The Bronze King by Suzy McKee Charnas

reminded me, we should be heading uptown to meet Paavo at Grant’s Tomb,
    I didn’t want to go empty-handed, not when I knew what I was looking for and where to look for it.
    â€œMaybe Paavo has some way of locating it right away,” Joel said, “or maybe he could pick up the trail of whoever’s got it.”
    â€œNobody’s got it,” I growled. My eyes were tearing with frustration. “It’s got to be here! It hit me and bounced off—”
    I stood there thinking. I thought about how when Barbara first started wearing contact lenses, the hard kind, the left one used to pop out a lot because she blinked too hard when it was bothering her. We did a lot of patting the ground in some pretty strange places. You haven’t been in the pits until you’ve groped the floor of a movie theater in the dark among the gum wads and sticky soda spills, looking for a lost lens.
    We both got very good at hearing where the lens landed. That tiny click is all you need to get a good idea, more or less, of where to start patting.
    So when the key had hit my forehead, where had it landed afterward?
    I turned around and stood as close to where I’d been standing that day as I could remember.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” Joel said. “You look weird.”
    I told him to shush.
    I had been standing here, by the subway entrance, fishing around in my bookbag for my math assignment, and muttering. The ground shook, and something tapped me hard over the eye, and then—
    â€œThere was no sound,” I said. “It didn’t make any sound!”
    â€œYou mean it disappeared, like all those other things?” Joel said. “Come on, Tina—”
    â€œNo, no,” I said, “that happens with a contact lens, too. If there’s no sound, you know it never reached the floor. It’s hung up somewhere on your clothes, or it landed in the book you were reading, something like that.”
    â€œWhat were you wearing?”
    â€œI don’t know, exactly, but if I look in my closet, I’ll remember. The key must be caught in a pocket or a cuff!”
    â€œWhere’re you going?” he said.
    â€œHome! To look through my clothes!”
    At the door to my building, I told him to wait downstairs for me. I wasn’t about to have Joel come look over everything I owned.
    I went ripping through my closet, my dresser, my laundry hamper, looking for what I’d been wearing that day—the cuffless jeans with pockets too tight to jam anything into, let alone for something to fall in, the boots, the yellow shirt, my fuzzy jacket.
    There was nothing in any of them, not even in the pockets of the fuzzy jacket.
    I stood there feeling sick with failure. What was I going to tell Paavo?
    Then Mom came in. “Tina? Are you home?” I could tell by her voice that something was wrong and going to get wronger.
    â€œI forgot my English paper and Mr. Chernick told me to go home and get it. I’m just leaving.”
    â€œIs that so?” she said. She was in the living room, looking through the mail, I think. “I had a call from school a little while ago. I hear that you not only flunked a math test, you’re behind with two book reports and three weeks late with a presentation for social studies class. On top of which, they told me you’d vanished from school today.”
    There wasn’t a lot to say to this, so I didn’t say anything. I looked out my bedroom window. Joel was hanging around across the street. I made go-away signs. He didn’t see or didn’t mean to go away, because he didn’t budge. Well, if Mom hadn’t spotted him on her way in, maybe we were okay.
    She came and stood in the doorway to my room, probably expecting to find Joel in there with me. Even though I was alone as requested, I saw her get that bland, above-it-all look that meant real trouble. “And here you’ve been neatening up your room. What a