Sammy Keyes and the Runaway Elf (20 page)

I had to forgive her. I had to find a way to forgive my mother.

So I closed my eyes and tried to remember everything. Not just the past year. Not just the bad stuff. Everything.

I remembered the swings at the park and the way she’d wave after me when she’d drop me off at school. I remembered how she used to call me Sunshine and tousle my hair. How she helped me learn the difference between little b and little d. How she’d sing rounds with me in the car. How she’d take me down to the farmers’ market every Wednesday night, not to stock up on vegetables but just so we could walk around together.

And then I thought about how she’d cry herself to sleep some nights and could never explain to me why.

And when I was done soaking the carpet about
that
, I wiped off my face and got busy doing what I’d come there to do.

It was hard deciding. They were all so pretty. But in the end I picked a pastel pink and white one for Grams, a royal blue one for my mother, and one that looked like a sunrise for myself. I folded them up together, then took one last look around and whispered, “Thank you” as I closed the door.

When I got home, I locked myself in the bathroom with
paper and ribbons, and wrapped up the afghans, one by one. And as I placed them under our little tree, I got that feeling again. Warm, happy. Peaceful.

Now you may think it’s kind of strange, giving gifts for Christmas that have been taken from a dead woman’s apartment, but to me those afghans aren’t just presents to put under the tree. They’re like the fabric of life.

And if Mrs. Graybill were here, I don’t think she’d chase me down and take them back. No, something tells me that Daisy Graybill—the real Daisy Graybill—would give them to me herself if she could.

You’d think I could spend the night at a friend’s house without finding myself knee-deep in pig poop. But no. I couldn’t even
make
it there without practically breaking every bone in my body, and by the time the clock was gonging in the New Year, well, I was in so deep it was going to take a
backhoe
to get me out.

Marissa McKenze is the last person on earth you should ever accept a ride from. And I
knew
that. Trouble is, she had a bike, Holly had a bike, and all I had were my high-tops and the distant memory of a skateboard that had disappeared while I was playing video games at the mall.

And maybe I should have wobbled around on Holly’s handlebars instead, but Holly wasn’t offering. Marissa was. And since Dot’s new house was clear out in Sisquane and I didn’t want to spend all morning getting there, what choice did I have?

Actually, things were going pretty well. Our duffel bags were in back, bungeed tight and balanced right, and it was real foggy out, so Marissa was driving kind of carefully for once. We’d made it three whole blocks down Broadway and another three whole blocks down Cook Street without so much as a serious wobble. But then, just as I was starting to relax a little, these guys come barreling down a cross street on skateboards.

Holly stopped. Just locked up her brakes and slid to a halt. Marissa, on the other hand,
started
to stop, but then changed her mind and decided to
go
. And as we’re heading for the collision of the century, she lets go of the handlebars and cries, “Timber!”

She goes down sideways, and I sail through the air, straight for this guy who’s ducking and weaving on his skateboard, trying to avoid me. But I’m flying at him like a human cannonball, and he doesn’t have a chance. Not a prayer. I nail him,
smack!
right to the asphalt.

His skateboard goes flipping off, and his mouth does, too, letting loose with a string of four-letter synonyms for Ouch!

I untangle myself from him and hold on to my arm, because it hurts pretty bad and blood’s already seeping through my sweatshirt. He’s still swearing away, kind of dancing around flicking a wrist, but he interrupts himself long enough to say, “Stupid females!”

I sit there in the middle of the street holding my arm, trying to contain the pain. “I’m sorry. I … I …”

“You what?” he snaps. “You thought you could ride around town like a circus act and people would stop and cheer?”

Blood’s starting to ooze through the right knee of my jeans, and since my whole body’s pretty sore from having had an asphalt adjustment, I don’t feel like arguing or explaining. I just sit there with my eyes closed and say, “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry.”

Then I hear someone laughing. So I look up from my private little spot in the middle of the street and what do I see? A guy with brown hair and baggy pants on his way to becoming hysterical about bruised-up bodies in the street. And I’m about to tell Baggy Boy to shut up when I hear someone
else
laughing behind me. I turn around, and there’s Marissa and the guy she’d crashed into, dusting
off, laughing. And then there’s Holly, straddling her bike with her hand in front of her mouth, about to bust up, too.

Well. Obviously they’re all just fine. And I suppose I was, too, only I wasn’t ready to admit it yet. I was too mad. Mad at Marissa for being such a bad driver. Mad at my mother for buying me a pink angora sweater for Christmas instead of something I wanted—like a new skateboard or a bike. And the more I sat there, the madder I got, and the more I wanted to kill the guy who’d stolen my skateboard in the first place. I mean, if I still had it, I wouldn’t be sitting there in the middle of the street all banged up from riding around town like a circus act.

Then I hear Marissa’s victim say, “You don’t remember me, do you?”

Marissa looks at him a little closer, then says, “Oh, yeah … you’re …”

He helps her out. “Taylor. You asked me for directions the first day of school, remember?”

Well,
I
recognize him. He’s Taylor Briggs, slick-and-slimy eighth grader. Good friends with Heather Acosta, red-and-rotten seventh grader. Taylor’s older brother is best friends with Marissa’s cousin Brandon; Taylor’s the one who told Heather about Marissa being rich, and Taylor’s the one who told Heather that I looked like a
fourth
grader.

Now, Heather may be cat hair in my craw, and there’s probably not a kid at William Rose Junior High who doesn’t know that truth to her is a foreign language—one she’s not about to learn. But that first day of seventh
grade, when she told me that Taylor thought I looked like a fourth grader, you could tell—there was truth behind it.

So I’m sitting there, mad at the world, mad at Marissa for laughing with a guy who’s friends with Heather and thinks I look like a fourth grader, when Baggy Boy comes up to the guy I’d bombed and hands him back his skateboard. “Here you go, Snake. You all right?”

He says, “Yeah, dude. Thanks,” and gives me one last glare.

I’m sitting there thinking, Snake? What kind of stupid name is Snake? when I notice the bottom of his skateboard. It’s a metal-gray color, but it’s been spray-painted that way. And I can tell, because underneath, where the gray’s been scraped away jumping curbs, it’s purple. A light purple with dark veins running through it. Like it had been dipped in molten amethyst. And there’s only one other board I’ve ever seen that looks like that.

Mine.

I get up and say, “Hey, wait a second!”

He turns around.

“Where’d you get that skateboard?”

He sneers at me. “Oh, now you want to learn to ride? Don’t
even
go there.” He looks over at Baggy for a laugh. “Walkin’s more your speed.”

He turns to go, so I say, “No really. Wait a minute. Where’d you get it?” I run up for a better look, and when I see the foot grip, it’s like my heart hits rapids.

Along the back of the foot grip, there’s a three-inch strip missing. A three-inch strip completely gone except for a little piece sticking out like Florida in a States puzzle.

So between Florida on the top and amethyst on the bottom, there’s no doubt in my mind: That skateboard’s mine. And suddenly I’m not feeling my banged-up bones or the blood trickling down my leg. I’m feeling mad. Branding-hot mad.

I close in on the guy, saying, “Where did you
get
it?”

He’s looking at me like I’ve got something contagious. “I bought it off a friend, okay?”

I get right in his face. “Well, where did your
friend
get it, then?”

“Hey, back off, psycho!” He looks over at Taylor, then back at me. “At a garage sale, all right? Like it’s any of your business.”

“It
is
my business!” I twist the board and point to the band of purple. “This is
my
skateboard and I can prove it. I wrote my initials right up here.”

He snickers. “I don’t see no initials.”

“Scrape off the paint.”

He backs away from me, so I lunge for the skateboard. “I said, scrape off the paint!”

He wrestles it out of my hands. “You
are
psycho!”

I can’t just let him walk away. That’s
my
skateboard. And somehow I can’t find it in me to reason with the guy or have a nice little chat about how the right thing for him to do would be to give it back. No, watching him walk off with my skateboard, there’s only one thing left to do.

Jump him.

I go flying through the air to tackle him again, but this time he doesn’t go down. He spins and bucks and finally just throws me off. “Dude! Get a grip!”

Marissa helps me up and whispers, “It isn’t worth it, Sammy. It’s only a skateboard.”

“But it’s
my
skateboard, and he knows it!”

Holly calls, “Yeah! Hey—that thing’s pretty beat-up anyway. Why don’t you scrape the paint off and settle this?” She shrugs. “Unless you’re lying and
you
stole it.”

Snake takes a step toward us. “Who you callin’ a liar? You think I’d want to
steal
this thing?”