A Friend at Midnight

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Lily was so puffy and spongy with rage she thought she must look like somebody on chemo.

  If Michael can’t fly up here by himself, she decided, I’ll fly down and get him.

  She needed picture ID. She didn’t have any. She rummaged in Mom’s horribly messy desk until she located Reb’s passport, which had been obtained for a class trip to Spain when Reb was sixteen.

  I look a lot like her, thought Lily. Same hair, same eyes. “Hi,” said Lily to a pretend ticket agent. “I’m Reb Rosetti.”

  “Reb Rosetti” sounded like a mud wrestler. No wonder her sister planned to be Rebecca from now on.

  “Good afternoon,” she practiced. “I’m Rebecca Rosetti!”

  What did they do to people who falsified their identities at airports? Nothing good.

  If they caught her, she’d probably be responsible for ten delayed flights and possibly an airport evacuation. But how would they catch her? They didn’t know there was somebody named Lily, so they wouldn’t wonder if she was Lily masquerading as Reb.

  It was half past twelve. Mom and Kells and Reb were probably halfway to Rochester. This was also in New York State, but Lily tended to think of New York in three parts: New York City, the suburbs and the rest of the state—an unknown hinterland in which anything could happen and where nobody went except on weekends.

  “Wook, Wiwwy!” cried Nathaniel, triumphantly holding Mom’s cell phone. Lily swiftly substituted the television remote and Nate searched joyfully for Volume Control. “What am I supposed to do with you during this rescue?” she said to him.

  “Watch TV,” said Nathaniel, happily clicking.

  Lily got on the kitchen computer and went to the travel site bookmarked by Kells, who bought his business tickets online. She filled in the right blanks. The choices were few. There was exactly one flight nonstop to Baltimore and it was leaving in two hours. The return trips—every one of them—involved detours to Raleigh or Atlanta or Boston. She was furious. “This is New York!” she yelled. “You ought to be able to fly nonstop to New York from any place!”

  It took seven minutes to use the fraudulent credit card to buy the tickets, and even though Nathaniel, if he sat on her lap, didn’t need a ticket, it cost a fortune. Fifteen years old and bankrupt, she thought.

  At the LaGuardia Web site she got directions for public transportation. Then she studied her cash position. She personally had eight dollars. She emptied the jar where Mom threw one-dollar bills and change, and found two twenties in the middle, which was excellent. But she didn’t dare take a taxi. It could easily be twenty dollars, and she might need that cash. Buses were okay, just slow. There wasn’t a moment to waste. She stuffed the baby’s insulated tote bag with diapers, juice boxes and a Baggie of Cheerios.

  Would airport security notice that the two-year-old called her Wiwwy instead of Reb? Would they ask why she bought the tickets minutes before departure? Would they wonder why she had no luggage?

  Michael was fine until the delayed flight of the schoolkids around him was suddenly boarding and the kids were leaping up, tossing their stuff into backpacks and discarding leftover snacks.

  Michael was so hungry he almost asked a girl if he could eat her pizza crust. She threw it into a wastebasket, the kind with small round holes in the top. Michael stood on tiptoe to see if he could reach the crust, but he couldn’t.

  And then he was alone.

  He walked purposefully for a few steps, as if he had a destination, but he was approaching security, which wasn’t good, so he swerved toward the men’s room, pausing for a sip at the drinking fountain. He had no watch but he could see the digital time on one of the many monitors in the building. Okay, he told himself. Four more minutes and I can call Lily back.

  His little brother said okay all the time. “Okie, Miikoooo” was what Nathaniel actually said. If Michael shouted “Leave me alone!” or “Don’t touch my stuff!” or “Shut up!” Nathaniel said meekly, “Okie, Miikoooo.”

  Nathaniel loved Michael.

  That had been its own reason to leave: the suffocating, maddening love of Nathaniel. How could one person, especially such a small person, repeat the same name so often in one day, play the same stupid game, mash the same cookie, hug the same hug, joyfully greet that same brother?

  Nathaniel made him crazy.

  But now Michael knew what it was not to be loved.

  Nate, I promise, thought Michael. I won’t have better things to do when I get home.

  Although he knew he would. Two days home—two hours—given how annoying Nate was, possibly two minutes—and Michael would be sick of him again.

  Several men were leaning on the wall next to the ladies’ room, waiting for their wives, so Michael leaned there too, and slid slowly down the wall until he was cross-legged on the gray carpet.

  When he glanced up again, a whole new set of men was leaning against the wall.

  And he had killed the four minutes and now he could phone. He ran all the way to the wall of phones near the playroom.

  He was too excited to pay attention and got the digits wrong, and the call didn’t go through. He tried again and got the digits wrong this time too. His hands got cold and the back of his eyes hurt. What if he had forgotten the numbers? What if he couldn’t reach Lily after all? What if—

  Slowly, carefully, he tried a third time.

  “You’re one minute early,” said his sister.

  Michael wanted to gallop through the phone line to be with her. “Hi.”

  “Here’s the deal. I can’t just get you an e-ticket and have you pick it up at the gate because you’re a kid and they don’t let kids do that.”

  Michael’s heart sank.

  “So Nate and I are coming for you. We’re taking a flight out of LaGuardia at two-forty. We land at BWI at three-fifty-one. Then all three of us fly home together. I’m going as Reb because I’m using her passport for ID, so you have to call me Reb. Whoever picks you up has to be a grown-up, so I’m eighteen. Don’t forget that. But you’re coming as you and Nate is going as himself.”

  “Like spies,” said Michael.

  “Exactly. Now, remember that spies get shot if they’re caught. So don’t goof this up.”

  Michael was overwhelmed with horror. On TV news there was always a city in a distant country where people shot each other or blew each other up. He couldn’t catch his breath, thinking of Lily getting shot.

  “Joke,” said his sister. “We aren’t spies, nobody gets shot.”

  “Oh.”

  “Keep phoning me. Not this phone. My cell. You know my cell phone number by heart?”

  “I know it by heart,” said Michael, and his heart actually hurt, pierced by the numbers of his sister’s phone, as if those numbers had bitten him.

  “Meet us at the baggage claim. Do you know where that is?”

  “No.”

  “You have till three-fifty-one to find it. It’s twelve-fifteen. Can you manage almost four hours?”

  Four hours. Michael was stunned. He had hardly managed twenty minutes. Where was he going to sit for four hours? “Yes,” he said.

  “If airport security does pick you up, be polite. Tell them your eighteen-year-old sister Reb is on her way. Tell them what plane. Tell them you don’t know how things got messed up but Reb will solve things. Give them my cell number.”

  “Okay. What will they do then?”

  “Nothing,” said Lily. “I’ll still land and we’ll still fly home.”

  Reb could lie like a rug; she was the best fibber there’d ever been. But Lily was like Michael. Lies were so much trouble that she generally told the truth and accepted the consequences. He knew when Lily was telling a lie because her voice got forceful and loud, as if she was shoving it into being real.

  If security found Michael, it would not be all right.

  They might not fly home.

  Lily flung on makeup. She fastened her hair the way Reb had it in the passport picture. Lily despised pink, but Reb wore it all the time
and she had worn it for her passport photo. Lily grabbed silvery pink cotton pants Reb had once given her and filched an expensive short-sleeved pink shirt of her mother’s, tying a thin, lacy white sweater around her waist in case the air-conditioning was freezing. She looked as close to eighteen as she was going to get.

  She stuck a new box of playing cards in with the Cheerios. Nate loved cards. He chewed them, bent them, ripped them, stacked them, threw them. She double-checked her credit card and Reb’s passport, stuck the cell phone in her purse and they set out.

  Nate loved the bus and everybody on it. He stood on his seat, holding her shoulder or hair to steady himself, and he studied everything and talked to everyone.

  Lily’s thoughts leaped and sputtered like a fire being doused with water. Michael, be safe, she thought. God, keep Michael safe, she ordered Him.

  She couldn’t tell if He was listening.

  The ticket agent took Reb’s passport and the piece of paper on which Lily had written her ticket confirmation number, glancing so briefly at Lily it could have been a blink. Kells had said once that people were busy thinking about themselves, and even when it was their job to think about you, they were probably still thinking about themselves. He seemed to be right.

  Lily lifted Nathaniel onto the high counter so he wouldn’t jump up and down around her ankles calling, “Wiwwy! Wemme see too!”

  The attendant asked her the routine questions without making eye contact. Perhaps she was allergic to toddlers, a tendency Lily could certainly understand.

  Had Lily left her luggage unattended? No.

  Had anybody unknown to her given her something to carry? No.

  “Checking any luggage today?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Here’s your boarding pass. Your row is empty at this moment. If you’re lucky, nobody will sit there, and then your little brother gets his own seat. If you’re not lucky, he sits on your lap the whole flight.”

  And that was it.

  I really must look eighteen, she thought. Awesome. Always wanted to be eighteen. Always wanted to be Reb.

  At the security barriers, the guards wanted Nathaniel to walk through by himself, but he was having none of it and had to be peeled off her. Then Lily walked through while Nathaniel sobbed in panic and then the torture was over and she could cuddle him while the guards patted him on the back and told him what a brave boy he was.

  They had a few minutes to spare, so she let Nathaniel walk, and he cried out in wonder at all the exciting things. The best was a big soft pretzel dipped in cinnamon sugar. Instantly, even though she just gave him a crumb, Nathaniel was smeared head to toe with sugar and butter.

  Probably the best explanation to give Mom and Kells for the sudden reappearance of Michael was the simplest: Michael didn’t like it there after all. It wouldn’t occur to them that Dad hadn’t bought Michael a ticket—how could that occur to anybody? Mom wouldn’t be thrilled that Lily had taken Nate on public transportation to LaGuardia, and she’d complain that Lily ought to have called neighbors to drive her, but with any luck, Mom would be so pleased to find out Michael had decided her house was better than his house that she wouldn’t press it.

  It would be a real kick in the face if Dad was the one who spilled the facts—which he might, because he didn’t even care, and Mom was bound to call. Lily would e-mail him. His address was “denrose”—a good name for him, now that she could never use the word “Dad” or the word “father” again.

  At the gate, Lily thought: I haven’t heard from Michael since we left home to catch the bus. He has to call me; I can’t call him.

  She whipped out her cell phone.

  It wasn’t hers.

  She had smashed her cell to pieces.

  She had Mom’s phone.

  Michael could call all day and nobody would ever answer.

  chapter

  4

  The night before he left to go live with his father, Michael had set two alarms to make sure he did not oversleep, into which he had put new batteries to make sure they did not fail. He also wore his watch to bed, and from twelve-thirty in the morning until four-thirty, he watched the glowing digital numbers change.

  Now, in the airport, he did not know what he had been expecting when he lay awake all night long. Whatever it was, it had not existed, and Michael was filled with dread at what stretched ahead.

  So many things he could not ward off.

  Like Jamie.

  Jamie worshipped his own dad, who ran the town soccer program when he wasn’t running his company, which delivered heating oil. Jamie got to help repair engines and fix furnaces and his dad played every ball game with Jamie, or took him to one. Since Jamie’s dad was perfect, Jamie had explained that Michael’s dad too would be perfect, and that going to live with him was a perfect idea.

  Michael would never betray his father. He decided never to talk to Jamie again so that Jamie would not suspect.

  Michael slid into the midst of some young men who stood in a long ticket line. They never looked down to where Michael was. For eleven minutes he was safe. Then an airline attendant began working her way down the line, examining each ticket and making sure the person was in the right line.

  She got closer. She was heavy, very black, with complex braids. She was stern with people, but nice about it. Michael almost said to her, “I don’t have a ticket. I don’t have anything,” because she would make it better. But it wouldn’t be better for Dad.

  Grown-ups got into deep and serious trouble when they left kids on their own. There had been this woman who left her two little kids in car seats while she went into the grocery for a gallon of milk, and she was gone five minutes, and got charged with child abuse.

  Of course, her kids had been babies.

  Michael was no baby.

  Still.

  If I can get home, he thought, nobody will know Dad did anything wrong.

  Especially not Mom, who in some terrible divorce way would rejoice. See? I was right! she would say. Kells would not say any such thing. Kells stuck to subjects like baseball and dinner.

  It came to Michael that his stepfather was a better person than his real father.

  He could not allow such a thing to be said. He could not permit a comparison. The ticket agent got closer, so Michael slid out of line and went back to the play area.

  He passed a gift shop selling stuffed animals. They were colorful: monkeys in lime green and puppies in orange. He thought of York in a landfill. Filthy broken things thrown on top of York to stain and crush him. Michael wished he had gone to the landfill with York. It wouldn’t be any different, and at least he’d have York to hold.

  He picked up a newspaper somebody’d left on a bench and felt slightly better. Every single person at the airport was carrying something, and now Michael was carrying something too. He fit in.

  He tried the stairs and found an observation room, where he sat for quite a while, nose pressed to the window, watching Southwest planes come and go.

  The four hours seemed a forever thing, his heart and soul suspended like a plane.

  Nathaniel was so perfect on board the plane that Lily could have sold him for enough money to pay for the tickets.

  The flight attendants adored him.

  The lady across the aisle played his favorite card game, where Nathaniel threw the card on the floor and the other person picked it up.

  The man in the seat directly behind them shook hands with Nate about six hundred times through the crack in the seats and each time, Nate burst into giggles of joy.

  “What’s the fun part?” asked another passenger, after about a hundred times.

  “Who knows?” said the guy. “He sure likes shaking hands, though.”

  “Is he bothering you?” asked Lily, who knew perfectly well that Nate was bothering him; that was all Nate did—bother people.

  But the man just laughed. “It’s a short flight,” he said.

  Lily had run into enough kind people to staff
a hotel. How come her very own father wasn’t one of them?

  Her heart was pounding faster and faster, as if she were turning into a hummingbird. Michael could not call her. He had had complete faith in her, and now she too had abandoned him at the airport. Three times she’d called that pay phone Michael had used. Nobody answered the first time, a stranger answered the second time and nobody the third time.

  Nate tucked himself up in her lap and ate Cheerios one at a time, curling his stubby fingers carefully around a Cheerio and squishing it into Cheerio dust just before he put it on his tongue.

  “Gonna get Miikooo?” he said fifty times.

  “Going to get Michael,” she agreed fifty times. Half the Cheerios got dropped on the floor. Lily needed to conserve snacks, so she picked them up and stuffed them back in the bag.

  I don’t want to save denrose with excuses, she thought. I want him to be punished! I want him to suffer. I want him to end up in the meanest, roughest jail in the world. One with snakes and rats and cholera.

  Enraged, she was panting like a dog in summer.

  How dare you? she thought. How dare you?

  Michael’s need to talk to Lily almost tripped him, like an invisible wire strung across the corridor. But no matter how calm he tried to be, no matter how carefully he tried to press the right numbers, he couldn’t make the call.

  I told Lily I had her number by heart, he thought. But I don’t.

  The list of things he had done wrong seemed so long. Michael could not see how he could go on. Or why. What was he worth, anyway?

  Nothing to Dad.

  Michael tried the phone number at other phones in other locations. He never got the numbers right.

  Darkness enveloped Michael. He had no thoughts to go with it. He thought he would fall down, but there were still things to do: he had to cover for Dad. Nobody must know or see or guess.

  The darkness became deeper. He could hardly keep his eyes open from the suffocating pressure of it.

  I didn’t grow up, he thought. That was the problem. Dad is right. I have to grow up. Right now.