The Missing Girl by Norma Fox Mazer Page A

sort of spoiled and Mommy’s favorite.
    But then something occurs to you. How can you be 143

    positive that they would never lend you away? Maybe they would do it. Poppy said it, didn’t he? He said—and now you think for a moment, and then you’ve got it. He said he’d lend all of you, if he got half a chance. He didn’t say he’d lend all of you except Autumn .
    Thinking about this gives your stomach that cold, nasty feeling, like the times in the car when you think you’re going to throw up, but you don’t, and then it’s even worse than if you did throw up and got it over with. You sit up and, all at once, your eyes are wet and your throat is tight, and you think you’re going to start crying right then and there. “Stevie,” you say, but before you can get another word out, Stevie yells, “Don’t say my name. I didn’t give you permission.”
    You feel like yelling at her that she’s mean and selfish, but then you see the duffle bag on the floor, stuffed with all her clothes and earrings and her elephant with one ear that she sleeps with, and you think how this is going to be the last night for a long, long time that she’ll be sleeping in the bunk bed over you. And that makes you be like Stevie and hate them all. You wish you could wash out their mouths with soap, like Mommy is always saying she’ll do to you if you say the F-word or the A-word.
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    “Hey, Stevie,” you say, “I don’t want you to go away with Cousin Nathan. I’ll miss you too much.”
    For a moment she stops thrashing, like she’s thinking about what you said. Then she leans over the side of the bed and says, as mean as mean can be, “Shut up, and don’t talk to me.”
    “It’s not me,” you say. “I’m not sending you away, I’m not lending you.”
    “I told you, shut up ,” she says in a weird voice, “I hate you all,” and you wonder if she’s going to cry. She never cries.
    She’s always calling you a crybaby, snivel-snot nose, and other names like that. You thump your legs. She doesn’t even care that you said something nice to her. You’re mad!
    And sort of mixed up, too, sort of crazy feeling. It makes you want to scratch your face all over, but if you do that, Mommy will yell at you that you’re ruining your beautiful skin.
    You don’t know what to do, so you get up and go outside, and you still don’t know what to do. You think about going back in and eating pancakes, which should be ready pretty soon, but you’re just too mad at everybody, so you start walking, and you think about running away from home. Maybe you and Stevie could run away to Florida or 145

    someplace nice like that, and she wouldn’t have to go to New Hampshire, and she’d probably love you a lot for saving her.
    You walk for a long time, making up the story about going to Florida with Stevie, and after a while you look around, and you’re on a street you don’t know. It’s called Elm Street, and it’s mostly just houses like your street, but not as many, and you keep walking, and then you’re on another street, you didn’t notice the name or maybe there isn’t even a street sign. There’re only a couple of houses way down on the other end of the street, and everything else is mostly bushes and trash and junk. Well, not really junk— weeds , which aren’t really bad things, like some people think. Poppy taught you the names of a lot of weeds, not just dandelions, which everyone knows. He taught you mustard and wild onion and that tall one with the reddish kind of leaves called dock, and Japanese knotweed, and he said you could eat a lot of that stuff in the springtime, including dandelion leaves.
    You decide to spell dandelion. Mim told you to try spelling all the hard words. She said if you do that, after a while, it gets lots easier. So you stop walking to concentrate, and you say, “Dandelion. D-A-N-D-A-L-I-O-N. ”
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    Wait. Is it an A or an E after the dand part? You try again.
    “Dandelion.