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The Runaways

Zilpha Keatley Snyder

Chapter 1

DANI HAD BEEN IN the graveyard for maybe ten minutes when she suddenly knew she was going to do it. Jumping to her feet, she shook both fists in the air and yelled out loud, “Yeah, I’m going to.” Took a deep breath and shouted again, “I really mean it.”

It was like a vow, or maybe even more like—a challenge. Yeah. A challenge. Still staring up at the desert sky, she stuck out her chin and told herself, and anyone—or anything—that might be listening, that this time she absolutely meant it. She wasn’t yelling now. Only thinking, but with a fierceness that swelled her throat as if she were still shouting, “I mean it. I’m going to do it. And right now, too.”

No more of this waiting to grow up stuff, or even putting it off until next year. Any day now, like maybe next Friday, she, Danielle O’Donnell, would load up her old purple duffel bag, take whatever money was left in Stormy’s ugly bank and take off. On the bus if there was enough money for a ticket, or if that didn’t work, by stowing away in the back of a truck. But however she had to do it, she was definitely going to go.

Afterward she never was quite sure why she’d made up her mind at that particular moment. It must have been the graveyard that made the difference, that gave her the guts to finally come to a decision on an otherwise ordinary afternoon, the last day of April in 1951, a few months before her thirteenth birthday. It wasn’t as if she’d been especially angry at that particular moment, or even any more bored out of her skull than usual. And for once the weather wasn’t even especially awful. Okay, so the usual skin-shriveling desert wind was blowing, but at least it wasn’t either icy cold or hot enough to broil your tonsils. So why did she suddenly make up her mind to do something she’d been putting off ever since she’d first set eyes on Rattler Springs more than four years ago? It must have been the graveyard that did it. Or else what she’d been doing there.

The graveyard at Rattler Springs was on a hill. Not much more than a slope really, but about the closest thing to a hill anywhere near town, and high enough so that from where she sat there was almost what you might call a view. You might, that is, if you’d grown up in Rattler Springs, and had never seen anything like a real one. A real view with lots of cool blue water, towering green trees and all the other great stuff Danielle O’Donnell had been used to, once upon a time.

The “view” you actually got from the graveyard was of a short row of squatty, sand-blistered shops, clustered around the only two-story building in town. That one big ugly building held a general store, a lunch counter, a small office and a big bar on the ground floor, and up above, the Grand Hotel. Or, as it was sometimes called, the Grablers’ Grand. Everyone in town knew the Grablers, whether they wanted to or not.

Next door to the one big building there was the post office’s little cubbyhole, about the size of a postage stamp, and on the other side of Main Street, a big wooden shack known as the town hall, which served as a church or movie theater, depending on the day of the week and time of day.

On past the town hall you got Lefty’s Bar, one of the five bars in town, and right after that, the winner of any ugly contest, grubby old Gus’s garage and service station. Gus’s Grease Pit, as the whole place was sometimes called, consisted of a paintless gas station out front and, behind that, a big tin-roofed garage with its famous grease pit. The grease pit was famous, at least in Rattler Springs, because it was so deep, deeper than most grease pits because Gus was so tall. And greasier than most, because Gus was such a slob. And everywhere, in front, out back, in the garage and out of it, there were old tires, parts of dead cars and all kinds of other junk. And grease. Grease everywhere, especially on Gus himself.

Beyond the Grabler property and Greasy Gus’s the town went on for about a block, but except for the Silver Grill, the only halfway decent restaurant in town, there wasn’t much worth mentioning. The rest of Rattler Springs included a combination motel and gas station, a few more bars, and a scattering of houses and house trailers, spread out between a lot of trashy vacant lots, with here and there a spindly, wind-stripped thing that never quite managed to look like a tree. Of course, there was also the schoolhouse, but that was another story. A story that didn’t do much to improve Dani’s feelings about the view.

It wasn’t much of a school really, only two classrooms with a dark, narrow hallway between them. Dani had been in the primary room her first year at Rattler Springs. Since then she’d moved across the hall where Mr. Graham taught eighteen kids ranging in size from skinny little Chloe in the fifth grade to gigantic old Ronnie Grabler in the eighth. And not a person of any size who had any interest in anything outside of Rattler Springs.

Beyond and behind and around all of it was absolutely nothing. Nothing, that is, but desert. And not even an honest-to-God, Sahara-type desert like you see in pictures, where bare white dunes move in the wind like snowdrifts, and actually manage to look beautiful in a deadly sort of way. Nothing as interesting as that. Around Rattler Springs all you got was boring, gray-brown, flat-out ugliness, where the few things that did manage to grow were spindly or prickly, and not even big enough to hide behind. And in the distance the hills rose dark and slick against a bare, blue sky.

But it couldn’t have been looking at the Rattler Springs view, as miserable as it was, that made Dani come to a decision. After all, she’d looked out across that same depressing scene plenty of times before. What really must have done it—and she realized that this was pretty freaky, but it was true—what must have done it was seeing her own name on the tombstone. Even though she’d put it there herself.

She’d been sitting there on a flattish rock between the graves of Clarence Bailey and Hank Somebody-or-other when it happened. On her right was Clarence’s tombstone, which she’d noticed before because it was the only one in the whole graveyard that was actually made of stone. Poor little dearly beloved Clarence Bailey. You knew he was little because he was born in 1891 and died in 1893. Which might seem like a sad story if you didn’t stop to think that at least he’d escaped having to grow up in Rattler Springs. And you knew he was dearly beloved because somebody had gone to the trouble to put up a marble tombstone, instead of a wooden cross. Or even just a slab of wood, like the one over poor old illegible Hank.

The sad news on Clarence’s marble tombstone was easy enough to read, but Hank’s statistics were another matter. The writing on Hank’s grave marker had been burned into the wood, probably with a branding iron. The first four letters were HANK, she was fairly sure about that. But then came a last name that started with what might have been an S, before it faded away into a bunch of splinters. There was, in fact, only one spot on the weathered old slab that was still fairly smooth and it was there that Dani, for some unknown reason, had started to write her own name. Not branding it into the wood, like they’d done for poor old Hank, but only scratching it in with a rusty nail.

Danielle O’Don—she’d written, and then she’d stopped. Stopped scratching and for a moment almost stopped breathing, with the horror of it. The horror of a terrible heart-stopping fear. It didn’t come from the notion that she was going to die someday. She’d never wasted much energy worrying about that. But more likely from suddenly facing the possibility that she might die right there. That she might live out her whole life in Rattler Springs without ever escaping back to where she belonged.

It was then that she caught her breath, dropped the nail as if it had burned her fingers, jumped to her feet and started yelling. And then hushed, and stood motionless, only moving her eyes from one side to the other as she waited—and listened.

There was no answer, of course, at least not one that she heard with her ears, but the desert was talking to her, all right. Telling her that it wouldn’t ever let her get away. Like it had almost every day for the last four years. Ever since that blazing hot day in 1947 when she and Linda had arrived in Rattler Springs. Dani shook her head fiercely, took a deep breath and began to run. But she’d only gone a few steps when she stumbled on a rock and turned her ankle.

It hurt. For a minute or two it hurt like anything. She hopped for a while, muttering “Ouch” and a few other things, before she managed to go on. Refusing to limp, she tried not to wonder if the desert had done it on purpose. Had put that rock there to let her know how easy it would be to stop her if she ever tried anything desperate. Showing her how it could use a sneaky rock, or the blazing sun, or just hundreds of miles of emptiness, to keep her from making it. “Nice try,” she told the desert, “but you don’t scare me any.” She kept right on then at a slightly painful jog until she got to the end of the graveyard trail. And just beyond the trail’s end, Silver Avenue.

Chapter 2

SILVER AVENUE. SLOWING TO a walk and not even bothering to look both ways, Dani started right up the middle of the crumbling, potholed stretch of blacktop that some long-ago dreamer had the nerve to name Silver Avenue. “Sssil-ver Ah-ven-ooo.” Dani always stuck out her chin and waggled her head around in a “grand lady” put-on, whenever she had to give her address. “Number seventeen, Sssil-ver Ah-ven-ooo.” What a laugh. As if there had ever been much silver, or anything halfway grand enough to be called an avenue, in Rattler Springs.

She was almost home, still waggling her head and murmuring “Sss-il-ver” when, right behind her and practically in her ear, a voice said, “You going nuts or something?” Dani whirled around, but of course it was only Stormy.

“Nuts? Not me,” Dani said. “But I will be if you don’t stop sneaking up on me like that.” Grabbing Stormy by his collar, she hissed in his ear, “Don’t you know you can drive people crazy, doing stuff like that?”

She turned him loose then and, putting her hands on her hips, glared at him. Poor old Stormy Arigotti had been following her around like a pet dog ever since he’d come to Rattler Springs at least two years before. He’d moved right into the Grand Hotel because his mother worked there, and since Dani lived next door it hadn’t taken Stormy long to start moving in on her. And not only when she was at home either. Stormy had a talent for showing up almost anywhere. Like in the middle of Silver Avenue, for instance.

She never had been able to figure out how a short, clunky nine-year-old kid could be so good at sneaking around. You’d be walking along, on your way to the rest room at school, or crossing the highway or even heading out to the trash can in your own backyard, for heaven’s sake, and there he’d be, sudden and silent as a snake.

“Okay, what’s up?” Dani asked him impatiently. “What do you want now?”

“Nothin’. Not exactly right now anyways, but …” Looking down sheepishly, Stormy began to pull something out of his jacket pocket. “But maybe later …”

It was a book, of course. Dani jerked it away from him. “What is it this time?”

“It’s a short one,” Stormy said. “See, it’s just …” He reached out, trying to turn the book to the last page, but she snatched it away and put it behind her back. Stormy made a grab for it but she turned quickly, making him miss.

The book was called White Fang and the picture on the cover was of a wolfish-looking dog. It looked kind of interesting. At least a little bit better than some of the stuff Stormy brought her. Dani sighed. The trouble with Stormy was that he had a problem. Well, actually, a couple of problems that didn’t fit together worth a darn. On the one hand, he had this reading block. Like when Stormy looked at a word the letters got all mixed up so what he saw didn’t make much sense. But on the other hand he had this mad love affair with stories. Particularly stories about animals. Most of the time Stormy was a really active-type kid. He could run around for hours playing a stupid ball game, or chasing somebody who’d called him a bad name. But if someone was reading a story he’d do a complete personality switch. Listening to a story, Stormy Arigotti could sit still for so long you’d think he’d been turned to stone. You might, at least, if you didn’t notice his eyes. When Stormy was listening to a story there was something about his eyes that always reminded Dani of the sparklers kids play with on the Fourth of July.

When Stormy lunged at the book again, she held it up over her head, grinning at him teasingly. She was thinking about telling him to forget it. After all, if she was going to be running away in a few days, she was going to be too busy getting ready to sit around for hours reading out loud. She was still keeping the book away from him when she saw his face tighten with anger and she got ready, watching his fists, but most of all his feet. Stormy was a mean kicker when he got mad enough, and she had the scars on her shinbones to prove it. He was almost kicking mad, one more teasing grin would probably have done it, when Dani decided to cool it.

Handing the book back to him, she said, “Okay, here it is. And I’ll read it. But not now. After dinner. Okay?”

“Okay. After dinner.” Stormy’s snub-nosed face split into a jack-o’-lantern grin. “I’ll bring pretzels. Okay? Or Beer Nuts?”

“Okay, okay,” Dani muttered, and started on across the street to the historic old Jerky Joe cabin, where she and her mother had lived since right after they arrived in Rattler Springs. As usual, the sagging gate refused to open. Shoving and kicking it, she growled, “Grrreat. Just great.”

Right behind her Stormy was bouncing around like a clown on a pogo stick. “Which?” he kept saying. “Which?”

One more violent kick and Dani gave up on the gate and whirled to face him. “Which what?” she bellowed.

Dani stopped to think. She liked them both, but you could buy pretzels at the store and the only place in Rattler Springs where you could get Beer Nuts was on the counter at the Grand Hotel bar—where no juveniles were allowed. No juveniles, at least, except someone whose mother worked at the bar and looked the other way while her kid snuck in to snitch Beer Nuts.

“Okay, Beer Nuts,” she said. She watched Stormy clump happily off clutching his precious book and wondered how much money there’d be in her running-away fund if she had a nickel for every book she’d ever read to Stormy. Giving the stupid gate a final kick, she gave up and, walking down to the hole in the fence, she cut across the pitiful remains of a lawn and up the front steps and banged open the screen door. As she crossed the tiny combination living room-bedroom a voice called, “Dani. Is that you?”

The voice belonged, of course, to Dani’s mother, Linda, who at the moment was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a book.

“There you are,” she said as Dani entered the room. “I was beginning to wonder.”

“Oh yeah?” Dani asked. It crossed her mind to say that she was surprised to hear that a certain person had pulled her nose out of her book long enough to notice that her one and only kid was missing. But she didn’t. Instead she went to the sink, rummaged around for a halfway clean glass, ran some lukewarm water and drank it, looking over the rim at her mother.

Linda O’Donnell was a pale, wispy woman who might have been almost pretty if she’d halfway tried. Tried to dress in something modern, for instance, instead of the long, saggy, flowery things she usually wore. And if she’d comb her flyaway hair once in a while and put on a little lipstick, which she might have time to do if she didn’t waste so much time listening to soap operas on the radio. Not to mention reading dumb books about rich people, or else about poor girls who wind up marrying rich people and living happily ever after.

“What is it this time?” Dani asked, and when Linda turned the book to its front cover Dani couldn’t help grinning. “The Pirate’s Bride,” she read in a dramatic voice. “Wowee!”

Linda smiled sheepishly, saved her place with a bookmark and closed the book. The bookmark was an embarrassing old thing that Dani had made for her a long time ago. It was decorated with pictures of daisies along with some flowery print that said “I love to read.” Dani had made it before she started noticing how her mother wasted so much time reading instead of doing something useful, like—Dani put her glass back down on the cluttered sinkboard—like washing a few dishes now and then, for instance.

After Linda closed her book and started making dinner Dani plopped herself down in her mother’s chair and began to flip through The Pirate’s Bride. It looked boring, like most of the stuff her mother read. Just a bunch of mushy stuff about a handsome man who acts mean and dangerous at first and then turns out to be positively adorable, and a beautiful woman who doesn’t know she’s in love with him even though it’s perfectly obvious. Dani hated the books her mother read. And she hated the way her mother spent so much time reading and daydreaming instead of doing something about the mess they were in. Or at least worrying about it.

Linda said she didn’t worry much because she was a natural optimist, which meant that she really believed in happy endings. Happy endings as in finding a better job so she could pay off their debts and save up enough money so she and Dani could leave Rattler Springs forever and move back to Sea Grove. But in the meantime she only sat around reading books like The Pirates Bride. Dani slammed the book shut and shoved it away from her.

Her mother, who had started peeling things at the sink, looked back over her shoulder.

Dani shrugged. She couldn’t very well tell her mother that she was feeling a little nervous and jumpy because she was about to run away. But she could talk about the stupid book. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s just that I don’t see how you can waste so much time reading stuff like that instead of doing something to …” She took a deep breath and then went on, “to get us back to Sea Grove.”

Linda sighed. She came back to the table, bringing the carrot she was peeling. Sitting down at the table, she peeled another long strip and then just sat there, staring at Dani. Not an angry stare. Dani wished it were. She could be angry too then, and not feel guilty about it. Finally Linda said, “Like what? Just what do you see me doing that might change things?”

“Well, like … like …,” Dani began, and then stammered to a stop. Her mother was smiling at her in the pitiful way that always drove Dani crazy. “Well, in the first place you might … Well, in the first place we never should have left Sea Grove. That’s what’s in the very first place.” Then she went into her bedroom and threw herself down on the bed.

Chapter 3

THAT MUCH WAS THE truth for sure. If only Linda hadn’t quit her job and given up the lease on their Sea Grove house before she’d even seen Rattler Springs.

The house in Sea Grove. Even after four years Dani could close her eyes and see exactly how it had looked. It hadn’t been very big, that was for sure, and maybe it was a little bit shabby in an artistic sort of way. But it was on a hillside, beside a grove of incredibly tall redwood trees, and from one end of the front porch there was this incredible view of the ocean. And the school where Dani had gone ever since kindergarten was only about a mile away. A school where she liked everybody and nearly everybody liked her, instead of hating her just because she was new and different. And where Heather Brady, her best friend, lived just down the road with her big, friendly family.

Dani had only been eight years old when they’d left for Rattler Springs, but she’d known right away it was a bad idea. Even right at first when everybody thought that Linda had inherited a real ranch, like something out of a Roy Rogers movie. The whole inheritance thing had happened because Chance Gridley, who had been Linda’s husband for a while when Dani was around five or six years old, had always had a dream about being a big-time cattle rancher.

Actually Dani had some pretty good memories of Chance. For one thing she remembered what a good storyteller he’d been. But according to Linda, it turned out that she and Chance didn’t have very much in common, and besides he had this little problem with drinking and gambling. Like going to Reno and gambling away all his money so they had nothing to live on but Linda’s salary. So there was a divorce and Dani’s mother went back to being Linda O’Donnell. And Chance went off to live in Nevada. He must have gone right on gambling because all at once some kind of miracle happened and he won a whole bunch of money. Enough money anyway to buy a lot of land. At least that was what his letters to Linda began to tell about.

It had been a more or less friendly divorce, and every once in a while Chance would write back to Linda and Dani and tell them how much he still loved both of them, and about the huge cattle ranch he owned now. A cattle ranch near what he said was a nice little Western town called Rattler Springs. And every once in a while he’d send Linda a little child support money even though he didn’t have to, because Dani’s real father had died in the war before Chance and Linda had even met. So Linda would write back to thank him and tell him how she and Dani were getting along.

And then one day they’d gotten a letter from a lawyer saying that Chance had died of a heart attack, and that he’d left more than a thousand acres and a big old ranch house to Linda and Dani. And it just so happened that right at that time Linda was in the middle of her Western romances period, reading lots of books by people like Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. Dani remembered that when Linda began to talk about moving she’d made it sound as if the ranch were in a big green valley with all kinds of barns and corrals scattered around, and horses and cattle and handsome cowboys everywhere you happened to look. And then, without even waiting to see the ranch first, she sold their car and bought an old wreck of a truck, packed everything they owned into it, and they took off. And it hadn’t been until they’d gotten to Rattler Springs that they’d found out the awful truth.

The truth about Rattler Springs was that there’d never been much ranching in the area because there just wasn’t enough water or grass. And the truth about the ranch house was that even though it was big and kind of interesting in some ways, it didn’t have electricity or an indoor toilet. And it was about six miles from town, which was a big problem because Linda’s old truck had broken down for good by then, and there wasn’t enough money left to buy even a cheap old car. Nobody could live six miles from Rattler Springs without a car, so they’d only stayed a few days on their so-called ranch. And when Linda had finally given up and decided to sell the ranch and move back to Sea Grove, she’d found that nobody wanted to buy their worthless, dried-out land. Not even if she practically gave it away. So Linda had found a lousy job in town, and they’d rented the so-called Jerky Joe cabin, and they’d been there ever since. Linda kept saying that they’d move back home as soon as she’d saved up a little money, but four years had gone by and she never saved anything. Instead she read and daydreamed and got more and more into debt, and the desert kept right on telling Dani how it had her now and she was never going to get away.

“Only not for much longer.” Dani rolled over onto her stomach and smashed her fist into the pillow. “You hear me? I won’t be here much longer.” She got up then and started rummaging around in her closet looking for the duffel bag she’d had ever since they’d left Sea Grove. When she found it she dusted it off, opened it up and dumped it out on her bed.

There wasn’t much in the bag. Just a few almost forgotten toys. Little-kid stuff she’d insisted on bringing to Rattler Springs and then had almost immediately outgrown. Things like a small, bristly teddy bear, a Raggedy Ann doll and a homemade stuffed toy that kind of resembled a deformed elephant. After emptying out all the junk Dani climbed up and got her hideous pig bank off the high shelf where she always kept it.

The bank had been a present from Stormy. He’d won it at the school fair almost two years before and he’d insisted on giving it to Dani. Sitting back down on the bed, Dani held the bank in both hands and studied it carefully. It was made out of very heavy pottery and it was supposed to look like some kind of wild boar. Its enormous snout was covered with warts, there was a ridge running down its back and big fangs jutted out of its lower lip. Actually it was kind of artistic looking, in a disgusting sort of way. Dani shook it, trying to guess how much money was inside. If there might be, for instance, anywhere near enough for a one-way ticket to the coast of northern California with transfers in Reno and San Francisco.

It was hard to tell. The pig did feel pretty heavy, and she could remember putting quite a lot of money into it, on her birthdays and Christmas and when she earned a little by babysitting or helping out at the bookstore. But she also remembered shaking some out now and then when something urgent came up, like a new inner tube for her bicycle. She kind of hated to break the ugly old bank but she knew from experience that you could only get the small coins out by shaking. This time several minutes of shaking only produced a dime or two and three nickels. Not even a glimpse of the bills or silver dollars that she knew were in there. So after a while she gave up and went out to find a hammer.

When she got back to her room, she put the wild boar bank in the middle of her bed and stood over it, telling herself that it was a hideous thing anyway and she’d always hated it. “Okay, pig, this is it,” she whispered, and closing her eyes, she gave it a hard whack. But when she opened them there it was, still pretty much in one piece except for a broken front leg. She raised the hammer and was getting ready to try again when she heard her mother calling her to dinner.

Suddenly realizing how hungry she was, she threw the hammer down beside the bank and headed for the kitchen. Dinner that night was quiet and boring. It was boring because the food was mostly boring leftovers, and it was quiet because—well, because Dani didn’t feel much like talking. Linda chattered away as usual, though, about the weather and what was happening to the people in her favorite soap operas, and then about what had happened at the bookstore that day.

The bookstore, or Cooley’s Book Rental, was in a little building next to the Rattlesnake Bar and just across the street from the Grand Hotel. Actually it was a sort of cross between a bookstore and a library without really being either one. Some of the books were for sale and some could be rented for ten cents a day, but they were mostly secondhand and pretty beat-up looking. And old Al Cooley, who owned the store, was as old and worn out as his books. Which was a good thing actually because just about the time Dani and Linda arrived in town, Mr. Cooley decided he needed a helper and Linda got the job. Not much of a job really, but along with the little bit of money the government gave Dani because her father had died in the war, it was enough to keep two people more or less alive. But according to Linda, not nearly enough to move two people and all their belongings back home, where they’d have to rent a house and buy food to live on until Linda found another job.

Dani had just about finished her boring corned beef hash when Linda leaned over and said, “Dani. What is it? You’re a thousand miles away tonight. What’s on your mind?”

Actually, the “thousand miles away” stuff was kind of a jolt. It was almost as if her mother had read her mind. Had guessed that she was planning on being, well, maybe not a thousand miles away but at least a few hundred, very soon now. Dani couldn’t help feeling a little guilty as she said, “On my mind? Nothing much. I’m just … It’s just that I told Stormy I’d read to him tonight, and I don’t want to.”

“Oh?” Linda tried to put the last of the hash on Dani’s plate. “You don’t want to? Why not?”

Dani pushed the spoon away. “Because. Because I’ve got other things to … And just because I hate it. I hate reading.”

Dani glared. She’d said she hated reading to make Linda angry, and all she’d gotten was that soft, wide-eyed, “Oh?” That, Dani told herself, was what she really hated. The way Linda always made “Oh” into a question.

“Well,” Linda said, “it’s too bad you hate it, because you’re really exceptionally good at it, you know. I was listening to you the other night when you were reading Doctor Dolittle to Stormy and I was fascinated. You were changing your voice just a tiny bit for each of the animals, and you were every bit as good as that woman who reads on the radio. You know, the one who calls herself the Babbling Bookworm?”

Dani got up from the table very carefully and deliberately. She put her dish in the sink and then turned slowly around before she said, “Well, I do hate it. And what I really hate is when people sneak around listening to things they weren’t invited to listen to.” She was still standing there at the sink just waiting for Linda to do the “Oh?” thing, and thinking how she was going to hate that too, when without any warning the kitchen door crashed back against the wall. No sound of footsteps on the back porch, no knock on the door, no warning of any kind. Just bang as the door flew open, and there he was in the middle of the room, clutching his precious book in one hand and a greasy bag of Beer Nuts in the other.

Dani jumped, gulped and then glared. He’d done it again. Snuck up on her, and this time on her mother too. Linda was still clutching the bowl of hash. Her startled gaze turned into a smile. “Well, hello there, Stormy,” she said. “Do come in.”

Chapter 4

“HI.” STORMY’S GRIN ALMOST split his face in two. “You guys finished eating?”

“Just about,” Linda said. With the spoon still poised above the bowl, she turned to Dani. “You’re sure you don’t want the rest of this?”

Dani probably would have said no again, or she might not have, but before she could say anything at all Stormy said, “Hey. That looks good. I’ll eat it.” And then he did. Plopping himself down at the table, he began to eat right out of the serving bowl, shoveling the hash into his mouth at an incredible rate of speed. Over his head Linda caught Dani’s eye and made a face that said something like “poor hungry kid.” Dani shrugged. A person who was about to take off on a long, probably hungry, journey didn’t have any sympathy left over for a kid who, at least, always had plenty of pretzels and Beer Nuts. Turning her back on the disgusting scene at the kitchen table, she headed for her room, but a second later Stormy was right behind her, stepping on her heels as he called back to her mother over his shoulder.

“Bye,” he mumbled over the last mouthful of hash. “We’re going to read now. Thanks for the …?” He swallowed, poked Dani and whispered, “What was it?”

As she opened the door of her room she could hear her mother telling Stormy that he was quite welcome. But at that moment Dani remembered what she’d left lying right out in plain sight in the middle of the bed. The broken-legged pig bank, and beside it—the hammer.

For a moment Stormy was too busy arranging Dani’s beanbag chair to notice. Dani’s chair, a huge canvas bag full of dry beans, could be shoved and punched into different shapes to fit the rear end of the person who was going to sit on it. Stormy always rearranged it violently before he sat down to listen to Dani read. So while he was still punching and shoving, Dani started to slide the pig bank quietly toward the head of the bed, where it could be hidden under a pillow. She’d almost made it when she heard a voice, a shocked, accusing voice, saying, “Why’d you do that? Why’d you break your bank?”

Trying to sound innocent, Dani said, “Break? Why’d I …” She picked up the pig’s broken leg and put it back where it belonged, but of course it only fell off again. She was about to say that the bank must have fallen off the shelf when Stormy had banged the kitchen door open, when she noticed that Stormy’s accusing gaze had moved to the hammer. He grabbed it up and went on staring, his eyes moving from the hammer to Dani and back again. Even more than usual, his round, flat face looked like a Halloween jack-o’-lantern. Only instead of a grinning jack-o’-lantern it was an openmouthed, owl-eyed one. He gulped once or twice and then his eyes narrowed to a suspicious squint. “You’re going to run away, aren’t you?” he said.