Bradley shrugged, unconcerned.
“You better not have taken anything from the shelves,” Farley continued in his annoying drone. “Everything in this room is the property of the college.”
I stepped in front of him, blocking his view of Bradley. I gave Farley my haughtiest glare. Clay called it my Bitch Glare, but that didn’t matter. I never had to care what Clay thought about anything ever again.
Farley’s gaze rose to my face, his eyes locked with mine, and he paled.
“We don’t steal from libraries,” I said in my iciest tone. “We came here to research. We’re finished now.”
Farley nodded. He was worried. He was supposed to supervise us, and he’d left us alone in here. Too bad.
“You’ve been most helpful,” I said in the sarcastic tone that actually saidI will cut your head off and drink your blood if you don’t obey me.“We’re leaving now. Step aside.”
The kid stepped out of the doorway and back into the hall. I strode off in the direction of the front entrance without a backward glance. I heard Bradley fall into step behind my left shoulder.
I’d given Bradley a mere few seconds, but I knew it was enough time. When we were out of earshot, approaching the front doors, I asked softly, “What did you take?”
“The map,” he whispered back. “I figured it was what you wanted.”
He was right. The map would do just fine.
I pushed open the doors, walked out into the cool air of the parking lot, and smiled.
35
Dodie
I was, to put it mildly, not an athlete. Some models did aerobics or jogging to stay thin, but most of us used the time-honored methods used by our model ancestors of decades past. If starvation, cigarettes, and fishy diet pills were good enough for the girls in the fifties, then they were good enough for me.
So I was out of breath before Terri and I had gone a block on our bikes. The bike Terri had lent me—the one she got for Christmas and didn’t like much—was a five-speed, the kind with a high seat and low handlebars curled like horns that you had to lean onto. It made a loud, somewhat-satisfying whizzing sound as I rode, but the seat was so hard that my nethers began screaming. Within moments, I hurt in places that I hadn’t previously known existed, or usually refused to acknowledge.
Terri rode ahead of me, ignorant of my pain. She seemed delighted to have a companion for this ride, even a companion as old and decrepit as I was. She talked as she pedaled, while I wheezed as quietly as I could. Luckily, she didn’t seem to need me to respond.
“We can go to the creek,” Terri said. “I’ll show you the fort I made.”
“No creek,” I said, thinking of the shadow in the trees. “Let’s go toward town.”
“I’m not allowed to go downtown,” Terri said. “But there are lots of good spots in the neighborhood.”
“Aren’t there other children around for you to play with?”
“There are no kids in this neighborhood, and none of the girls at school want to come over. Were there kids here when you were growing up?”
“No, there weren’t. None at all.”
Terri was incurious about this. I followed her around a curve in the road, feeling the trees recede behind our backs and remembering how there were no children here for us Esmies to play with, even if we had wanted to. Only Violet had had a friend, Alice McMurtry, who I had thought was boring. I’d felt bad for thinking that when Alice died. Alice had been around Terri’s age, and now I was thinking about Terri lying lifeless next to the train tracks. I pumped harder on my pedals to stay close to her, nearly hitting her rear tire with my front one.
Terri slowed next to a curb, then got off her bike. “There’s a hollow tree this way,” she called to me, leaving her bike sprawled as she hurried away.
I got off my bike, wincing, and followed her. I had no interest in a hollowed-out tree, but I said, “Fine. Don’t you have any siblings?”
“No,” she called back.
How did one live without siblings to drive one crazy day in and day out for one’s entire childhood? I suddenly felt fond of my dullest days growing up, which I spent drawing, reading a line or two of a book at a time, or simply lying on my bed, staring out the window at the sky while Vail and Violet bickered down the hall. I was even nostalgic about Violet hogging the bathroom and Vail emitting various gases on me whenever possible.
The tree Terri showed me was indeed hollow, as advertised. “Hownice,” I said politely as she showed me the hole, where she sometimes stashed treasures for the purpose of retrieving them later.
“There’s a hill I like to bike up as fast as I can,” the girl said. “It’s steep. Want to try?”
