Runaways (9 page)

Pixie looked puzzled. “It’s not all that far. And you have to do it anyway, don’t you?”

“I know,” Dani said. “But it may not be easy.” She went on to tell about the kinds of things that happened to unpopular kids in Rattler Springs. She was telling about the slashed bicycle tires when Pixie interrupted.

“Oh, do you ride a bicycle to school sometimes?” she asked.

Dani snorted. “Not lately. I ran out of money for new inner tubes.” She could have gone on to say that there were a lot of other things wrong with her old bike, like rust and broken spokes, and brakes that usually didn’t work. But that seemed to be beside the point so she started telling about the rotten tomatoes and dead rattlesnake instead. “That only happened when I first got here though,” she admitted. “After a while they got bored with it, I guess.” She grinned. “Or else they ran out of tomatoes and rattlesnakes.”

“Tomatoes and rattlesnakes?” Pixie repeated, sounding amazed and, strangely enough, almost enthusiastic. “You think they might start doing things like that again because of me?” Dani said she wouldn’t be surprised, and then Pixie actually said, “Oh, I hope so. I’ve never seen a rattlesnake before.” Dani stared. She couldn’t believe it. At least she wouldn’t have been able to if she hadn’t already started getting used to Pixie’s strange reactions.

Another of Pixie’s reactions that wasn’t what you might expect concerned the historic old Jerky Joe cabin, the poor ragged wreck of a place where Dani and her mother lived. One of the reasons that Dani hadn’t been too thrilled with the daily visit idea was because she didn’t much like letting Pixie see the inside of the cabin. Actually she didn’t much like to let anyone see it, but she could just imagine what a person like Pixie would think. A person whose parents could afford to pay seventy-five dollars a month for an old wreck of a house and, on top of that, buy a generator and pay to have the whole house wired for electricity. What would someone with that kind of money think of a kitchen counter covered with peeling linoleum and a bathroom that had a rusty tin shower instead of a tub? Not to mention those horrible holey drapes in the combination living room-bedroom. Dani couldn’t help wincing when she thought about those drapes. But then Pixie walked into the cottage and acted like the place was some sort of palace. Well, maybe not a palace so much as a “fascinating place to live.”

“What a fascinating place to live,” Pixie said when they arrived in the tiny living room. “I love it. I’d love to live in a place like this.”

“Fascinating?” Dani was amazed, and immediately suspicious. But Pixie didn’t look like she was trying to be funny, or sarcastic either. Dani shrugged, rolling her eyes and throwing out her hands. “I think it’s gruesome. Just look at it.” She gestured at the daybed couch and the falling-apart drapes. “Disgusting.”

“Oh no,” Pixie said. “I’ve always wanted to live in a house like this. It’s like—like something in one of my favorite books. I used to play a game about it.”

“A book? What kind of book?” Dani asked.

“Well, there’s this one story about these five kids whose father is dead and they live with their mother in this old—this old …” She stuttered to a stop then as if she had just decided not to go on with what she’d started.

She was still stammering when a loud voice said, “What’s she doing here?” And there was Stormy, staring at them from the kitchen door. Staring, or you might even say glaring.

“Oh, great!” Dani said, and then to Pixie, “Could you wait here a minute?” Grabbing Stormy, she pushed him, squirming and sputtering, back into the kitchen.

As the door swung shut his sputtering turned into words. “What’s that Frankenstein girl doing here?”

It took a while to calm Stormy down and even longer to convince him that Pixie was there as Dani’s guest and if Stormy wasn’t going to be polite he was just going to have to go home—immediately. She finished up by saying, “And whatever you do, don’t say anything about her folks being spies, or Frankensteins, or anything like that. Okay?” And when Stormy only stared, blank-faced, she went on. “How’d you like it if people said things like that to you? About your mother?”

She thought that would get through to Stormy and she was right. His angry glare melted into confusion and then reluctant acceptance. “Okay,” he said. “I won’t say it.” And then added under his breath, “But I bet they are.”

Dani sighed, wondering what on earth she was going to do. All by himself Stormy had been hard enough to handle, and now there were going to be two of them. Two of them almost every afternoon. She shrugged and sighed.

Obviously the very first thing she had to do was to get rid of Stormy for a minute while she warned Pixie about the kinds of things you didn’t do or say around Stormy unless you wanted to risk getting your shins kicked. Thinking fast, she told Stormy to go get
White Fang,
which, fortunately, she’d put away on the highest shelf in the bedroom, where he’d have to climb up on a chair to reach it. And the minute he stomped out she rushed back to the living room, where Pixie was waiting quietly on Linda’s daybed with her hands folded in her lap. Sitting quietly, but with her eyes darting around the room like charges of blue electricity.

“Does he live here?” she asked as Dani came in. “Is he your brother?”

Dani snorted. “My brother. No, he’s not my brother. But he lives next door, well, at the hotel actually because his mother works there. But he comes here for me to read to him. He likes to be read to.” She glanced back over her shoulder. Lowering her voice, she said, “Look, I wanted to tell you before he gets back. You gotta be careful what you say to Stormy because he has this bad temper.”

Pixie nodded eagerly. “A bad temper? What does he do when—”

“Well,” Dani interrupted, “he hits people. Or kicks. Actually he usually kicks.” She took a deep breath. “See, it’s like this. He’s just fine unless somebody says something about him being a nonreader or dumb. And anything at all about his mother. He doesn’t like people to even mention …”

But at that moment, there he was, back in the room, holding
White Fang
and still glaring. Pixie jumped up to look at the book. “Hey,
White Fang.
I’ve read that,” she said. “It’s great, isn’t it? Do you like animal stories?”

Stormy stared suspiciously. Stared for a long moment before he nodded grudgingly. “Yeah,” he said. “I like dog stories.”

“Me too,” Pixie said. “My favorite is
Lassie Come-Home.
At least that’s my favorite dog story. But I like horse stories too. My favorite horse story is
King of the Wind.
Have you read
King of the Wind?”

Stormy started to grin—tried to stop—and then quit trying. “Yeah. I—we read that one. Didn’t we, Dani. I liked that one next to the best. But my best favorite book is
Doctor Dolittle.”

Pixie made a squealing noise. “Oh yes. Me too. I love
Doctor Dolittle.
And how about …”

Dani sat down on the daybed. For a while she stared in amazement. Then as the talk went on about what books and what parts of books were the best, she sighed and then yawned. After a while she yawned again and asked if anyone was interested in hearing the last chapter of
White Fang.

“Yeah,” Stormy said. “Dani reads good,” he told Pixie. “She makes it real, like on the radio or something.” He glanced at Dani, puckered his forehead thoughtfully and added, “She does when she wants to.”

Dani glared and snorted. She knew what Stormy meant, and she didn’t like it. Maybe once in a while she had something else on her mind, or maybe she was a little bit bored because she had read ahead and knew what was going to happen. “Humph!” she said. And then, forgetting what she’d just told Pixie about what you shouldn’t say to Stormy, she went on, “You’re a fine one to talk about how good somebody reads. How about if—”

But at that moment Pixie interrupted. Shoving
White Fang
into Dani’s hands, she said, “Go on. Read it. I want to hear you read
White Fang.”

So Dani read, taking care to do what Stormy called “making it real.” Making her voice tough and scary during the part about the escape of the evil prisoner, deep and slow when Judge Scott was talking, and higher and more fluttery for the women characters. She knew she was doing a great job by the way Stormy and Pixie listened, as if they had almost forgotten to breathe. Just as Dani was finishing the last page, Linda came in.

The next few minutes Dani was busy introducing Pixie to Linda and then explaining why she was here, and how she was going to be here every afternoon after school. Of course it was all right with Linda. But while she was telling Dani all the reasons she thought it was just wonderful that the Smithsons’ little girl could visit every afternoon, Pixie and Stormy disappeared. It wasn’t until Linda finally ran down and went back to the kitchen that Dani found the two of them on the front porch. As she came out the door she heard Stormy saying, “Yeah, in the graveyard. That’s where Frankenstein got them.”

“Stormy!” Dani practically yelled. “What are you talking about? What was he telling you, Pixie?” But before anyone could answer, the Smithson tank pulled up in front of the house and Pixie ran out to meet it.

For a few seconds Dani watched it go, watched how it slithered smoothly over bumps and potholes, before she whirled around to face Stormy. “Look,” she said, hands on hips. “You promised. You said you wouldn’t say anything about the Frankenstein thing. You promised!”

“Look.” Stormy was imitating her, hands on hips and chin jutting. “I didn’t tell her. She told me.” Then he turned around and clumped off toward the hotel.

T
HE NEXT FEW DAYS
were pretty crazy. Piled on top of the usual end-of-the-school-year chores, such as finishing up projects and taking tests, there suddenly was a new problem to deal with. The Stormy plus Pixie problem. Not that they were fighting, or anything like that. In fact there were times when Dani almost wished they would. A fight, a good old kick-and-punch fight, would be something a person could do something about. Like telling them to stop or you’d crack their heads together. But this was different and a lot more complicated.

For example, there was the book thing. Dani had promised Stormy that, as soon as they finished
White Fang,
they’d read another dog story from the Jack London book. But she’d hardly gotten started on
Call of the Wild
when Pixie showed up with a whole armload of her own books.

“They’re all my favorites,” she said as she spread them out on the coffee table, running her hands over each of the books as if it were some kind of a pet animal. “I’ve read all of them already, but I wouldn’t mind hearing them again. And Stormy will love them.”

“Stormy will love them,” Dani repeated, waggling her head around sarcastically. As if this three-way after-school arrangement was going to last long enough for a person to plow through—she counted six, seven, eight books. That would take at least two or three months of reading, depending on how long they were. She checked the books’ widths, turning them so she could see their spines and, while she was at it, read the titles. Some of them, like
Blue Willow
and
The Five Little Peppers,
she’d never heard of before. But there were at least two that she did remember seeing a long time ago in the Sea Grove library.

“Yeah.” She held up
Peter Pan
and
The Jungle Book.
“I remember both of these. They had them at my old school.”

“Oh yes, they’re fabulous, aren’t they?” Pixie was doing her breathless little-girl voice. “Which one was your favorite?”

“Oh, I didn’t read them,” Dani said coolly. “I was pretty young at the time, and besides”—she spaced out the words, emphasizing each one—“I don’t like to read.”

“You don’t?” Pixie’s head was tipped to one side and she was looking at Dani in a way that definitely seemed to mean she didn’t believe what she was hearing.

Dani stared back. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “Don’t you believe me?”

But Pixie only asked, “Why? Why don’t you like to read?”

Dani shrugged. “Well, for one thing it’s a waste of time. People waste their time reading when they should be doing all sorts of more important things.”

“Ohhh.” Pixie nodded and then frowned thoughtfully. “How come you do it then?”

Dani looked across the room, where Stormy seemed to be completely engrossed in the pictures in
The Jungle Book.
Lowering her voice, she said, “You know why. I do it to help Stormy. He needs to be read to.”

Pixie lowered her voice too and asked, “Then why do you read when he’s not around?”

“I don’t!” Dani said, chin out and glaring. Pixie was staring back, doing her wide-eyed thing. “Well, not very often—” Dani had begun to say when Stormy interrupted.

“Yes, she does,” he said. “When it gets real exciting she does. When it gets exciting she reads ahead.”

Dani got to her feet and left the room. She marched through the kitchen, slammed out the back door and sat down on the back steps. Okay for you, Stormy Arigotti, she was thinking. That’s all the thanks I get for reading all those boring books. Just wait until the next time you want to be read to. Just wait.

She went on sitting there for a long time, waiting for Stormy to come out to say he was sorry, but after what seemed like almost an hour she went back into the house. Crossing the kitchen quietly, she shoved the door to the living room open just a crack. Just enough to hear a deep, threatening voice saying, “ ‘ “Am I to stand nosing into your dog’s den for my fair dues? It is I, Shere Khan, who speak!” The tiger’s roar filled the cave with thunder.’ ”

The voice was Pixie’s but it definitely didn’t have a breathless little-girl sound to it. Pushing the door a little farther, Dani could see that Pixie was reading from
The Jungle Book,
and, sprawled out on the daybed, Stormy had gone into his usual listening trance. When Dani let the door slam shut neither of them even seemed to notice.

That night, just to catch up, Dani read
The Jungle Book
up to where Pixie had left a bookmark. Which happened to be the place where Mowgli takes the pot of fire to the wolves’ council meeting. And then she went on just a little farther, not really reading as much as skimming, to find out if Mowgli was going to be able to keep Akela from being killed by the pack. She also practiced a little, making her voice slow and sultry for Bagheera, and deep and hollow for the old bear. And the next afternoon, when she and Pixie took turns reading, she did a great job. Even Pixie said so. So after that they went on taking turns, with Dani reading one chapter and Pixie the next. Which was fine with Dani. After all, why should she care if someone else wore out their eyes and voice, for a change?