The Key to the Golden Firebird

by Maureen Johnson

  Brooks and Palmer sprinted across the diamond at Camden Yards as if it was something they did every other day or so—even strides, backs straight, heads high, side by side. They turned to look for May occasionally and shouted back encouragement.

  “Go, May!”

  “May, run!”

  “I…am…running!”

  Thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack.

  “No, RUN!”

  “Oh…my…God!”

  Thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack.

  May’s feet were striking the ground so hard that her head shuddered. The toggles of the flip-flops ripped into the skin between her toes. This was why Palmer had told her to take them off. There was probably no historical precedent for anyone running from the cops in flip-flops. She was in the vanguard of a whole new breed of idiot criminal.

  Thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack.

  The guards were catching up to her. Yelling for her to stop. As she struggled to force more air down her raw, windburned throat, she saw her impending arrest in an oxygen-deprived flash—the handcuffing, the fingerprints, the mug shot, the one phone call, the bitter and cold plastic foam cup of coffee, the good cop and the bad cop circling her (“Come on, what were you doing on the baseball field? We’ve been waiting long enough.” “Aw, leave the kid alone, Joe. She’ll tell us when she’s ready…won’t you, May?”).

  She thought about just stopping. Giving in to the creeping inertia that was weighing on her limbs. Giving in to the strain of holding on to her flip-flops with clenched toes. Giving herself up so that Brooks and Palmer could get away. She could take the rap. It would be the perfect movie ending—the others running away, only to turn back…. “Where’s May?” And there May would be, standing in a pool of searchlight, surrounded by a throng of police, with a beatific smile on her face. They would know that she had sacrificed herself for them. A loving look would pass between them as May was dragged away to the sound of wailing sirens….

  But then she remembered—she had the car key.

  This jolted May. Car. Get to the car. Don’t trip out of the flip-flops and die. Keep going. She put her head forward and pushed harder. Her calves were burning, and the cutting sensation between her toes was almost unbearable. Left of the dugout…left of the dugout…Palmer and Brooks were at least leading her there; she realized too late that she hadn’t been paying attention to which of the dugouts was the Orioles’. Then Palm and Brooks suddenly veered sharply to the opposite side—guards had appeared at their planned point of exit. May followed, not quite as sharply but with a wide turn to keep the flip-flops from flying off sideways.

  A light, scattered clapping and cheering came from the remaining crowd left in the stands. May was almost tempted to swivel her head around to see if she had made a second appearance on the Jumbotron, but she couldn’t take the time. Her focus was steady on her sisters, who had by now made it to the wall, where a few people were cheerfully helping them over. They glanced back at her, then disappeared into the crowd. Now May was alone, and some other guards were closing in on the point where they had just exited, trying to meet May.

  So she zigzagged in another direction, this time cutting across the alternating light and dark strips of grass to the wide dirt section between second and third base.

  This had to be something out of a dream. It had to be.

  May called up whatever reserves of power she had left in her body. She called up strength from the ground. She put it in her thighs. She put it in her calves. She was the greatest living example of what people mean when they say that someone “runs like a girl,” but at least she was going faster now. She was getting off this field.

  Thwackthwackthwackthwack…

  The rail was in sight. The rail was closer. The rail was about ten more steps away, six more steps, three more steps…. She could almost touch the rail…. Her throat was so scorched with air that it no longer mattered how much it hurt. One more step…

  A man lent her a hand to help her over and started laughing and asking her what she was doing, but she couldn’t speak. She started right up the cement staircase, bobbing, weaving, and pushing her way through the crowd. She passed through the huge archway and found herself back in the main indoor concourse. It was all concrete and echoes in here, and the thwacking seemed painfully loud.

  “Why…are…these…places…all…named…the…same…?” she said, wheeling past the identical carts and shops. She ran past the pennant banners, the Russell Street exit…no longer even sure if anyone was after her. Maybe she should slow down, start walking? That way she would blend in.

  No. Keep running.

  Finally she saw the exit and tore off through it and kept right on going, across the plaza, into the complex of parking lots, across a street. She looked for whatever signs or landmarks she could remember but found none. It was all just parking lot.

  Then she saw Palm bouncing up and down in the distance, waving her in.

  She didn’t even care that Palm and Brooks doubled over with frantic laughter as they watched her run her strange, head-down, flat-footed run in their direction.

  “The key!” Palmer was screaming. “The key!”

  “I…know!”

  Thwack, thwack…

  “Get the key!”

  “I…know!”

  May’s hand was already scouring the bottom of her bag, trying to hook a finger onto the all-important key. She found everything else. Wallet. Altoids. Millions and millions of Presto Espresso napkins, which went flying out and left a trail.

  Bingo. Key.

  “I got it!” she screamed, skidding up to the car. One of the shoes flew underneath, but she didn’t try to retrieve it. (So they’d have Cinderella evidence as well. If they wanted to scour the East Coast trying to find the coffee-drinking girl with only one dazzling and patriotic flip-flop, that was their business.) The adrenaline was causing her entire body to shake, so it was hard for her to coordinate her movements and get the key into the lock.

  “May!”

  “Shut up!”

  She managed to control her hands just enough to unlock the driver’s side door. She jumped in and unlocked the other side. Ignition. Where was the ignition? The key banged fruitlessly into the dashboard. Palm let out a high-pitched squeal that did little to calm May’s nerves. Brooks reached over, grabbed her hand, and directed it firmly toward the ignition. The key slid into the slot, and the car roared to life.

  “Drive!” Palm yelled.

  Shift? Shift. Come on, May. Grab the shift. Her confidence growing, May threw the car into reverse and backed the Golden Firebird out of its parking space. Shift again, May. Move it to D. Hit the gas. Go.

  The Golden Firebird pulled off into the balmy Baltimore night, leaving behind a star-spangled flip-flop, a fistful of crumpled napkins, and the contents of the bronze urn.

  Hysterical laughter filled the car. None of them could stop. It wasn’t necessarily a funny kind of laughter—it was a crazy, relieved kind of laughter. Palmer was flat on her stomach in the backseat. Brooks was doubled over, her head resting on the dashboard. May was hugging the wheel, barely able to breathe or see through her watery eyes. They were stuck in creeping traffic anyway, in a long line of cars trying to get back on I-95.

  “I can’t,” May said between heaves. “I can’t drive.”

  “Take the shoulder,” Brooks said.

  Normally May would never have taken a piece of advice like this, but all rules of her life were temporarily suspended. She steered the massive Firebird onto the shoulder of the road, then drove along slowly until she came to a small local road. She turned down this and kept going until she found a gas station with a convenience store attached.

  Brooks filled the tank while May and Palmer went into the store. May, ignoring the sign on the store entrance, kicked off her remaining flip-flop, put it in the trash, and walked in barefoot. They roamed the aisles, laughing and picking up a strange assortment of items: chips, Swedish fish, chocolate bars, minidough-nuts. When they dump
ed their selections on the counter, the clerk looked at them suspiciously.

  “All of this food is for her,” Palmer said straight-faced, pointing her thumb at May.

  “I get hungry,” May said.

  “You’re missing your shoes there,” the man said, looking down at May’s feet.

  “Oh, right,” May replied, as if just noticing this herself. “I ate them.”

  Once outside, they sat on the ground next to the Firebird and passed the bag around. They ate in silence for a moment, basking in sugar, fat, and impending doom.

  “Do you think they know how to toe print?” May asked, looking down at the two raw and slightly bloody spots where the flip-flop toggles had cut into her skin.

  “No.” Brooks shook her head. “Probably not.”

  “Good.” May stretched out her toes, and the stinging sensation from the broken skin shot up both her legs. She kept doing it anyway, trying to create as wide a space between the toes as she could. The pain almost fascinated her.

  “They could check your shoes for DNA,” Palmer said, shoving an entire peanut butter cup into her mouth.

  “I’ll tell them you made me do it.”

  Palmer shrugged and chewed.

  “We should take the top down,” Brooks said.

  “Fine,” May consented, still absorbed in her toe stretching. “Go ahead.”

  Brooks climbed into the front seat and flipped the switches on either side where the convertible top met the windshield. Palmer got up to help Brooks lower the top into the well. It was slightly stiff, but it came down without too much hassle.

  “There,” Brooks said as the interior of the Firebird was once again exposed to the open air. “That’s more like it.”

  “So,” May said, fishing around in one of the bags and pulling out a potato chip, “do we ever tell Mom we did this?”

  Palmer was opening her mouth to reply, but Brooks beat her to it.

  “No,” she said.

  “Don’t you think she’s going to notice?” May asked.

  “Not if we just put the urn back,” Brooks replied.

  “Isn’t it going to be a little light?”

  “You think she takes it down and weighs it?”

  “Do you know that she doesn’t?”

  “So we fill it with flour or something.”

  “She’ll be able to tell the difference.”

  “You think she opens it up and looks at it?” Brooks said.

  “Stop,” Palmer said, coming over to stand in front of them. “You’re ruining it. We did it, so just…stop.”

  May and Brooks fell silent. It wasn’t an angry silence, either. For one of the only times in her life, May felt like she and her sisters were truly together, on the same page. But this time they had accomplished something enormous.

  “You’re right,” she said. “We did it.”

  Brooks was sunk down completely in the backseat of the Firebird, submerged in a universe of vinyl, protected from the wind and bathing in the warm breezes. This was something that she had missed for a long time. Time moved differently here. Perspective changed. Even though she couldn’t see where the car was going, she could watch herself moving quickly toward the moon. Billboards looked thin and straight, like redwoods. They seemed to be keeping time with a plane that flew overhead, probably in the direction of Philadelphia International.

  Palmer was glorying in the front seat, hanging her arm over the side of the car. She took her ticket from her pocket and did as her father always used to do—she shoved it under the raised lock on the glove compartment. She examined the sight with satisfaction for a few minutes; then she watched May drive. May had gotten more relaxed. The road was fairly empty, and the route was straight and well lit. They were actually doing sixty.

  “So, what did you do to Pete?” she asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” May said, tucking a stray piece of hair behind her ear.

  “Why not?”

  “Because.”

  “Those are the things that always come back and bite you in the ass,” Palmer counseled.

  May threw her a puzzled look.

  “What things?”

  “The things you try to avoid. You can never really avoid them.”

  Palmer was scary sometimes. May often suspected that she might have her own talk show someday.

  “So what happened?” Palmer pushed again.

  “We had a fight. Sort of.”

  “He tried to kiss her and she ripped into him.”

  “Thanks, Brooks,” May said into the rearview mirror.

  “De nada.”

  “Why?” Palmer asked.

  “I don’t know,” May answered honestly.

  “But he likes you. And you like him.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Yes, you do. Why do you keep saying that you don’t?”

  “Good question,” came a voice from the back. “Especially since you made out with him all night before we left for the shore.”

  “What did you say to him?” Palmer asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” May said.

  They drove the next five miles in silence.

  “I screwed it up,” May finally said. “I screwed it up really badly.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” May said, tentatively pushing harder on the accelerator. “I guess I’ll figure something out.”

  Right before midnight the Firebird stopped just short of the driveway. The minivan was parked in front of the house. All three Gold sisters gazed at it in horror.

  “Why is that here?” Brooks whispered, leaning forward.

  “I don’t know,” May said, eyes wide. “Maybe she switched shifts.”

  “We can tell her we just ran out to the store,” Palmer said. “We’ve got stuff.”

  “For six hours?” Brooks said.

  “Okay,” May said, “it’s not so bad. Well, it might be for you, Brooks….”

  May heard a thunk as Brooks fell back hard against her seat in despair.

  “We just need to have one consistent story. Where could we have been for that amount of time?”

  “The mall?” Palmer suggested.

  “The mall closes at ten.”

  “Okay,” Palmer said, “we went to the mall, then to a movie.”

  After agreeing on the details, May pulled the Firebird into the garage. Their arrival was painfully loud, with the garage door squealing as it was opened and the coughing and growling of the Firebird engine echoing through the room. Immediately the door to the kitchen flew open. Their mother stood on the threshold. Her chest was actually heaving, like a volcano in those final, huff-and-puff seconds before an eruption.

  “Oh,” Palmer said. “Hi.”

  “Where have you been?”

  The question echoed through the calm night air. It shook the garage. It vibrated between the houses. It caused a neighbor’s dog to start barking. A car alarm also started going off somewhere in the distance, but that was probably unconnected.

  “The mall?” May offered. “And then to a movie?”

  “I got a call from the league. You hurt someone today, Palmer? Then you left?”

  “That was an accident,” Brooks said. “Bad pitch.”

  Normally Palmer would have jumped at Brooks’s throat for a remark like that, but she just sat now, staring dumbly at the dashboard.

  “You have your license for half a day, May, and you do this? You take Brooks out? You keep Palmer out until midnight when she’s hurt someone?”

  May could tell that the fight from earlier hadn’t been forgotten. She sighed and looked up at the steel garage door tracks in the ceiling.

  “Just get inside,” her mother said, disgusted. “All of you. And go right to bed. I don’t even want to discuss this tonight. I’m—”

  She stopped suddenly, her eyes frozen on a spot along the dashboard. May knew in that instant what she had seen, but it was too late to do anything about it.

&
nbsp; Her mother reached into the car and plucked Palmer’s ticket from under the glove compartment lock.

  17

  May was lying in bed, unwilling or unable to get out, even though it was after noon and a sweet breeze was coming in through her screened window. It seemed to be trying to reach her through the sheet she had over her head, to tell her that a perfect summer day was waiting outside. But May wasn’t interested. She liked it where she was, under this soft, cool canopy dotted with the undersides of little orange flowers. If she could have, she would have stayed there all day. The adrenaline of last night had worn off, and there was too much ugly stuff outside that she had to face now. But she had to get ready for work, so she reluctantly rolled out of bed and went downstairs.

  May’s first surprise of the day was that her mother wasn’t drinking coffee at the kitchen table when she got down there—but Mrs. Camp was. She rubbed her eyes. Yes. Definitely Mrs. Camp. Her long, pale orange hair, now streaked with a few gray wisps. Her freckled skin.

  “Oh, hi, May,” Mrs. Camp said, pretending not to notice that May was standing in the doorway wearing only a T-shirt and her underwear. “Your mom asked me to…stay.”

  “To stay?” May repeated, pulling down hard on the hem of the shirt and trying not to move too much.

  “To keep you guys company today,” Mrs. Camp said, smiling apologetically.

  “Keep us company?”

  “I brought some cinnamon rolls,” Mrs. Camp said, pushing a large white bakery box in May’s direction. “And I hit a huge sale on paper towels, so I brought some of those over.”

  May glanced over and saw a massive fifteen-pack of paper towels sitting on the floor by the stove.

  “I’m just going to…put on some other things,” May said. “Be right back.”

  May ran up the stairs and to her room, shutting the door tightly behind her. First, they had, in essence, a babysitter. This meant they were under house arrest. Second, their guard was Pete’s mom, which definitely put a little salt in the wound. It was entirely possible that Mrs. Camp knew what May had done yesterday—and there was so much to know: she’d fought with her mother, spat on Mrs. Camp’s son’s declarations of love, driven to Baltimore…and that was just the public domain stuff. Wait till everyone found out about the criminal trespassing and the going into a convenience store with no shoes on.