The Lost Days (24 page)

Day 28

Ümlaut brought me a note from Jakey this morning. Here it is:

That was pretty depressing by itself, but then Molly Merriweather marched in with her suitcases and her big smile and her positive, can-do attitude and that made it even worse.

I put my head in my arms and sent powerful thought waves of aggravation toward that version of Myself who put me in this impossible situation. I was vaguely aware of Molly saying a bunch of “Hey, girl, I’m here for you” and “It’s all gonna work out fine.” It was enough to make me promise myself never to show weakness in front of her again.

So I forced myself to recover from my three minutes of despair and get back to business. Unfortunately, it was not really possible
for me to get back to business with Molly in the picture, asking questions about who was the hottest guy in town, and offering ridiculous non-solutions like “Hey—let’s ask Ripper what he thinks we should do!!” Eventually I had to admit defeat. So I made another promise to myself: I would do my best to neutralize whatever crazy plans she came up with, or die trying. Then I handed over my notebook and told her she had an hour to come up with something quality or she was off the case.

At least she’s a fast reader. Within twenty minutes of flipping the pages and saying “Hmmm” and “Uh huh, huh,” she tossed the notebook back at me.

Fine. Change of scenery. Cats and Molly and Raven and I closed up the café, piled into the van, and rolled out.

We had been in the van only a couple minutes when I heard Raven say, “Sandstorm.”

“Huh?”

She pointed off toward the edge of town. “Sandstorm.”

She was right, my sandstorm was building up, maybe a mile away. It was nice and easy to see, what with so many of Blackrock’s buildings lying in ruins. I thought we’d probably have an hour, maybe two, before it hit us.

We rolled on. I stayed hidden in the back while Molly sat up front and took in the “sights” of Blackrock. That took about three minutes. We had seen all the rubble we needed to see, and were trying to turn down the alley behind the El Dungeon, when we were stopped at a construction roadblock. Molly leaned out the window to chat with the construction crew.

I wished I could stay cool, but all I wanted to do was chain myself to the building to keep them from wrecking it. Well, at least they were stopped for now.

Since we couldn’t park at the El Dungeon just yet, we drove on aimlessly. Suddenly there was this awful howling, I mean AWFUL, and the sandstorm slapped us like a big heavy sand-hand out of the sky. Got those windows rolled up fast and stopped the van, since we couldn’t see anything but sand out there anymore.

“Uh, sorry, guys. I didn’t think it would hit this fast. We might be here a while.”

“That’s cool, why don’t we get some good lines written for Raven?”

I have to say, there is no way I would have come up with the sort of overblown, drama-dripping, soap-operatic lines Molly
wrote for Raven. Tell you the truth, they were embarrassing: “Stand up and face me like a man,” “What of your professed love for me?” “I gave you a challenge. Tell me, how have you fared?” Ugh!!

But who knows? Maybe all that will be just perfect for him. Hey, he’s probably never heard Raven say a complete sentence. He’ll be lapping it up!

About an hour later

Still in the van, parked in the sandstorm. No sign of it letting up. We are all a little stir-crazy. Cats and Molly are bouncing off the walls. Am trying to distract the cats by tossing bits of wadded-up paper for them to chase, but they are just getting more wound up. I’m afraid it’s only a matter of time before one of them needs to use the catbox, which right now is the floor of the van. Am also trying to distract Molly with idle conversation. Pretty torturous
for me since she mainly talks about her hundreds of acquaintances and their various dramas. I did find out one interesting thing: Molly says that after she met me, she went back to my house in Blandindulle, where she was indeed staying with my mom, and looked through all the photo albums there, and get this, our childhood pictures don’t look anything alike! So, chances are—and we both like this idea a lot—in a year or so, we won’t even look like each other anymore.

“It’s like we grew together, and soon we’ll grow apart,” Molly says, very dramatically.

She also tells me that she has been calling Sharon and George regularly these days. “Just to make sure no one’s staying in my room.” She looks at me and laughs. “No offense.”

Man, I have to solve my problems fast and get Molly out of my hair SOONLIKE. Am waiting very impatiently for the sand to clear up.

About two hours later

BREAKTHROUGH!!!!!
(Finally!)

We had all been sitting around in the van for several hours while we waited for the sandstorm to stop. Molly was getting testy, and trying to talk me into sending Raven out into the storm to turn off the generator, which wasn’t going to happen. That girl does not take well to boredom. Eventually I had to start giving her assignments. First I tried to get her to write a well-supported descriptive essay on what she did last summer, but she flat-out refused. Then I told her she should talk to Raven for a while, but that made her even crabbier. Finally I told her to look around the van for McFreely’s collar and she did give it a shot for about five minutes and then gave up. She informed me she was going crazy and plopped herself down on the backseat of the van nice and hard, which apparently unlatched some sort of latch, causing the seat to spring up violently and pitch Molly face-first onto the floor. When the cats and I got done laughing our cheeks off, I thought to inspect under the seat, which is where I found THE GLORIOUS AMNESIA DEVICES.

Oh lovely. Good old cranky Molly. Good old amnesia devices! I wanted to hug them. Uh, unfortunately there is no RESTORE device. Or maybe it’s fortunate, since I really don’t know if I would’ve had the self-control to maintain my amnesia for one more minute. Instead, there’s a BACKUP device and a BLOCK device, which has several dials where you can set expiration dates
for several different cases of amnesia. (Which gives me ideas. But more on that later.) My own current case of the forgetfulness is going to clear up in two days. Which, according to Molly, is when my mom expects me home.

Am extremely happy to know there is a solid expiration date on the amnesia.