Wanted! by Caroline B. Cooney

but not now when Alice needed it for protection.
    Cindy’s window was down, and her face was outside of the car, like a dog scenting the breeze. Cindy was the passenger. Her mom was driving, and also craning her neck, as if checking out her side of the street. What could they be looking for? They were miles from the high school, where Cindy needed to be in another ten minutes.
    Alice was suddenly aware that the joggers were staring at her, and even the most dedicated had ceased to run in place.
    Her ears played back a sentence one of them uttered. “You look like the girl who was on the news last night. The one the police are looking for.”
    Alice’s heart skipped. She made a topknot out of her hair and waved it like a pom-pom. “People have been saying that to me all morning. I can’t help it if I have brown hair.”
    They kept staring at her.
    “My gosh, I bet ten people stopped me jogging,” Alice said. “Is it my fault I have brown hair? What am I supposed to do—quit my run early? I have two more miles.”
    The college boy who had accused her actually blushed. “Like wow, I’m sorry. But you know what? I really did just telephone the police.” The guy actually had a cell phone on his hip where normal runners had water bottles.
    “Oh yikes,” said Alice, laughing. “Well, let’s hope I have time to take a shower before they interrogate me.”
    Everybody laughed with her, and everybody crossed the big street together, Alice in the middle, between men’s shoulders and women’s flapping ponytails.
    Cindy and the red Saturn were only half a dozen cars beyond the crosswalk. Cindy’s head was poking back and forth.
    Alice was pretty close friends with Cindy, who had been through divorce twice with each parent, a horror so enormous that Alice could not even think of it as real life, but as a soap opera taking over. Cindy had been able to nod at everything Alice confided about her own mother and father.
    Of course tons of Alice’s friends’ parents were divorced, and Alice had expected that it would not upset her when her mother began to see other men, but it was hideous.
    How could Mom stand the presence of any man but Dad? Couldn’t Mom see that these men did not measure up? How could Mom giggle and put on perfume and buy a new wardrobe and experiment with expensive makeup as if she, too, were fifteen and learning how to flirt? And how could she fall for Mr. Rellen, who was old and paunchy and had a prickly beard?
    Cindy would say, “Yeah. It’s like that, don’t worry, it won’t bother you after a year or two.”
    Could Cindy and her Mom be looking for Alice?
    I can’t waste time thinking about Cindy, Alice told herself. The important thing is that runner. He actually called 911 from his cell phone; from his jogging path. How long before the police show up?
    Alice stayed in the pack of runners, or they stayed with her, and in a few paces the trail picked up along the same creek, and there was a sense of country, even though the greenery was just landscaping to screen traffic.
    Alice glanced through the leaves and recognized another car. Laura Schmidt’s very old Taurus wagon. Laura’s older sister was driving. Both Laura and Lucy should be in class this very minute. But no, they were miles away from the high school, cruising a main road. And slowly. Lucy, whose boyfriend had gotten into trouble big time for drag racing at midnight; Lucy, who had gone along and no doubt enjoyed every minute—Lucy was driving half the speed she ought to be, staring all over the place.
    The path wound behind a Bagel Deluxe, and Alice slowed her tempo to let the group go on without her. Then she swerved off the trail, crossed an acre of parking lot, and jogged in the back door of Bagel Deluxe. The door to the ladies’ room was behind a trellis, which gave a fake, see-through privacy.
    Inside, she took inventory. Out of the backpack came the glasses and the baseball cap. Alice threaded her hair through the hole. There