Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus (8 page)

I glanced at Samantha and Dustin. Then I looked back at Mrs. Bratberg.

“I’ll pay you double,” Mrs. Bratberg said.

I heard myself say, “Okay.”

“I’ll be back in one hour,” she said. “Except it might take an hour and a half.” Then she slammed the door.

“See you,” I said. But the door was already closed.

After Mrs. Bratberg left, I decided to lay down the law with Samantha and Dustin.

“You are not allowed to take your turtle out of its aquarium,” I said.

They nodded.

“And you can’t put your underpants in the
microwave. Or touch any glue. And nobody is allowed to put anybody in a plastic bag.”

“We won’t,” Samantha said.

“Today, I’m the babysitter,” I said.

Samantha and Dustin smiled at me.

“Okay,” Dustin said.

I was relieved to hear them agree with me so quickly. They were pretty good at keeping their word. I let out a deep breath. Then I checked on Brody. Peeking through the crack of his barely open bedroom door, I saw his foot resting on a stack of pillows. He didn’t look like he was going anywhere. Even to the bathroom. So I shut the door, found some snacks, took my sock (because I didn’t want to leave it unattended), grabbed the remote control, and found a comfortable place to sit.

“Can we go outside?” Samantha asked. She was wearing a big, red, puffy coat zipped to her chin. She’d wrapped her scarf around her head, leaving only her dark brown eyes showing.

“It’s cold out,” I said, tossing potato chips into my mouth. I was comfortably seated in the middle of their enormous beanbag. And I’d turned on the Science Channel. A badger was chewing on a rotten log. Inside, he had found a thick wall of honeycomb. Bees were stinging him like crazy.

“I’ll only be out for five minutes,” she said, batting her eyelashes at me.

“Where’s Dustin?” I asked.

“He’ll come too,” she said, slipping on her gloves.

I didn’t think it was a great idea, but I didn’t think it was the worst idea in the world either. Because their turtle was inside. And so was the microwave. And their underpants. And all their glue. And everything else that was off-limits.

“Don’t you want to watch the badger?” I asked. I pointed to the screen. That badger had a real sweet tooth. Even when the bees stung his pink gums, he kept biting at the log.

Samantha looked at the TV and shook her head. “No,” she said.

“Five minutes,” I said.

I heard her boots pound down the hall. Had I been listening more closely, I would have realized that I heard one set of boots thumping out the door, and one set of boots being dragged out the door.

You’d think that I would have gotten tired of watching that badger eat honey. But I didn’t. When Samantha came back inside, I knew that she had been gone for a lot longer than five minutes.

“Your face is really red,” I said. “You should come sit down and watch this badger.” She stared at me hard, unblinking.

“I guess we can watch something else,” I said, reaching for the remote. “Go get Dustin.”

Samantha didn’t move.

“I can’t,” she said, speaking through her scarf.

“Why not?” I asked, rolling off the beanbag onto my hands and knees.

“Because I don’t have the key.” Her brown eyes had grown very big.

“What key?” I asked.

“The Halloween key,” she said. One perfect tear rolled out of her eye and dripped onto her coat.

“Did you lock him in a pumpkin or something?”

She didn’t answer. Then I remembered. For Halloween all three of them had dressed up as sheriffs, and all three of them had handcuffs.

“Does this involve handcuffs?” I asked, grabbing her by the shoulders.

“After you arrest your bandits you have to cuff them.”

My mouth dropped open.

“You cuff them and then you stuff them,” she said.

When you’re the babysitter, this is terrible news to hear. I left my change sock, threw on my coat, and ran outside. In the backyard, I could see a navy blue figure huddled beside the Bratbergs’ propane tank. My stomach flipped. They had a very big propane tank. It’s what they used to heat their whole house. “I hate being the bandit!” Dustin said, yanking on the handcuffs.

Samantha had tightly clamped the cuff around Dustin’s right wrist, fastening him to the tank’s curved
metal handle. Even after I took off his glove, there was no way to slip the cuff over his hand. Snot rolled like a little stream out of his nose. He swept his tongue across his upper lip, steering the stream into his mouth.

“You’re not going to die. So there’s no need to eat your own snot,” I said. “I’ll get my mom. We have a saw.”

I turned to run, but Dustin tugged on my coat.

“If you saw metal, you’ll make a spark. I’m attached to a fuel tank,” he said. “What if you blow me up? Or send me to the moon?”

He made a good point.

“When’s the last time you had your tank filled?” I asked.

“Just yesterday,” he said, gulping down air.

“Are you sure?” I asked. Because I thought maybe he was trying to make the situation sound more dramatic. And as the babysitter, I thought the situation sounded plenty dramatic already.

“I’m very sure. It was part of my math lesson. This tank is eighty percent full. Which is the limit. You can only fill a propane tank to eighty percent. Gases can expand as temperatures change.”

“I’m aware that gas expands,” I said. “When it comes to science, my teacher is very advanced.”

Dustin took a deep breath and made more gulping sounds.

“Well, this is a five-hundred-gallon tank. I know, because I had to calculate how many gallons it would take to fill it.”

“You can do that in your head?” I asked.

“No, I used a pencil and paper.”

Wow. Maybe learning math at home was just as good as learning it at school, because that was a tough problem to solve. I couldn’t have done it.

“Are you sure you don’t have a key?” I asked Samantha.

“To make sure none of them got into the wrong hands, after Halloween I smeared the keys with pea nut butter and fed them to three different neighborhood dogs.”

“What?” I cried. “You could have killed them!”

“But I didn’t,” she said, slowly shaking her head. “Because they’re all still running around.”

For a moment, I thought about searching for dog turds. But the ground was snow-covered and it was almost March. Even with three dogs out there, the odds that I could find a five-month-old, frozen dog turd with a handcuff key in it seemed pretty slim.

I threw open my front door and cried for my mother. But the sound of my voice echoed through the empty house. I ran to the garage and the car was gone. On the kitchen table was a note.

Had to teach ab blast class. It was an emergency. Be back soon—with veggie burgers. I’ll probably be back before you. But-you have my number just-in case.

When I tried to call her cell phone, it said she was out of range. When I tried to call the gym, they put me on hold. And when I tried to call Mrs. Bratberg’s cell phone, all I got was her voice mail. I thought about calling Aunt Stella, but she lived in Modesto, and I knew she couldn’t help me. Besides that, she was probably working. In a perfect world, I could have called my very good friend Sally and she would’ve brought me a bobby pin and helped me pick the lock. Or I could have called my father. Problems like this were right up his alley. But I knew that I couldn’t. Being a mother’s helper was a secret. And babysitting? If I told my father the truth, he’d explode. First at me. Then at my mother.

At this moment, I realized how unfair it was to live in a world where people could move to Japan, and perfectly normal kids could have exploding fathers, and mothers who turned forty and went to teach an ab blast class out of range. And aunts who lived in Modesto and worked day shifts at hospitals.

Sweat rolled down my back. I ran my fingers through my hair. Then I bit my fingernails. From the
kitchen window, I could see Samantha hopping around her handcuffed brother. This was a serious problem, and I didn’t have any answers. I tried to bite my fingernails some more, but they were pretty much all gone. So I picked up the telephone and called the one number I thought I’d never have to call. I, Camille McPhee, dialed 911.

Chapter 11
No Excuses

I
was waiting in the driveway when Officer Peacock rolled up in his squad car. He wasn’t flashing his lights, which was a big surprise to me, because this was a huge emergency. It was below zero. Dustin could get frostbite or hypothermia. If you get frostbite, your fingers, toes, and nose turn black and the doctor has to cut them off. And if you get hypothermia, you get so cold that you go crazy and then you die.

I introduced myself to Officer Peacock as the
baby sitter. I told him everything, except the part about Samantha feeding the keys to dogs. I was sure that was against the law. That’s when he said, “So your butt was planted in front of the TV when this happened?”

I was really surprised that a police officer would use that kind of language with a ten-year-old. I figured he was one of those people who hated TV and blamed it for everything bad in the world. Clearly, these people weren’t aware of the good stations, like CNN, or PBS, or the Game Show Network.

“I bet you got the idea to fix your brother like this from some cop show on TV,” he said, wagging his finger at Samantha.

“It was a movie,” she whimpered.

“I actually was watching an educational program on the Science Channel,” I said.

Officer Peacock stopped in his tracks. He spun around to face me. The sun reflected off his badge and into my eyes, blinding me. When I shaded my eyes with my hand I saw that he had his bolt cutters aimed right at me.

“No excuses!” he huffed. “We got a child chained to a fuel tank and you’re the babysitter. No excuses!” He turned back around and stomped through the ankle-high snow into the Bratbergs’ backyard toward Dustin and the propane tank.

Dustin was shivering and crying. As Officer Peacock inspected the handcuffs, Dustin pleaded with him to hurry.

“We’ve got two choices,” Officer Peacock said. “First, how important is that hand to you?”

“It’s very important to me,” he whined. “I write with it.”

“I hope I don’t have to cut it off.”

Dustin fell to his knees, but his arm stayed where it was. The way his arm stretched above him made it look as if he were raising his hand to ask a really important question. I was not happy about this officer’s attitude. He was acting like a jerk. I wanted to kick him in the shins and demand that he be nicer to us or I’d kick him again.

But Officer Peacock wasn’t the kind of guy you kicked in the shins, even if you had a good reason. He was armed with a gun and a billy club and a terrible personality. He towered over me and Samantha and Dustin in his all-tan uniform. I decided it was best to apologize.

“Normally, I’m the mother’s helper,” I said. “Being the babysitter is new to me. I’m really sorry about this.” I walked over to Dustin and patted him on the back.

“I’m sorry too,” Samantha cried, running and throwing her arms around Dustin. “I was a bad sister.”

“Back away. Let me use Jaws.” Officer Peacock
squeezed the bolt cutters around the cuffs and snapped them off.

Dustin hugged his leg.

“I’ll never do this again,” he said. “And I’ll always look both ways before I cross the street. And I’ll never throw candy bar wrappers out the window again. And I won’t glue quarters to sidewalks. And I won’t toilet-paper supertall trees or stick plastic forks in old people’s yards. And when a light turns yellow and my dad asks if he should punch it, I’ll tell him no. And—”

“You’re welcome,” Officer Peacock said, patting Dustin firmly on the back. “You need to stay out of trouble, or those handcuffs will have just been a practice session.”

I thought that was an awful thing for Officer Peacock to say. As he drove out of sight, I hooked one arm around Samantha and the other around Dustin and led them back inside. On the Science Channel, two paleontologists were digging up dinosaur bones. I’ve always felt sorry for dinosaurs. It’s never seemed fair to me that such neat-looking animals went extinct.

“This is gross,” Dustin said.

Both he and his sister collapsed onto the giant beanbag and continued to watch the TV like zombies. The blue light bounced off their faces, making them look half dead. (Nobody looks attractive when they’re watching TV.)

When Mrs. Bratberg came home, I told her what had happened. She apologized several times. Then she took a plastic spatula out of a kitchen drawer and started whipping up a batch of brownies. She told Samantha and Dustin they didn’t deserve any. But she said she’d call me when they were done and I could have one. Then I presented her with my sock filled with quarters.

“I don’t have time for a math lesson right now,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“How much is in there?” she asked.

“Forty-nine dollars and fifty cents,” I said. I would have felt better if it had been fifty dollars, but I had to be honest.

“Let’s round up,” she said.

I liked that idea.

“Here is seventy dollars. Fifty for your sock. And twenty for your day.”

“Thank you so much!” I said.

“Don’t spend it all in one place,” she said.

This made me frown. Because I only planned on buying one calling card. I slipped the money into the palm of my hand and slid it into my glove.

“Would you like to stay for some pasta salad?” Mrs. Bratberg asked. She opened the refrigerator. “It has sausage and broccoli and eggplant in it.”

“I can’t,” I said. “But I’ll save room for a brownie.”

I was out of there. My mind zoomed as I walked home. How much would it cost to call Japan? On TV they had commercials for psychics and it cost about five dollars a minute to talk to one of those women and learn about your future. Sally wasn’t going to tell me about my future. We’d talk about the past and the present. My call had to be a lot cheaper. Probably a dollar each minute. I figured I’d need thirty more dollars, so we could talk for one hundred minutes, so we could remember each other one hundred percent.