
of sick?”

“Sick sick sick sick sick.” Lew sang the word like a nursery rhyme.

“Just … sick. You know, like a bad cold,” I said.

I knew it was a pretty weak lie, but it was too late to change my story. So I coughed as loud as I could. I was almost certain I could throw up if I needed to. Just from feeling miserable.

“Why didn’t they call us?” asked my mom, setting down her coffee. “To come and bring you home? What kind of school lets a kid just leave like that?”

“It’s only four blocks,” I argued lamely. “It was easier to walk.”

“That so?” Mom answered me, chewing her lip. I could tell she didn’t believe me, but she surprised me. She said, “Well, get into bed, and I’ll be in to see you in a minute.”

With an extra cough, I headed for my room.

Behind me I heard Gran say, “Well, now,
that’s
a load of bunk if I ever heard it!”

Mom answered her, “Of course it is, but let’s let it go this once. She’s got a lot going on right now. And I’m hardly worried about Rebecca becoming a juvenile delinquent. She’s not that kind of kid.”

With a sigh, I climbed into bed and turned over, thinking that my pillow was the warmest thing I’d ever felt in my life. I also wondered if there were any other diamond thieves who were so misunderstood. I wondered how, exactly,
you knew a juvenile delinquent when you saw one. I wondered just what kind of a kid I really was. Then I wondered what everyone was saying about me at school. I could just imagine Hannah’s sneer. After that I wondered when the school would call, and I started to get scared. Now that I’d lied, I didn’t want to get caught.

And this may be the worst thing I did with the bread box, because when I did it, I knew better. It was just downright sneaky, but I did it anyway. Climbing out of bed, I went over to the bread box and whispered, “Gran’s phone, please?” Her little black phone appeared in the box, with all those silly numbers taped to the back.

I turned it off and slipped it under my mattress.

That night, maybe as some kind of karmic punishment, I really got sick. I guess I caught a cold sitting in the windy graveyard. I even had a fever, but it wasn’t so bad, really. Sometimes it’s nice to be sick, to give up trying to function, to crawl into bed and be cared for a little. Nobody suggested I go to school the next morning, and Gran brought me chicken soup for lunch. Lew shared his crayons with me, and his gross blue blanket. He read me a story, holding the book upside down.
The Runaway Bunny
. In his version, the baby bunny actually got caught on the fishhook. Then it turned into a dinosaur.

Mom had to work during the day, but when she came home in the afternoon, she brought me a stack of library
books. They all looked really great, just the kind of books I liked best. How had Mom done such a good job of picking them out? How could she be so smart about me in some ways and so dumb in others?

All day Friday I just lay there in bed, reading and drinking ginger ale. The whole time the bread box sat there on the table, and when I wasn’t reading, I stared at it. I thought about how to try and return the things I’d taken. I thought that might make me feel better, to send everything back where it had come from. The only thing I could think of was to put everything in the box and say, “I wish you would all go back to wherever you came from!” When I tried that, nothing happened.

That night, just as I was drifting off to sleep, a thought struck me. “Adda and Harlan!” I said, sitting up in the dark room. “Who are Adda and Harlan?”

I would probably never find the owners of the crumpled dollar bills, but the spoon … I snuck out of my room and into the den, where Gran had her desk. I turned on the computer in the darkness and Googled “Adda and Harlan.” There was only one entry—one single entry in the whole entire world. At last, some luck!

I sat there at Gran’s big rolltop desk, staring at the glowing screen, and felt giddy, and thankful that “Adda and Harlan” weren’t “Betty and Joe.” I pulled a sheet of paper from the trash and tore off a tiny piece. On it I wrote in my smallest handwriting:

I folded up the tiny bit of paper and put it in my locket.

On Saturday I was miraculously better. I woke up to the sun shining through my window and felt great. I put on my clothes, brushed my hair, and went into the kitchen for breakfast, like everything was normal.

“Guess what!” I said, reaching for a cereal bowl. “I feel better!”

“Well,” said Gran. “Isn’t
that
just the funniest thing, how a body always feels better on the weekend!”

I pretended not to hear her and took my Cheerios into the living room. Lew followed me. We watched
Mary Poppins
under a blanket, even though I’d seen it a million times before. Lew hadn’t, and it was nice, sitting on the couch together, laughing. It was how Saturday mornings are supposed to be.

C
HAPTER 14

L
ater that day, I offered to take Lew for a walk. It was still cold, but I was itching to do something after my day in bed. I bundled up and walked fast to keep warm, pushing Lew’s stroller quickly along the uneven sidewalks of the neighborhood. I didn’t think about much of anything. My face was crammed down into my scarf, and my breath made the inside of it all hot and wet. That made me think that maybe mufflers are called mufflers because they muffle anything you might want to say. I felt nicely muffled. Lew stared at everything we passed from under a hat of Gran’s that was way too big for him.

We walked past the park and the zoo, south to where the houses got smaller and uglier. The dogs we passed had scars and no collars, and their fur was reddish from lying in the Georgia clay. We walked past vacant lots overgrown with viny green plants. As we passed a bus
stop with an overflowing trash can, a skinny lady came up, with bare legs in that winter weather, and asked us for a dollar.

For a minute I thought about handing her a thousand dollars and a diamond, but then I got scared and shook my head. “I … I don’t have any money,” I said, then turned the stroller around and headed back the way I’d come, almost running.

I was lost in my thoughts, mostly thinking about the bread box, trying to decide if the box was altogether bad. I was pretty sure there was nothing wrong with finding my mom’s keys for her when she lost them. But I knew I couldn’t use the box to get stuff I wanted anymore. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know how the box got things for me.

While I was doing all this thinking, Lew was staring at everything we passed with a glazed expression. He looked cold.