Taking Care of Terrific by Lois Lowry

that Hawk gave you?"
    "Oh, I meant to show you." He took the folded paper from his pocket. "It's his phone number. And I gave him mine. Just in case we have to get in touch about Saturday night."
    I looked at the seven meaningless numbers written in pencil on the slip of paper. They weren't entirely meaningless; I recognized the exchange as Cambridge. So that was where Hawk lived.
    It was a little weird, thinking about where he lived. To me he was just a Public Garden person. A friend from the green place. It made me uncomfortable to think, as I did for a minute, about what his house might be like, about whether he had a wife, or children. How on earth did they survive—or, in fact, did he survive—on those few coins that people tossed into his saxophone case?
    "It's Cambridge he goes home to," I said. "I
wonder where the bag lady goes.
All
the bag ladies."
    "Maybe it's better not to think about that," Seth said as we turned onto Marlborough Street. "Anyway, we know where they'll be going Saturday night at midnight, right?"
    "Long as she doan rain," we said together. Then we both laughed, and suddenly Seth reached over abruptly and took my hand. A little awkwardly, we held hands the rest of the way to my house.
    I don't think it was for romantic reasons or anything. I think it was because we were both scared.

Chapter 14
    It rained on Thursday, and it rained on Friday. But Seth told me on the phone that he could absolutely guarantee that it was not going to rain on Saturday.
    "Howie Friendly says so," Seth explained.
    Ha. Howie Friendly (if you need a description; if that disgusting name isn't enough) is the weatherman on Seth's father's TV station. He wears polyester plaid sport jackets, has dyed hair, and his only claim to fame, as far as I'm concerned, is that he can draw lightning bolts, snowflakes, and smiling suns left-handed while he talks.
    Apparently he was drawing smiling suns on Saturday's weather map.
    "Trust Howie," said Seth.
    Would you trust a man wearing an orange and green sport jacket? I ask you.
    I talked a lot to Seth on the phone those two rainy days. Mrs. Kolodny began to make a lot of dumb jokes about "Enid has a boyfriend," and
then my parents took it up too, grinning a lot, my father tousling my hair (my God, do you know of anyone who actually had their hair
tousled
since 1902?), and my mother suggesting that maybe now I'd like to go clothes shopping. "Now" meaning "now that a boy finally likes you."
    If they had only known the truth. The only clothes I needed as a result of my new relationship with Seth Sandroff were black cat-burglar clothes, not what you'd find in the Prep Shop at Bloomingdale's. We—Seth, Hawk, and I—had agreed that we would all wear black on Saturday night. The better not to see you with, my dear.
    As for the bag ladies: well, we couldn't tell them what to wear. None of them probably had anything beyond what was on their backs anyway.
    And Tom Terrific? Once when I'd helped him look for a sweater, I had seen a little black velvet suit with short pants hanging in his closet beside all the corduroys and ginghams. Somehow a black velvet suit didn't seem appropriate for this particular adventure. I'd have to come up with an outfit for him that night after his mother had left.
    It was all set. Hawk and the bag lady had somehow organized the others, and Hawk told
Seth on the phone that there would be at least twenty of them at midnight on Saturday. Obviously we'd gotten a few converts since the success of the Popsicle strike.
    On Friday evening, after he'd come home from work, Seth told me that he had the bolt cutter hidden away in his closet. One of the best smuggling jobs since the Hope diamond was stolen, he said. It occurred to me that the Hope diamond was probably considerably smaller than a bolt cutter, and he was darn lucky he hadn't been collared at the door to the station as he left, with an unwieldy contraption of metal and wood wedged under his