Marissa leaned over to look in the bag. “You don't think it's … dead … do you?”
I peeked in, too, and there it was — the scariest thing I'd ever seen.
A baby.
I got in a little closer and said, “It doesn't look dead.”
“I can't believe it slept through all that noise. Don't you think you should pick it up and find out?”
“No!”
“Why not?”
“I'm not touching it! I'm going to find that girl and give it back!”
Marissa looks around and shakes her head. “Sorry to break it to you, but she is long gone.”
“But…I can't believe she'd …” I looked in the bag one more time. “Marissa, it's a baby.”
“Exactly. Now make sure it's all right, would you?”
“Why am I the one who's always got to investigate? Why am I always the one checking pulses and —”
“Because you're the one who accepts unidentified packages from strangers, that's why. She could've been handing you a bomb, Sammy. Why didn't you look?”
“A bomb I could handle! And it happened so fast! One minute she's shaking and quaking like she's about to die, and the next she's shoving this thing at me and running out the door! This is not my fault!”
Marissa gives me a closed little smile, then says, “It never is.”
In a flash she's squatting beside the bag, digging under the towel to check out the baby. “Look,” she says to me. “He's fine! He's moving.”
I looked in at the little head with the wispy black hair. It had such tiny ears. Such a tiny nose. Such a tiny mouth. And sure enough, it was moving. “Great,” I whispered. “So now what?”
She didn't have time to answer. That tiny mouth let out an enormous “Wwwwwaaaaaaahhhhhh!”
“Marissa! You woke it up!”
“It would've woken up anyway. Now pick it up, would you?”
“Wwwwwaaaaaaahhhhhh!” went the bag, and you better believe I picked it up! I grabbed those Sears-bag handles and made a beeline for the elevator.
“Sammy! Where are you going?”
“She said something about leaving stuff in the elevator. I'm gonna go find it!”
“Sammy! Sammy, that is not how you carry a baby!”
I held the screaming bag out to her. “Oh, really? Well, here! You hold it!”
She just stood there, her eyes wide open.
I resumed my dash to the elevator with Marissa chasing after me. “Sammy, I didn't take the baby —”
“Wwwwwaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!”
“— and I didn't —”
“Wwwwwaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!”
“— promise to meet some stranger back here at seven —”
“Wwwwwaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!”
“— and I didn't —”
“Wwwwwaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!”
She blocked my path and cried, “Would you just pick up the baby!”
I dodged around her, and believe me, people were staring at us. When I reached the elevator, I punched the button about five hundred times and stood by with a screaming bag on one side and a bossy friend on the other.
Finally Marissa says through her teeth, “I just don't understand why you aren't picking it up!”
I spin around and say, “Because I don't know how to, all right? I've never even touched one before! I keep asking you to do it, but you're too focused on whose fault all of this is to help me out.”
She pulls a little face and says, “Well, I don't know anything about it, either!”
“Then why are you acting like you do?”
By now the baby's kicking and punching the sides of the bag. Marissa shouts over the crying, “I do know you're not supposed to carry a baby around under towels and a Barbie in a Sears bag, though! And when they cry, you're supposed to pick them up and feed them or change their diaper or rock them or, you know, do something. You're not supposed to leave them to punch a hole in the side of a sack!”
Just then the elevator door opens and an elderly couple steps out. They frown at us and our Sears bag as we scoot past them to get on board. And from their whispers and gasps, I can tell it won't be long before they notify security about two teenagers on the loose with a wailing, flailing Sears sack.
So I smile at them as the doors close and call, “It's a Dolly Scream-A-Lot. The switch is stuck!”
Marissa rolls her eyes and says, “A Dolly Scream-ALot?” But then she points and cries, “Look!”
Propped in the corner is a stroller. A collapsible stroller, all folded up so it looks like a double-handled umbrella on wheels. The corners of a blue knitted blanket are peeking out the sides, and there's a rubbery-looking bag wrapped over the handles.
“This must be what she was talking about, don't you think?” Marissa asks me.
The Sears bag is still wailing, and the elevator's cruising up to the second floor. “You know how to work it?” I shouted.
She fumbles with the stroller, then screams, “Would you take the baby out of the bag!”
“Okay! Okay!”
I started to. Really, I did. But then the elevator came to a stop and the door opened up and a herd of kids shuffled in. So I grabbed the bag and bolted, leaving a screaming “Wwwaahhhhahhhh” in my wake.
Marissa struggled out behind me with the stroller, yelling, “Where are you going?”
I just marched down the corridor, around a bend, and blasted straight through an Employees Only door.
“Sammy! Sammy, stop!” She knew where I was headed. We'd been there before.
“I can't think, all right? And I don't want to figure this thing out with everyone staring at us!”
Down a maze of back corridors we went, right, left, then right again. Then up some cement steps, through the roof access door, and into the sunlight.
Marissa drags the stroller and plastic bag and our backpacks up with her, yelling, “If you don't pick that baby up now, I'm going to…”
She never did say what she would do, but I could tell she was serious. And I wanted the thing to shut up as much as she did, so the minute we were on the roof I reached in, grabbed the baby under the arms, and lifted.
So there I am, holding a baby for the first time in my entire life, and what's it do?
Screams even louder.
Marissa says, “You can't hold it out like that, Sammy! You've got to hold it close to you. On your shoulder!”
I put it on my shoulder and look at Marissa like, Well?
“It's not a sack of potatoes! Hold it.”
I yank it off my shoulder and give it to Marissa. “You hold it!”
She did. One hand under the rump, one hand on the back, the baby's head against her shoulder. And after about a minute of bouncing up and down, the wailing quieted into gasps and hiccups.
I let out a huge breath and said, “Oh, thank you. How did you do that?”
She shrugged. “Haven't you ever seen someone hold a baby?”
I felt pretty much like an idiot. I mean, sure, I'd seen women with babies. They're everywhere. And I can't really explain why this one felt like a bomb instead of a baby, but it did. That's exactly what it felt like.
“I think he's hungry,” Marissa was saying. “He's rooting around like crazy! Is there a bottle in that bag? He also needs a new diaper — pee-yew!”
I dug through the bag. “Bottle, check!” I held it out to her. “Diaper, check!”
“Let's feed him first.”
She sat down cross-legged on the graveled tar paper and held the baby in the crook of her arm. The baby grabbed the bottle with both hands and sucked like it hadn't been fed in days.
“Wow, look at that,” I said.
Marissa grinned. “He was just hungry.”
I sat down next to her. “Why do you think it's a him?”
“Looks like a him, don't you think?”
“It looks like an it. And there's a Barbie in the bag.”
“Yeah, but the blanket's blue. And his outfit's mostly blue. Mothers are very blu
e and pink oriented at this stage.”
“Is that so.” I shook my head at her. “For someone who doesn't know anything about babies, you're sure sounding like a pediatric pro.”
“Well, here. Have some experience.”
Before I could stop her, she'd transferred the baby into my lap. “See?” she says. “It's just a baby.”
Nuh-uh, I thought. This thing's a bomb. But I sat there and watched it chugalug the bottle, and when there were all of two drops left, the baby pushed the bottle aside and started fussing again. “What?” I asked it. “What do you want now?”
“I think you're supposed to burp him now.”
“How do I do that?”
“I don't know. Hold him on your shoulder and tap his back?”
I tried, but it started fussing even more. “Maybe bounce a little?”
So there I am, cross-legged on the roof of the mall, bouncing and patting and sort of trying to shake the bubbles out of him, when all of a sudden he goes, “Aaaarp!”
“Yeah! You did it!”
I was about to say, “Hey, I did!” but before I got the chance, he bombed me. Half that bottle came up. And it was hot, too. It spread all over my shoulder and down my back, and all I could say was “Oh! Oh, yuck!” I held the baby away from me and cried, “Why'd you do that?” And you know what that little monster did? He smiled. Smiled and cooed.
“Oh, great. Just great!” I practically threw the Bomber to Marissa and dug through the bag. One small package of Kleenex, a can of baby formula, a tube of baby wipes, a plastic mat, five diapers, and a thin flannel towel.
I sacrificed the towel, but it was hopeless. I had baby barf all over my shirt and it wasn't coming off. And I'm barely coming to grips with the barf when Marissa says, “We'd better change him and go, Sammy. What if they lock that door or something?”
I was more worried about Grams worrying about why I was so late than I was about the door getting locked. So I decided, All right. Let's change this puppy and get a move on. Pit stop at home for dinner and then back out to the mall at seven. It'd be over before my shirt was done tumbling dry.
I opened up the plastic mat and said, “Let's do it.”
She laid him down and said, “Smell that? This boy's pretty poopy.”
“Oh, great.” I unsnapped the jumper, ripped the side tabs of the diaper open, and it turns out Marissa was right. It was stinky. It was poopy.
And it was, indeed, a boy. “I told you so,” Marissa said with a grin.
He starts kicking and cooing, and the more I tried to clean him up, the more he giggled and pumped those legs. Finally I grabbed both his feet with one hand and cleaned him up with the other. And as I'm shoving a new diaper under his bouncing bottom, he suddenly stops struggling, looks right at me, and opens his eyes real big.
“What?” I ask him. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
He holds my gaze, then lets loose.
Not with a wail.
Not with a burp or barf.
No, this time he shoots a fountain of pee, straight up in the air.
And since what goes up must come down — down it came. All over him, all over the new diaper, all over the changing mat, and all over me.
So I'm kneeling there with pee on my hands, pee in my hair, pee everywhere, when he starts kicking again. And cooing. Like, Whipee! Wasn't that fun!
Marissa's trying hard not to, but she can't help it. She just cracks up.
I grab the flannel towel and clean everything the best I can; then I wrap him in his diaper, snap up his jumper, flip open the stroller, and strap him in. I stuff everything else into the Sears bag, whip on my backpack, and say, “Let's go.”
Marissa holds open the door and helps me carry him in the stroller down to the back-corridor maze. Then we jet out of the mall and over to where Marissa's parked her bike. She looks at all the stuff I've got and asks, “How are you going to get into the apartment?”
Now, this is a very good question, seeing how I'm living in a seniors-only apartment complex where kids are not allowed to live. But for once, I don't have to give her a plan that involves the fire escape and bubble gum in the doorjamb. For once I get to say, “I'm going to walk right in.”
“Oh, of course,” she says. “That way you can walk right back out.”
“Exactly. And after I give this baby back, then I'll sneak in for the night.”
I should have known it wouldn't be that easy.
Don't miss these other great books by Wendelin Van Draanen:
Published by Dell Yearling an imprint of Random House Children's Books a division of Random House, Inc. New York
Text copyright © 2001 by Wendelin Van Draanen Parsons
Interior illustrations copyright © 2001 by Dan Yaccarino
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eISBN: 978-0-307-54517-6
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