Sammy Keyes and the Runaway Elf

by Wendelin Van Draanen

  She nodded and practically wagged her tail. “Do you like it? Really?”

  “It’s amazing! I can’t believe …” I looked right at her. “Where did you learn to do this?”

  She looked around like she was afraid someone might hear. “Girl Scouts.”

  “Girl Scouts?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. But it’s really fun. We do crafts and go camping and hiking. Do you … do you like camping?” I could see hope right through that curtain of hair. Then she looked down and said, “You seem like you would.”

  “I … I don’t know. I’ve never been.”

  “You’ve never been? Boy, you’re missing out! You should come with us sometime. It is so much fun.”

  I tucked the ornament safely in the box. “Um …”

  She whispered, “You wouldn’t have to join, just talk to your mom—ask her if you can come along sometime.”

  My mom. Right. But I wasn’t about to get into that, so I smiled and said, “Uh, yeah. Maybe so.”

  She kind of nodded over my shoulder and said, “Well, Marissa and them are waiting for you, so I’d better let you go.” She smiled and said, “Merry Christmas!”

  I stopped her. “Cassie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m … I’m glad you were my KK. Thank you.”

  She smiled. “I’m glad, too. ’Bye!”

  And it’s funny. As soon as she scampered off I felt sad. Lonely. And even though I had friends waiting for me to join them, Cassie bringing up my mom made me realize that I couldn’t just have fun hanging around with them when school let out.

  There was something else I had to do.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I stared at her door for a long time. And when I did put the key in and turn the knob, it felt strange. Like I was Mrs. Graybill.

  I went in and just sat on her sofa and thought. About her. About Billy McCabe. About how miserable she’d made herself, trying to make her sister feel bad.

  Then I started thinking about the Crocodile and the whole Landvogt mess. How she’d treated Tina, and how Tina had turned into a blackmailer, just like her mom.

  And through it all I could hear Hudson talking. Talking about forgiveness.

  Then I did something I’ve tried for over a year not to do. I thought about my mother. About how she’d dumped me at Grams’. About the bad dreams I’d had and all the tears I’d cried because I’d missed her so much. About her promise to be back soon. About how, just when I was getting used to not hearing from her, there would be her voice on the line, telling me she loved me.

  And I thought about how, when you got right down to it, what she’d done was desert me to become the GasAway Lady.

  And as I sat there on Mrs. Graybill’s couch, I started crying. First just a little, then like Elyssa had at the graveyard. And somehow I wound up with one of Mrs. Graybill’s afghans wrapped around me, warm and soft, like arms comforting me.

  When I was done watering her apartment, I let out a deep sigh and knew that there was only one way not to turn out like Mrs. Graybill, or worse, the Crocodile or Tina.

  I had to forgive her. I had to find a way to forgive my mother.

  So I closed my eyes and tried to remember everything. Not just the past year. Not just the bad stuff. Everything.

  I remembered the swings at the park and the way she’d wave after me when she’d drop me off at school. I remembered how she used to call me Sunshine and tousle my hair. How she helped me learn the difference between little b and little d. How she’d sing rounds with me in the car. How she’d take me down to the farmers’ market every Wednesday night, not to stock up on vegetables but just so we could walk around together.

  And then I thought about how she’d cry herself to sleep some nights and could never explain to me why.

  And when I was done soaking the carpet about that, I wiped off my face and got busy doing what I’d come there to do.

  It was hard deciding. They were all so pretty. But in the end I picked a pastel pink and white one for Grams, a royal blue one for my mother, and one that looked like a sunrise for myself. I folded them up together, then took one last look around and whispered, “Thank you” as I closed the door.

  When I got home, I locked myself in the bathroom with paper and ribbons, and wrapped up the afghans, one by one. And as I placed them under our little tree, I got that feeling again. Warm, happy. Peaceful.

  Now you may think it’s kind of strange, giving gifts for Christmas that have been taken from a dead woman’s apartment, but to me those afghans aren’t just presents to put under the tree. They’re like the fabric of life.

  And if Mrs. Graybill were here, I don’t think she’d chase me down and take them back. No, something tells me that Daisy Graybill—the real Daisy Graybill—would give them to me herself if she could.

  Have you read

  SAMMY KEYES and the CURSE of MOUSTACHE MARY

  yet?

  Here’s a sneak peek.

  Excerpt from Sammy Keyes and the Curse of Moustache Mary

  Copyright © 2000 by Wendelin Van Draanen Parsons

  All rights reserved

  PROLOGUE

  You’d think I could spend the night at a friend’s house without finding myself knee-deep in pig poop. But no. I couldn’t even make it there without practically breaking every bone in my body, and by the time the clock was gonging in the New Year, well, I was in so deep it was going to take a backhoe to get me out.

  ONE

  Marissa McKenze is the last person on earth you should ever accept a ride from. And I knew that. Trouble is, she had a bike, Holly had a bike, and all I had were my high-tops and the distant memory of a skateboard that had disappeared while I was playing video games at the mall.

  And maybe I should have wobbled around on Holly’s handlebars instead, but Holly wasn’t offering. Marissa was. And since Dot’s new house was clear out in Sisquane and I didn’t want to spend all morning getting there, what choice did I have?

  Actually, things were going pretty well. Our duffel bags were in back, bungeed tight and balanced right, and it was real foggy out, so Marissa was driving kind of carefully for once. We’d made it three whole blocks down Broadway and another three whole blocks down Cook Street without so much as a serious wobble. But then, just as I was starting to relax a little, these guys come barreling down a cross street on skateboards.

  Holly stopped. Just locked up her brakes and slid to a halt. Marissa, on the other hand, started to stop, but then changed her mind and decided to go. And as we’re heading for the collision of the century, she lets go of the handlebars and cries, “Timber!”

  She goes down sideways, and I sail through the air, straight for this guy who’s ducking and weaving on his skateboard, trying to avoid me. But I’m flying at him like a human cannonball, and he doesn’t have a chance. Not a prayer. I nail him, smack! right to the asphalt.

  His skateboard goes flipping off, and his mouth does, too, letting loose with a string of four-letter synonyms for Ouch!

  I untangle myself from him and hold on to my arm, because it hurts pretty bad and blood’s already seeping through my sweatshirt. He’s still swearing away, kind of dancing around flicking a wrist, but he interrupts himself long enough to say, “Stupid females!”

  I sit there in the middle of the street holding my arm, trying to contain the pain. “I’m sorry. I … I …”

  “You what?” he snaps. “You thought you could ride around town like a circus act and people would stop and cheer?”

  Blood’s starting to ooze through the right knee of my jeans, and since my whole body’s pretty sore from having had an asphalt adjustment, I don’t feel like arguing or explaining. I just sit there with my eyes closed and say, “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry.”

  Then I hear someone laughing. So I look up from my private little spot in the middle of the street and what do I see? A guy with brown hair and baggy pants on his way to becoming hysterical about bruised-up bodies in the street. And I’m
about to tell Baggy Boy to shut up when I hear someone else laughing behind me. I turn around, and there’s Marissa and the guy she’d crashed into, dusting off, laughing. And then there’s Holly, straddling her bike with her hand in front of her mouth, about to bust up, too.

  Well. Obviously they’re all just fine. And I suppose I was, too, only I wasn’t ready to admit it yet. I was too mad. Mad at Marissa for being such a bad driver. Mad at my mother for buying me a pink angora sweater for Christmas instead of something I wanted—like a new skateboard or a bike. And the more I sat there, the madder I got, and the more I wanted to kill the guy who’d stolen my skateboard in the first place. I mean, if I still had it, I wouldn’t be sitting there in the middle of the street all banged up from riding around town like a circus act.

  Then I hear Marissa’s victim say, “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  Marissa looks at him a little closer, then says, “Oh, yeah … you’re …”

  He helps her out. “Taylor. You asked me for directions the first day of school, remember?”

  Well, I recognize him. He’s Taylor Briggs, slick-and-slimy eighth grader. Good friends with Heather Acosta, red-and-rotten seventh grader. Taylor’s older brother is best friends with Marissa’s cousin Brandon; Taylor’s the one who told Heather about Marissa being rich, and Taylor’s the one who told Heather that I looked like a fourth grader.

  Now, Heather may be cat hair in my craw, and there’s probably not a kid at William Rose Junior High who doesn’t know that truth to her is a foreign language—one she’s not about to learn. But that first day of seventh grade, when she told me that Taylor thought I looked like a fourth grader, you could tell—there was truth behind it.

  So I’m sitting there, mad at the world, mad at Marissa for laughing with a guy who’s friends with Heather and thinks I look like a fourth grader, when Baggy Boy comes up to the guy I’d bombed and hands him back his skateboard. “Here you go, Snake. You all right?”

  He says, “Yeah, dude. Thanks,” and gives me one last glare.

  I’m sitting there thinking, Snake? What kind of stupid name is Snake? when I notice the bottom of his skateboard. It’s a metal-gray color, but it’s been spray-painted that way. And I can tell, because underneath, where the gray’s been scraped away jumping curbs, it’s purple. A light purple with dark veins running through it. Like it had been dipped in molten amethyst. And there’s only one other board I’ve ever seen that looks like that.

  Mine.

  I get up and say, “Hey, wait a second!”

  He turns around.

  “Where’d you get that skateboard?”

  He sneers at me. “Oh, now you want to learn to ride? Don’t even go there.” He looks over at Baggy for a laugh. “Walkin’s more your speed.”

  He turns to go, so I say, “No really. Wait a minute. Where’d you get it?” I run up for a better look, and when I see the foot grip, it’s like my heart hits rapids.

  Along the back of the foot grip, there’s a three-inch strip missing. A three-inch strip completely gone except for a little piece sticking out like Florida in a States puzzle.

  So between Florida on the top and amethyst on the bottom, there’s no doubt in my mind: That skateboard’s mine. And suddenly I’m not feeling my banged-up bones or the blood trickling down my leg. I’m feeling mad. Branding-hot mad.

  I close in on the guy, saying, “Where did you get it?”

  He’s looking at me like I’ve got something contagious. “I bought it off a friend, okay?”

  I get right in his face. “Well, where did your friend get it, then?”

  “Hey, back off, psycho!” He looks over at Taylor, then back at me. “At a garage sale, all right? Like it’s any of your business.”

  “It is my business!” I twist the board and point to the band of purple. “This is my skateboard and I can prove it. I wrote my initials right up here.”

  He snickers. “I don’t see no initials.”

  “Scrape off the paint.”

  He backs away from me, so I lunge for the skateboard. “I said, scrape off the paint!”

  He wrestles it out of my hands. “You are psycho!”

  I can’t just let him walk away. That’s my skateboard. And somehow I can’t find it in me to reason with the guy or have a nice little chat about how the right thing for him to do would be to give it back. No, watching him walk off with my skateboard, there’s only one thing left to do.

  Jump him.

  I go flying through the air to tackle him again, but this time he doesn’t go down. He spins and bucks and finally just throws me off. “Dude! Get a grip!”

  Marissa helps me up and whispers, “It isn’t worth it, Sammy. It’s only a skateboard.”

  “But it’s my skateboard, and he knows it!”

  Holly calls, “Yeah! Hey—that thing’s pretty beat-up anyway. Why don’t you scrape the paint off and settle this?” She shrugs. “Unless you’re lying and you stole it.”

  Snake takes a step toward us. “Who you callin’ a liar? You think I’d want to steal this thing?”

  Taylor plants himself between us like a road-wrestling referee. “He is telling the truth. He bought it off me.” He shrugs. “I got it at a garage sale for five bucks.”

  Well, that buttons my beak. Finally I choke out, “But it’s mine.”

  Taylor gives me a sad little shake of the head. “If it was, it’s not anymore.”

  Just then a primer-gray pickup truck with wide tires and huge sideview mirrors comes rumbling down the street. And the minute Taylor sees it, he practically stomps his foot. “Oh, maaaan …”

  The driver cranks down the window and calls, “Get in. Mom and Dad want you back home.”

  There’s also a guy in the back of the pickup, and he leans out and calls to Taylor, “Hop into the paddy wagon, bro. The gestapo’s out in force.”

  Marissa whispers, “Is that Karl?”

  I whisper back, “Who’s Karl?”

  “Brandon’s best friend, remember?”

  Now maybe it was, but the guy in the back of the truck wasn’t anyone I recognized as being any kind of friend of Brandon’s. I mean, I’d been to pool parties at Brandon’s before, and this guy sure didn’t look like anyone I’d ever seen him with.

  Marissa whispers, “God, that is Karl. His hair’s gotten long, and he looks … I don’t know, older, but that’s him.”

  Baggy Boy goes over and asks for a ride, and pretty soon Snake’s on board, too, only none of them are in the cab. They’re piled up like a load of cattle in the back, settling in as Big Brother grinds into gear and lets out the clutch.

  So off they go into the fog with my skateboard. And all of a sudden my body’s aching and I can feel the blood crusting my jeans to my knee, and all I want is to sit down and cry.

  Marissa sees the sleeve of my sweatshirt and says, “Maybe we should take you to a doctor.”

  “I don’t need a doctor!”

  Holly comes over and says, “Let me see,” and makes me pull my arm out of the sleeve. Marissa about faints when she sees the scrape, but Holly turns my arm back and forth and says, “You just need some gauze and tape. A doctor can’t do anything for that.”

  I don’t happen to have a box of gauze and a roll of tape handy, and I sure didn’t want to go home to dig some up. But then Marissa asks, “Do you think Hudson will have some?”

  Hudson! Of course! We were only a few blocks from his house, and if anyone in Santa Martina could patch me up, it was Hudson Graham.

  Not that Hudson’s a doctor or anything. He’s seventy-two and retired—from what, I’m not real sure—but what I do know is that he’s a friend I can count on, and he’s got the tools to fix anything. Including a scraped arm and a banged-up knee.

  So off we went to Cypress Street to find Hudson. And I was expecting him to be in a chair on his big porch, sipping tea like he always is, but when we turned up the walkway, no Hudson.

  I tried the bell, then peeked in the living room window. No Huds
on. And I’m just about to give up when a jogger in gray sweats and white Nikes appears on Hudson’s walkway.

  He might have been able to fool me altogether if it weren’t for those bushy white eyebrows sticking out like fog lights from beneath his sweatshirt hood. And even after I knew it was Hudson, it still felt strange. Like discovering that the jacket you’ve been wearing all year is reversible.

  I mean, Hudson drinks iced tea, reads books, and spends his days on his porch watching the world go by. Hudson does not wear sweats. Hudson does not jog. And Hudson Graham does not wear tennis shoes. He wears boots. Cowboy boots. Red ones, green ones, furry ones, ones that look like the hide of a Tyrannosaurus rex—boots.

  So seeing him appear out of the fog in tennis shoes and sweats spooked me.

  He pulls back his hood and ruffles his beacon of white hair. “Sammy, are you all right? You look pale.” Then he notices the sleeve of my sweatshirt. “Here. Come up here and sit down.”

  He gets me onto his porch and parks me in a chair, then asks, “What happened?”

  I glance over at Marissa, who starts fidgeting around, doing the McKenze dance. “They came out of nowhere. And they were going so fast!” She looks up at me. “I couldn’t help it!”

  Hudson sizes up the number of wheels on his walkway and the number of people on his porch and says, “You riding tandem again?”

  I scowl and nod, and pull my arm out of my sweatshirt. After he inspects it, he whispers, “I thought you swore off,” and heads for the house.

  I call after him, “I did! But Dot’s moved out to Sisquane, and I can’t exactly walk that far.”

  A minute later Hudson’s back with a first aid kit, and while he’s cleaning me up, I tell him about our little crash-dummy convention and how I wouldn’t have to be riding on Marissa’s handlebars if my skateboard hadn’t been stolen.