Savvy (11 page)

A wave of dizziness hit me, making the room lurch, and I stumbled, uselessly covering my ears and trying to stay upright. Fish caught me on one side as Will grabbed me on the other, each boy glaring at the other, both trying to steady me and keep me on my feet.

“Ah, geez—” said Lester, sticking his hands in his pockets and taking a step back, none too sure what to do about falling-down girls.

“You okay, honey?” Lill said to me, turning around and reaching out to help. She was ignoring a lady in a green and white uniform that matched her own. The other woman had red hair and a surly glower, and was trying to push pitchers of coffee and water Lill’s way, complaining like a wet cat about Lill being late.

“I think my sister was just on that bus too long,” Fish told Lill, nervous and hasty. Fish was trying to cover for me and my savvy, even though he was still unsure what exactly he was covering for. I was grateful to my brother, and ashamed. I knew that I was going to have to tell him everything: about the voices, and about how I’d gotten us all into this big mess for nothing.

“Well, maybe Mibs should lie down in the back room for a spell,” said Lill. In several quick long strides that the rest of us had to hop to keep up with, she led us past the piping and bellyaching of the red-haired waitress, past booths and tables filled with diners and their deafening thoughts. Lill led us past a long counter where customers sat perched atop round spinning stools, eating their onion rings and drinking coffee, and took us through an Employee’s Only door next to the kitchen.

We found ourselves in a cramped storeroom that smelled like ketchup and pickles and mustard. Lill shrugged out of her sweater and hung it on a coatrack inside the door. Shelves stacked high with bread rolls, jars of mayonnaise, and enormous cans of beans and tomatoes lined the room, reminding me of our basement back in Mississippi and all of Grandma Dollop’s noisy jars. Filing cabinets, a cluttered desk, and a battered sofa filled the only area without supply shelves. A pile of newspapers lay on the floor near a back door labeled
Emergency Exit
and there was a low table in front of the sofa littered with crumbs and empty soda cans.

A small black-and-white television sat on top of one of the filing cabinets, its antenna aslant and festooned with bows of crumpled aluminum foil. The TV was turned on, its poor, snowy image broadcasting the evening news. A newscaster was reporting from somewhere in Kansas, covering a story about freak power outages and damaged electrical grids that ran up and down Highway 81 on most of its path through Kansas and into the town of Salina. Fish and I exchanged knowing glances, fairly confident that Rocket had something to do with those problems.

Lill told Fish and Will to get me to rest on the sofa as she turned the volume down on the little TV, but I brushed off their orders like annoying, buzzing flies. Just being in the back room helped. My head still hurt something awful and my stomach still wanted to jump and jive and do the twist. I could still hear all the voices, but tucked back in the storeroom as I was, those voices were muted low now like the TV. I sat on the edge of the frayed sofa cushions, staring at the floor and trying not to listen—trying to let all sounds, both inside and outside of my head, blend together into one endless, punishing roar, as I mourned the loss of my hopes for my savvy—and for my poppa.

“She just needs a little space,” I heard Fish tell the others above the din in my head.

“I
really
have to get to work,” said Lill apologetically, linking her hand through Lester’s arm where he stood next to her. “I may be in luck tonight, y’all. I didn’t see The Great and Powerful Ozzie when we came in.” She sounded relieved and laughed her small laugh, bumping Lester with her hip and nearly knocking him to the ground.

“Ozzie’s the manager here and he’d put a knot in my tail if he caught me coming in at this hour. Mr. Fish, why don’t you stay with your sister and I’ll have the others bring you kidlings something to eat in a wink and a shake.” Fish just nodded without looking away from me. Lill pulled Lester back out into the restaurant, and Bobbi and Will Junior followed after, Will casting a long worried look over his shoulder, obviously reluctant to leave my side. I looked around for Samson.

“Where’s—?” I started.

“Who knows,” said Fish with a shrug. “Y’know Samson. He’ll turn up.” Pushing aside the empty soda cans and brushing off some of the crumbs, Fish sat down on the low table directly in front of me and, patience worn thin, crossed his arms over his chest. “Tell me.”

Fish wanted the full hokeypokey on my savvy. He wanted details. He wanted them
now
.

Needing to look anywhere besides my brother’s sullen face, I stared at the fuzzy images on the small TV screen across the room; there was so much static that it was like trying to watch television through soda pop bubbles; the sound was too low to hear. The story about the power outages ended and the anchorman behind the news desk swiveled his chair to a new, more dramatic angle, looking doubly serious. A telephone number began marching herky-jerky across the bottom of the screen as the anchorman moved his lips mutely.

I didn’t know quite what to tell Fish. I had been so sure about my savvy. We wouldn’t have been sitting there in the storeroom of the Emerald Truck Stop Diner and Lounge if I hadn’t been positive that I could bring Poppa back home to us, back home to Kansaska-Nebransas. But it was now as clear as Momma’s don’t-touch-or-else crystal that my savvy had different plans for me, and I was nothing but sorry and filled up with misery and dread at the thought of telling my brother.

“It’s the ink, Fish,” I finally said, still finding it easier to focus on the black-and-white fizz of the news report than to look my brother in the eye.

“What ink, Mibs?” said Fish.

“Any ink, I think, as long as it’s on someone’s skin.”

Fish squinted at me. “Go on.”

I didn’t know how to explain. I didn’t want to rummage through my mind for the right words and try to put them into the right sentences like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It felt too hard. I was tired and I was hungry. And, now that I knew there was nothing, nothing, nothing I could do to help Poppa, I just wanted to go home. Home to Grandpa Bomba and home to Gypsy. Home to the mud left behind by Fish’s rain. Home to be homeschooled and grow moss in pickle jars and learn how to scumble this savvy and make it know its place.

“
Tell
me, Mibs,” Fish demanded. I tore my eyes away from the little TV, where a reporter was interviewing a man and a woman who looked, through the sleety static of the poor reception, a little like Pastor Meeks and Miss Rosemary. I met my brother’s stare and sighed again.

“Maybe I should just show you.” I pulled the silver pen Will Junior had given me for my birthday from the pocket of my skirt. “Hold out your hand and think of a number—any number. But make it a hard one.”

Fish drew his eyebrows together, looking wary. “What are you going to do, Mibs?”

“It’s not a hurricane, Fish,” I said impatiently. “It’s not dynamite. Trust me.” Fish thrust his hand toward me stiffly, his lips pressed together into a tight, straight line. I could tell I’d made him mad—my hair blew back from my face and the newspapers by the door rustled and fluttered. I placed the tip of the pen to the skin of Fish’s palm, and then stopped.

“Are you thinking of a number?” I asked him sharply. “Because I don’t want to hear
anything
but a number.” The last thing I wanted was to hear what was going on inside my own brother’s head. I shivered. Gross.

Fish squinted at me again and nodded, all curt and serious and grumpy “I’ve got a number.”

“Just think it to yourself over and over,” I said, and I pressed the pen down to draw a small quick circle punctuated with the eyes and mouth of a smiley face that wasn’t smiling so much as
not
smiling. The mouth of the face rippled like a grimace and the eyes blinked twice.

“Two thousand, two hundred twenty-two and a half,”
it said.
“Two thousand, two hundred twenty-two and a half … Two thousand, two hundred—”

I spit quick on Fish’s hand and smeared the face away before Fish’s thoughts had the chance to wander somewhere else. Fish didn’t move, but just sat looking at me like I was some kind of a whack-of-a-quack fortuneteller at the county fair, reading his palm and telling him how many squalling, bawling children he was going to have when he was grown up.

“Two thousand, two hundred twenty-two and a half,” I repeated. “Right?”

Fish gave me a hard-boiled nod, looking grave but unruffled. “You can hear what I’m thinking?”

“Thinking or feeling, I guess.”

“So you read minds, do you?”
A singsong voice broke out above the droning roar and hummed inside my head.

Bobbi was standing just inside the storeroom, looking as though she was about to drop her armful of plastic baskets all overflowing with burgers and fries.

“So you read minds, do you?”

B
obbi looked at me and fish. She’d seen and heard everything.

“I knew it. I
knew
it,” she said, setting the burger baskets down on the desk and backing up the few feet toward the door. “I knew there was something mental about you. Will’s never going to believe this.” Bobbi left the storeroom before Fish or I could say a word.

Fish leaped up from his seat on the low table. “I’ve got to stop her!”

“There’s nothing you can do, Fish,” I said, jumping up from the sofa to grab my brother’s arm, to keep him from doing something stupid. But there was no need. Fish halted dead in his tracks, staring at the little television on top of the filing cabinet.

I followed his gaze and inhaled sharply. There, in all the snowy black-and-white importance such a tiny TV could muster, our photographs—Bobbi’s, Will’s, Fish’s, Samson’s, and mine—began flashing across the screen with ALERT! MISSING! ALERT! scrolling across the bottom of the screen, along with an eight-hundred number to call if anyone had seen us.

We watched our pictures flick and wobble through the poor reception of the small TV, then the newscast cut over to another reporter interviewing the pastor and his wife in front of the church. Miss Rosemary looked sorrowful and worried; Pastor Meeks looked stiff and strained and spitting mad.

Fish clenched his jaw, his muscles tense. “We’ve got big problems, Mibs,” he muttered without looking away from the television.

I glanced from the television to the door leading into the dining area and swallowed hard, trying to imagine what else could go wrong that day. Things had already gone from bad to worse, and I had a feeling our situation wasn’t going to be getting better any time soon.

Just as Fish reached out his hand to turn off the television, the back door emergency exit burst open with the loud rasp of metal on metal, startling me and Fish so badly we both jumped back. A barrel-chested man in a hooded sweatshirt and green spandex shorts scowled at us from the doorway. He had a gold chain around his neck and a large gold-nugget ring on each hand.

This had to be Ozzie, manager of the Emerald Truck Stop Diner and Lounge. He pulled a toothpick from between his lips and flicked it back over his shoulder toward the parking lot. Then he stepped inside, bearing down on Fish and me like an angry bison.

“What are you kids doing back here?” he demanded, his breath a loud mix of bluster and buffalo wings. “Can’t you read? This area is for employees only Beat it. Scram.” Ozzie advanced, waving his hands at us like a muscled wizard shooing chickens. “Go find your parents, or go play with the jukebox or something.”

“We’re here with Lill,” I squeaked as he pushed us backward toward the door to the dining area. “She said we could be in here.” But that didn’t stop Ozzie’s forward momentum. In fact, it only made things worse.

“BWAAAAAP!” he said, making a harsh and showy sound like a game show buzzer. “Wrong answer! Lill’s at the top of my list right now. In fact, Lill’s about to get canned.” With that, Ozzie pressed Fish and me right out of the storeroom.

Pushed back into the middle of all those chaotic, noisy voices, I tried my best to keep from becoming discombobulated, tried to figure out how to scumble those thunderous thoughts that didn’t belong to me, but that was a hard thing, a thing that could take years— horrible long years of this stupid savvy—and I had no idea how to do it.

I stayed as close to the edge of the room as I could, hovering near the wall closest to the kitchen, next to the long dining counter. I was aware of the sound of plates hitting plates in the kitchen, the sound of silverware hitting the floor, and the pop and sizzle of frying burgers. But all the boisterous voices in my head floated on top of those other ordinary sounds like warring battleships on a churning ocean.

I couldn’t tell if the room was spinning or if
I
was, and the scene that followed flew by me like a series of snapshots set to the jingle-jangle jumble of other people’s thoughts and feelings.

When Ozzie entered the dining room, Lill was behind the counter with three pies lined up in front of her, putting the first slice into the banana cream with a long, wedge-shaped pie knife. Lester sat near her on a round stool, biting into a thick burger and spilling yellow mustard onto his twisted tie.

“Bobbi’s with Will Junior over by the jukebox,” I heard Fish say into my ear. Looking toward the corner of the room, I saw Bobbi talking to Will and pointing our way.

“She’s telling him everything,” said Fish darkly. I noticed Will looking back and forth from his sister to me, but at that point my head hurt too much to care about his reaction. And by then, Ozzie had started yelling again.

Ozzie stepped over to Lill, picking up the banana cream pie and taking the knife out of her hands.

“That’s it for you, Lill,” Ozzie said, waving the pie knife covered in whipped cream through the air as he spoke, gesturing wildly and hitting Lester on the head with a stray slice of banana. “You’ve tried my patience too far. You may be a decent waitress—when you manage to get yourself here on time—but I’ve had it. This is the last time you show up late and the last time you slice pie at the Emerald Truck Stop Diner.”