Stealing Our Way Home

by Cecilia Galante

  “Did she work?” Shelby asks.

  “She was a waitress. At the Rocking Robin here in town. Everyone liked her. People used to ask for her when they went in because she was so nice. And funny. She always made everyone laugh.”

  “That’s nice.” Shelby’s voice is soft, but a detached look comes into her eyes, and I can tell she’s thinking about something else. “I can’t remember the last time my momma laughed at anything.”

  “No?”

  Shelby shakes her head. “She hardly even smiles.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know, really. I used to think it was because she drinks so much, but now I’m not sure.”

  I don’t know what to say to that, so I don’t say anything at all.

  Shelby stares down at her tray. “I told Nibs and Pippa I was here because my parents were getting a divorce, but that wasn’t really true. I just didn’t want to get into all the details.” She looks back up at me. “I’m mostly here, I guess, so’s my mother can try to get her act together.”

  “You guess?” I echo. “You mean you’re not really sure?”

  “’Course I’m sure.” She sounds insulted for some reason, although that’s the last thing I meant to do. “It’s just … ” She shrugs, shaking her head a little. “There’s a lot more to it than that.”

  I want to ask her what “a lot more to it” means, but I don’t want her to think I’m prying either. “What about your dad?” I ask instead. “Can he help her out at all, down there?”

  “Nah. He’s not around at all. He got tired of her drinkin’ all the time and hit the road when I was in third grade. Haven’t seen him since.”

  I stop chewing. The phrase I’m sorry springs to my lips and I swallow it.

  “You haven’t seen him since third grade? Like, not even once?”

  Shelby shakes her head without looking at me. “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  She tosses the last of her pizza in her mouth, balls up her napkin, and looks me directly in the eye. “He’s got better things to do I guess.”

  Her casualness makes me uneasy. It’s hard to know if she doesn’t care that her father doesn’t speak to her or if she’s lying through her teeth. Either way, I can’t hold her gaze. I stare at the pile of potato chips on my tray, wondering if I should offer her one. Everything on her tray is already gone.

  She stands up, beating me to the punch. “Well, thanks for the conversation.” She takes a few steps and then turns around. “I wish I could’ve met your mom. She sounds cool.”

  And just like that, she’s gone.

  I head up to the tree house after school. There’s still a ton of work that needs to be done. Half the roof is missing, the window in the back is crooked, and six of the nails in the wall have fallen out. But I lie down on the floor and stare up at the pocket of sky that peeks in through the leaves. I don’t have the energy to do anything. Or maybe it’s that I just don’t want to. For the first time in my life, the tree house feels childish. Like something a little kid would spend time on. Not someone who will turn thirteen in three more months. Definitely not someone who was involved in a bank robbery.

  I was involved, wasn’t I? If the police came and demanded to know why I was there, I would have to tell them, right? No, sir, it wasn’t just some coincidence that I was there. Yes, the prime suspect was my father. No, I wasn’t standing guard, hanging out there in the foyer. Yes, I freaked out in the car and ran inside to make sure he was okay. Yes, I witnessed everything that happened. Yes, I left with him.

  All these things make me an accomplice. That’s what I am now. An accomplice to a bank robbery.

  “Jack?” I sit up straight as Dad’s voice floats up the trunk of the tree.

  “Yeah?” I stick my head out the window and look down. He’s already climbing the ladder, hand over hand, grimacing from the effort. My heart drops. He never comes up here unless he wants to talk. Except for hi and bye and yeah and ’night, it’ll be the first time we’ve talked in over a week. I slink back inside the tree house, press myself up tight against the wall. I don’t want to talk. I’m still not ready.

  Dad reaches the top and hauls himself inside. “Whew!” he says. “Haven’t done that in a while.”

  I scratch one of my knees, hoping I don’t look as scared as I feel. What’s happened to me? How can I be scared of Dad?

  He sits opposite me, both hands resting on top of his tented knees, and exhales loudly. He looks at me for a long moment. “How are you, buddy?”

  I shrug.

  “Yeah,” he says softly. “That’s sort of how I feel, too. Actually, that’s why I came up here. Is there anything you want to ask me? Anything you want to talk about?”

  I rub my chin, glance quickly at him, and then look away again.

  “I know you do,” Dad says encouragingly. “Just throw one out there. Anything at all.”

  I stare at the little space between my feet, my eyes trailing over a sliver of wood poking out of the smooth wooden floor. I move the tip of my toe over it, trying to press it down flat, but it doesn’t budge. It’s stuck there, glued rigidly with tree sap, hard as a nail.

  “Jack.”

  “What if we get caught?” I blurt out. “Your picture was in the paper, you know.”

  “I saw that,” Dad answers. “But it was just footage from a video camera. And it was just my back. No one knows it was me.”

  “Pippa was reading the article,” I continue, feeling something rise inside. “Pippa!”

  “Pippa reads Nibs’ paper every morning, buddy.” Dad lowers his knees. “She doesn’t know. Trust me, okay? She doesn’t know anything.”

  I bring a hand to my forehead to push my hair out of my face. It’s shaking. My whole body is shaking. It’s exactly like I thought. Saying it out loud is making it real. And making it real is too much.

  “What’re you doing now?” I can hear the accusation in my voice, but I don’t care. “I mean, when we’re in school? Are you out looking for a job?”

  “Yes,” Dad says. “I’ve put a whole bunch of resumes out at different places. We’ll see what happens. These things take time, you know.”

  The shaking slows a little, hearing this. Sending out resumes is definitely a step in the right direction. Someone will call him soon for an interview and he’ll go in and answer the questions he needs to answer and get a job and everything will go back to normal. “How much time?” I ask.

  Dad shrugs. “Hard to tell. Although I really don’t have a lot of time to play around with. You know, I only came away with three thousand five hundred dollars.” He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. “I couldn’t believe it when I counted it all out. I thought I’d gotten at least two or three times that amount. And I know three thousand five hundred dollars sounds like a lot of money, but it isn’t going to go very far.”

  Somehow, I find my voice. “That’s what your new job is for.”

  Dad flashes me a smile, and when he does, something inside of me crumbles, because it’s one of those fake, tight smiles that says he’s hiding something. “Right?” I press, pretending I haven’t seen it, that everything is still okay.

  “Of course.” He nods. “I mean, that’s the plan.”

  “ ‘That’s the plan?’ ” I echo. “What does that even mean?”

  “Listen, Jack,” Dad says. “We’re just going to have to take things as they come. I’m looking hard for a job and I will keep on doing that. I promise you. But if we run out of money again before that happens … ” He pauses, scratching his head. “I mean, if there’s a chance of losing your mother’s house again … ”

  He doesn’t say it out loud. He doesn’t have to.

  “But I’m getting ahead of myself. Way, way ahead of myself.” He looks around the little room, as if seeing it for the first time. “Wow, it looks great up here buddy, you know that? Really great.”

  But his words sound empty. He’s just saying them to try to fill a space between us that not
hing in the whole entire world will ever be able to fill again.

  I don’t know what the ringing in my head means. I’m pretty sure it’s ringing for a reason, but I can’t figure it out. It’s like the connect-the-dot freckles on Molly’s face; I can see the box around them, but only in my imagination, not because it’s actually there. Still, I get a weird feeling when I hear Nibs read that article on the dock, especially when she says the words Spider-Man and Middlebury and Batman. I think about them all day in school, as they hit and bounce off each other like one of those metal balls in a pinball machine. I have a feeling that they’re all connected in some way, but I still don’t know how.

  So it’s sort of like I’m watching myself from the outside when I walk over to Dad’s blue Eldorado later that day and open the door. I don’t even know what I’m looking for, really. But maybe I’ll be able to figure it out when I find it. Jack’s in the tree house and Dad’s gone upstairs to nap, so neither of them will notice me. Neither of them will care.

  It smells like old French fries inside the car. An empty bottle of water has been crammed in between the driver’s seat and the clutch, and a pile of loose change sits in a small paper cup under the dashboard. I look in the back, lifting up the floor mats and peeking under the dark wedge of seats, but nothing stands out. Whatever it is I’m looking for, it isn’t there.

  Then I remember the trunk.

  I wish I didn’t know how to pop a trunk, but I do. Dad showed me a few years ago, after Molly came over one day and hid there during a game of hide-and-seek, and I ran screaming to him because I didn’t know how to get her out. He was furious, but it was the kind of mad that had more to do with being scared than being angry. It was easy to get stuck in a trunk, he told us. And dangerous, too. He took Molly and me over to the front of the car and showed us the lever by the door that popped it open. “Stay away from car trunks as a general rule,” he said. “But if you ever need to get it open, pull this lever. You’ll never get stuck if you know how to open the back of a car.”

  Now, I reach in on the driver’s side of the car and pull the lever. The trunk bounces open and then drops again, staying slightly ajar. My heart is pounding so hard I can hear it in my ears, and the inside of my mouth tastes sour. I stare for a long time at the thin space between the lid and the bumper.

  It’s so dark.

  Anything could be in there.

  I lean forward, close my eyes, and lift it all the way open.

  I don’t mean to scare Jack, but when he catches sight of me hiding behind his bedroom door, he jumps so far back that he bumps his head on the wall.

  “What the heck, Pippa?” He rubs the back of his head with one hand and grabs my arm with the other. “Get out of my room!”

  A high-pitched noise comes out of my throat as he drags me toward the door, and I lean back, reaching for the Batman mask on the floor.

  Jack freezes when he sees the mask, and he lets go of my arm.

  “What’s going on in there?” Dad’s voice drifts down the hall. “Everyone all right?”

  Jack leans over slowly, like he’s moving in slow motion, and picks up the mask.

  “Jack? Pippa?”

  “We’re fine, Dad!” Jack’s voice cracks on the second word. He strides over to the door and shuts it carefully, still holding the mask in his hand. Then he turns around and stares at me with huge eyes. “Where’d you get this?”

  I take a step back, frightened.

  Jack yanks me by the wrist again. “Where’d you get this, Pippa?” His hand is too tight and I scrunch my eyes up and whimper. “Shhhh!” he says fiercely, dragging me toward the bed. But his hand loosens a little, and his voice gets softer. “Sit down, okay? Just sit down for a minute.” The meanness in his voice is fading. He arranges himself across from me on the mattress and crosses his legs. “Pippa,” he says. “This is important, okay? I really, really need you to talk to me right now. Do you have your notebook?”

  I nod.

  “Can you use it?”

  I nod again.

  “Okay.” He pauses, waiting. “Get it out, then.”

  I pull the notebook and my pink glitter pen out of my back pocket, not taking my eyes off him, not sure what he’s going to do next.

  “Where’d you find this?” Jack shakes the mask again in his hand.

  “In the trunk of Dad’s car.”

  Jack reads my answer and looks at something on the wall behind me. His forehead is all wrinkled up, like he’s trying to remember something. “What were you doing looking around in Dad’s trunk?” he asks finally.

  I shrug. I don’t know how to describe the alarm in my head after I heard Nibs read the newspaper article on the dock, or why I went looking for something I didn’t know I would find.

  “Did you see anything else?”

  I nod.

  “What, Pippa? Write it down!”

  “Pillowcase.”

  Jack’s eyes flit over the word and he looks back up.

  “Anything else?”

  I nod and bend over my notebook. “But not in Dad’s car.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jack’s knee starts jiggling as I write again. “I found your Spider-Man mask,” he reads slowly. “On the living room floor. The night you left. For Middlebury.”

  “Spider-Man mask?” He looks confused. “But … I don’t … ” He gets up off the bed and starts walking around his room. There are T-shirts and shorts and underwear all over the place, but he walks right on top of them.

  “The paper said Spider-Man tried to rob a bank in Rutland,” I write, tapping on my notebook to get his attention. “Last month. But then he got scared and ran away.”

  Jack walks back over and reads my words. His eyebrows narrow. “What are you talking about? What paper? When? When did you see this?”

  I gesture with my hand for him to follow me, and we head downstairs to the kitchen. The article about the curly-haired woman catching the huge catfish on Lake Bomoseen is still on the front of the refrigerator, held in place with a blue stone magnet. When I point to it, Jack snatches it off the refrigerator. The magnet goes flying, skittering across the floor like a rock. “This is about a fish, Pippa!”

  He clenches his jaw as I turn the paper over in his hands. I watch him the whole time he reads, his eyes flying back and forth across the article like ticker tape, and when I know he’s gotten to the end, I curl my index finger around one of his belt loops. But he grabs me around the wrist and pulls me back upstairs. I stumble alongside him, trying not to fall. Inside his room, he lets me go and shuts the door.

  “What’s happening, Jack?” I write quickly. “I’m scared.”

  “Just hold on, okay?” He folds the article in half and shoves it inside one of his pockets. “Just hold on and let me think.” He runs both hands through his hair and locks his fingers around the back of his head.

  “You don’t have to be scared.” His voice sounds hollow. “It’s going to be okay.”

  “What is?”

  “I don’t know.” He lets his hands drop heavily. “Everything, I guess.”

  “What happened in Middlebury?”

  Jack swallows when he reads my question and then walks away.

  I write again and get up off the bed, pushing the notebook in his face. “I want to know what’s going on!!!”

  Jack’s face gets red when he reads this and he snatches the book out of my hands. “Listen to me,” he says in a dead-quiet voice. “Whatever you’re thinking, it’s not true. So just leave it alone, okay? I mean it, Pippa. Leave it alone.”

  I reach for my book, but he holds it up over my head, out of reach. And then, without warning, he flings it across the room. My little pink book hits the wall and drops down into a pile of blankets like a big, dead insect. I turn around, furious, ready to smack him, but he’s already disappeared.

  The sound of heavy footsteps thuds down the stairs, and by the time I race to the window to see where he’s gone, all I can make out is the little
red reflector on the back of his bike as it flies down Lake Road.

  It’s dark outside. The kind of night where you can barely see your hand in front of your face. But I don’t care. I could ride Lake Road blindfolded by now, I’ve done it so many times. My legs know every twist and turn by heart, and my hands can steer this bike in my sleep. Besides, I don’t want to see anything right now. I just want to ride. And ride. And ride.

  I can’t believe I didn’t know about the bank in Rutland. It must have been Dad. It had to have been, with the Spider-Man mask and the note; it’s almost identical to how everything went down in Middlebury. Maybe that’s why he wanted me to come with him. So it wouldn’t feel quite so scary the second time. So he wouldn’t chicken out and run off again.

  And now Pippa knows.

  PIPPA KNOWS!

  By the time the two words scream through my head a final time, I can’t breathe, no matter how hard I try. I jump off my bike, letting it roll wildly and crash into the bushes along the side of the road. When I lean over, grabbing my knees, every single curse word I know comes pouring into my head. And before I know what’s happening, they’re pouring out of my mouth, too. I probably shouldn’t know as many curse words as I do, but Ben’s dad swears like a sailor, and last summer when I spent almost every day over there, I learned a lot of them. Bad ones, too. The kind of bad that Mom would wash my mouth out with soap if she heard me say. Maybe even worse than that.

  But I don’t care. They shoot out of my mouth like a stream of fireworks, and I’m kicking rocks and picking up sticks and throwing them as hard as I can into the dark. And then, all of a sudden, I’m crying. My legs give out from under me, and I sort of collapse in a heap on the side of the road and just bawl my eyes out.