I went to get in the front seat, but the Brat blocked me. “What are you, some sort of barbarian?” he said. “The girl gets the front seat!”
If the Brat thought this chivalry act was going to score points with the Cruel, he had another think coming.
“I hope you don’t think I’m impressed by this car,” she said as we bumped along in the Doozy. “Or the fact that you can drive it—badly. Because that would be sad and pathetic.”
“HAH! She sure crusted you!” the Vainglorious yelled from the back seat.
The Brat’s face started going that color again.
We dropped off the Vainglorious first, then the Cruel, and the three of us made the long drive back to Sewickley. The Brat stopped the car about a mile outside of town.
“Get out,” he said.
“Hey, what’s the big idea?” I said. “Aren’t you driving us home, too?”
“You guys live that way,” he said, pointing to the right. “And I live that way,” he said, pointing left. “I have to get home before my father realizes the car is gone.”
“So you can’t take five minutes to take us into town?”
“What are you complaining about?” the Brat said as the Know-It-All and I got out. “It’s downhill! Hah!”
“Jerk!” I yelled as he drove off.
The worst part of the walk was how the Know-It-All wouldn’t stop yammering about Morse code and lighthouse reflectors. It seemed like we had walked a hundred miles by the time we got to his house.
Instead of heading home myself, I ambled over to Beaver Street. I had a nickel burning a hole in my pocket, and there was some rock candy at the confectionary with my name on it.
As I crossed Broad Street, I almost got hit by a beat-up jalopy.
Which was the same beat-up jalopy I had seen at the meeting place! I looked at it more closely now. It was a black Tin Lizzie with a missing rumble seat. And I knew exactly who had one of those!
I kept on strolling down the sidewalk. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the jalopy slowly following me. Then I passed a parked delivery truck which blocked the street-side view, and I quick ducked into Slam’s Barber Shop.
“Hey, Looie!” the barber said. “How’s that momma a yers?”
“Pretty good, Slam!” I said, walking through his storeroom and out into the alley. I looped back around and up the street, right to where the jalopy was still waiting.
Ducking low, I snuck up alongside the car, opened the passenger door, and popped into the front seat.
“Blin!” the Truant Officer shouted as he just about leapt out of his skin.
I chuckled.
“Why so jumpy?” I said. “And what does blin mean?”
“It means you are a negodnik American child!”
The Truant Officer wasn’t what you would imagine a Russian secret agent to look like. There was no big bushy beard or fur hat or anything. Instead, the guy was rail thin with blond hair and blue eyes. Really blue eyes. Like the sky.
And while his car might have been a mess, the Truant Officer himself was neat as a pin. His shirt was so ironed and starched, it looked more like armor than fabric, and his dumb Sewickley Constable of Attendance badge was polished to a shine so bright, you’d have thought it was made of real silver.
I asked him what he was following me for. “Don’t you know there’s no school at Christmas in this country?”
The Truant Officer stretched his lips in what must’ve been his version of a smile, the first I’d ever seen from him.
I didn’t like it.
“Oh, I know all about your Christmas. And your Christmas plans,” he said. “Maybe if you tell me now, the police will go easy on you!”
“What are you talking about?” I said, squinting.
“I am onto you!” He wagged a finger at me. “You and your negodnik friends!”
“Onto what?”
“Your plot!”
I saw the journal on the seat beside him. There was a pen stuck in the middle of it. I grabbed it and opened it.
“You cannot do that!” he yelled, trying to grab it back from me. “That is official Constable of Attendance business!”
This might have been a triumphant moment. Might have been, except—again—it was all written in Russian. But I couldn’t let that stop me.
“Ah-ha! This is very interesting!” I said, flipping through the pages and bluffing. “So you’ve been following me around all week, have you? So you know about our secret club, do you?”
“Yes, I do!” he said, still trying and failing to snatch the notebook away. “And I know you are trying to destroy Christmas!”
“Destroy Christmas?” I said. “You’ve got it all wrong, T.O.!” He hated it when I called him by the initials. “It’s a backgammon club!”
He narrowed his eyes to slits. “And you need to take a train to play backgammon? Or don’t you think I know about your little plan to meet at Union Station?”
Now he smiled for real.
This was the uh-oh moment. What if he knew all our plans? But even if he did, what could he do to us? His job was just to make sure we got to school, and we’d be long gone way before we missed any class.
Still, I wasn’t going to tell him the truth or anything crazy like that.
“Union Station?” I said. “That’s just our meeting place. Where else can we set up board games and no one is going to bother us?”
“We shall see about this,” the Truant Officer said, and scowled as menacingly as he was able. “I always catch my man! Even when they are children.”
“Well, I’m sure if anyone can break up a gang of twelve-year-old backgammon players, it’s you,” I said. “Now, how about you drive me to the confectionary?”
A dumbfounded look broke over his face.
“Why would I want to help you?”
“Well, if you’re trying to follow me, then I am the one helping you,” I said. “If I’m sitting right next to you in the car, I can’t give you the slip!”
Grumbling, my archenemy turned the key and popped the stick into gear.
When we got to the candy store, I thanked him for the ride. He drove off without saying anything.
And without realizing I still had his journal.
11. HOW TO RUN AWAY FROM HOME
Reading in your lovely twenty-first-century library or on your comfortable twenty-first-century couch or in your own twenty-first-century bed in your own twenty-first-century room, you might be wondering what all of us Naughty Listers were thinking. After all, why would we be so quick to run away from home?
Well, I can only tell you what I was thinking. And that was:
Why hadn’t I run away sooner?
My life was horrible. My “house” wasn’t even a house. It was an apartment over a laundry. And it wasn’t our apartment. After my dad lost his construction job, we moved in with our aunt and uncle and their five kids, which sounds like a lot of children until you realize that I had seven brothers and sisters. Plus there were three grandparents and some guy named Nunzio, who I’m not even sure was related to us. That’s twenty-one people. And my mother was pregnant again. And so was my older sister. And my grandmother!
O.K., not my grandmother.
Anyway, the mere thought of not having to fight over every last scrap of food at dinner made the thought of leaving home sound positively delightful. (That, plus I had a book report due the first day back at school, and I hate reading anything that isn’t the comics.)
You also have to understand that in 1931, it wasn’t so weird to run away from home. Heck, parents half the time didn’t mind—one less kid to support. Plus, kids our age could get jobs and even rent a bed in a flophouse, like the Rude did. For him, running away was easy.
The Hooligan didn’t exactly live in the lap of luxury, either, and the Cruel’s orphanage
was more like a prison than a home, so I wasn’t surprised those two wanted to come along.
But why kids like Goody-Two-Shoes or the Brat wanted to run away, I had no idea. Heck, I’d run away to go live at their houses. The Vainglorious and the Know-It-All had it pretty fat from where I was sitting, too.
Which is all a way of saying it was no big deal for me to slurp up the two sips of soup that was my dinner, leave without saying goodbye to anybody, and walk three blocks to the Sewickley train station.
The Know-It-All was there waiting for me, holding a big suitcase. “Where’s yours?” he asked as we walked to the Pittsburgh-bound platform.
I didn’t have one. After all, I only owned one jacket and one pair of shoes, and why bother bringing extra shirts or pants? So I just took what I was wearing.
(I did have an extra pair of underwear in my pocket. I wasn’t a complete animal.)
The Know-It-All, on the other hand, had spent three days packing. Besides a handkerchief and a change of clothes and a blanket, he took all the stuff we needed to make it to Santa’s, like a compass and a sextant (whatever the heck that was). He’d also spent two days in the library copying loads of information into notebooks—not only the full text of the Santa article, but a list of Morse code symbols, the train and boat schedules, travel guides to Canada, and maps. He loved copying maps.
“And I keep worrying about what I’m forgetting!” he said as we got on the train and found seats.
Then he took out his briefcase. What twelve-year-old has a briefcase? It was even weirder than the Brat’s tie.
Anyway, he unsnapped it and drew out a stack of letters. There were two each addressed to his mother, father, little sister, and grandmother.
Why two?
“In case one gets l-l-lost in the mail,” he said. “Where are yours?”
I hadn’t written any. I seriously doubted anyone in my family would even notice I was gone. Besides, writing a letter was like homework, and running away from home should not have homework.
“I had a feeling this would be the case,” the Know-It-All said, tut-tutting me like one of my teachers. He reached back into his briefcase and brought out a stamped envelope that had The Curidi Family and my address written across the front of it. He handed me a sheet of paper and a pen.
“Oh, fine!” I said, taking the pen.
It took me the rest of the train ride to write the letter. It read:
Deer Familee,
As you may or may not have notissed, I have not bin arownd for sume time now. I have run away frum home.
Yer welcume.
Luve, Looie
PS If I nevver come back, do NOT givve my baseball cards to Littel Tony. Thancks.
As I put the letter in the envelope and licked the back, the conductor came walking into our train car.
“Next stop, Pittsburgh!” he hollered. “Union Station!”
I felt a jolt of excitement. It was happening! We were really doing this!
The Know-It-All, however, didn’t look excited. He sat there clutching his suitcase, looking out the window, not getting up.
I asked what was wrong
“Is this not a g-g-good idea?” he asked.
He had that same about-to-barf look he’d had in the Doozy.
“Is what not a good idea?” I said.
“R-r-r-running away from home,” he said. “Going to C-C-Canada to try and find this lighthouse. Going to S-S-S-Santa’s.”
“What are you asking me for?” I said. “It’s YOUR idea!”
“But what if something g-g-g-goes wrong?”
This should have been the moment I started to worry. And yet, somehow, I still thought it was going to all work out.
Did I mention that I never did have very good judgment?
12. SHOWDOWN AT UNION STATION
As we walked through the cavernous train station, I looked around for the Truant Officer. No sign of him—thank goodness!
Goody-Two-Shoes was at the meeting spot already, which put a smile on the Know-It-All’s face. The two of them compared how many letters they had written and what they had packed. (Goody-Two-Shoes’s luggage contained sewing equipment, which the Know-It-All thought was splendid.)
Next came the Brat, who had a monogrammed steamer trunk that was twice the size of the Know-It-All’s and Goody-Two-Shoes’s suitcases put together. Of course, he had that yellow-uniformed servant of his to carry it for him.
Not that the servant knew about our plan. The Brat’s parents had sent him to the train station because he was supposed to be heading back to boarding school in New Hampshire. (Which, it winds up, was his idea of prison, and the real reason he was running away.)
The servant would naturally be carrying the trunk for him, but the Brat had a better idea.
“Why don’t we let one of these poor boys who hang around the station looking for tips take it for me?” he said. “Like that really filthy one over there!”
He pointed at me.
At first, I wanted to pop him right in his grinning mug. But I didn’t.
“Oh, yessir, sir!” I said, saluting him. “Thank you so much for the opportunity, sir! And I’ll take that tip right up front, please, sir. Fifty cents, please, sir!”
Which—believe it or not—was a lot of money.
“Fifty cents! That’s robbery!” the Brat said. “An outrage!”
The servant stepped up and gave me the money out of his own pocket.
“It’s well worth it, if it means spending one less minute with him,” the servant said, jerking his head back toward the Brat. “Have fun.”
I looked at the shiny quarters. Money!
“Well?” the Brat said, holding a hand out to the trunk and looking at me.
“Ah, move it yourself!” I said.
Just then, the Hooligan and the Rude arrived. Together.
Apparently, they had become fast friends since they walked home together after the meeting. Go figure.
The Rude had packed, but it couldn’t have been much. Whatever he had was wrapped inside of a handkerchief and tied to the end of a broomstick.
“What are you, a hobo?” the Brat said. “And how about you?” He turned to the Hooligan. “Or did you bring absolutely nothing, like the Liar over here?”
“Ah, I don’t need nuttin’. Not so long as I got my lucky rabbit’s foot!” The Hooligan patted his chest to feel for it, and a look of panic swept over him. “My lucky rabbit’s foot! I forgot it! I hafta go home and get it!”
“What? Wait!” the Rude called after him. “You’ll never make it back in time! Just forget it!”
But the Hooligan was already gone.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “He’s got half an hour. He’ll make it!”
Which wasn’t 100 percent a lie, because I didn’t know for sure he wouldn’t make it. I just assumed.
The Cruel came next, holding one small bag. I smiled and waved.
She did not wave back.
“Do you have a letter?” the Know-It-All asked her.
“Most definitely,” the Cruel said, grinning. “It says what I think of every single one of those sniveling girls I have had to live with over the past thirteen years. And the nuns too! I’ve been waiting to send a letter like this my entire life.”
“I’m sure they’ll be real sorry to see you go,” I said.
Everyone had at least one letter to mail except the Vainglorious, who was the last to show.
“What’s this about a letter?” he said. “It’s the first I’m hearing of it!”
“That’s because you never listen to a single thing we say,” I said.
“I listen to what she says,” he said, and winked at the Cruel, who narrowed her nostrils and rolled her eyes.
The letters mailed, we headed over to the departure board to see which track ou
r train would be departing from. And that was when I saw him.
My archenemy. The Truant Officer!
He was wearing what had to be the single worst disguise in the history of mankind. He had on a big bushy fake black beard and a fur hat. Now he looked like a Russian secret agent.
“Uh, guys,” I said, stopping everyone dead in their tracks. “We might have a problem.”
I gave them the whole story.
“You’re just telling us this now?” the Brat said, going beet red in the face. “What were you thinking, you nitwit!”
“Hey, no need to get mean!” I said. “I thought I had thrown him off our trail.”
“Well, I guess you didn’t, did you?” the Brat said.
I explained how it wasn’t like he could do anything to us. “We’re not skipping school or anything,” I said. “It’s New Year’s Eve!”
“But we are running away from home!” the Brat said. “We can get arrested for that!”
“We can?” I said.
“And thrown into juvenile d-d-d-detention,” the Know-It-All added.
O.K., so maybe I had messed up. Still, everyone was making a big deal out of nothing. I’d been giving this Truant Officer guy the slip for years—it was not that hard! Plus he obviously didn’t know which train we were taking, so all we needed to do was stay away from him. Once we had the track number, we’d slip onto the train and be gone.
“But what about the Hooligan?” the Rude said.
“He’s on his own!” the Cruel said.
We hid behind a column in a place where my nemesis couldn’t see us but we could keep our eye on the clock and the destination board.
“Where are we going again?” the Vainglorious said.
“Don’t you pay attention to anything?” the Rude said. “We’re going to Quebec. Canada!”
“Canada?” the Vainglorious said. “Oh yes—of course, Canada! One of the original thirty states.”
“There were thirteen original states,” the Cruel said. “And Canada is a country.”
“It’s cute how much you like me,” the Vainglorious said. “The way you correct me and all.”
The No-Good Nine Page 5