The Face on the Milk Carton

by Caroline B. Cooney

  “Normal persons,” said Adair, “can never resist a phone call.” She disconnected to go back to Pete.

  Janie called Michelle, who did not have total-phone.

  The phone rang twice. Somebody picked it up.

  Janie disconnected immediately.

  Rude! thought Janie. Why’d I do that? Because I can’t talk to Michelle about anything. If I told Michelle about Reeve, the next day the whole school would think Reeve asked me to marry him. If I told Michelle about the milk carton, the whole school would know that I actually believe I was kidnapped. Guidance Department would hear the rumors. They’d summon my mother from her Bloodmobile. Your daughter’s hoping you’re not her parents; your daughter is planning to call the FBI on you; your daughter is living in a sick, twisted, perverted daydream in which …

  Her body vibrated with a queer, frightening energy, as if she could have run all the way to New Jersey to that shopping center.

  What if I can’t get this horrible idea out of my brain? she thought. What if it sits there, and grows, like some terrible egg, splitting open and turning into something real?

  CHAPTER

  6

  In separate cars, the Johnsons, the Shieldses, and the Sherwoods drove upstate to the football game.

  “Please let me drive,” Janie begged her parents. “Sarah-Charlotte’s family is letting her drive because she needs highway practice. And Reeve gets to drive the whole way.”

  “Reeves had his license an entire year,” said her father. “And Sarah-Charlotte’s been practicing longer than you have.”

  “I’ve never driven on the highway,” said Janie. “Please, please, please? This is a perfect day to start. Lots of sunshine, no rain, no ice on the roads, no summer-people traffic.”

  “All right,” said her mother nervously.

  “Certainly not,” said her father.

  Old times. Progressive mother, conservative father. Janie waited for the debate to commence, and for them to meet in the middle. They would probably let her drive part of the way.

  “Oh, all right,” said her father. “I keep not wanting to believe you’re going to be sixteen soon. I don’t like the year sixteen.”

  Janie giggled and took the keys from her mother’s hand. Her parents clicked their seat belts firmly, as if to say, we’re sure going to need them this time. “Have faith,” said Janie reproachfully.

  “Take off the parking brake,” said her father.

  “I was going to, Daddy, you just didn’t give me time.” She backed perfectly out of the driveway.

  Not only did Reeve come out his door in time to see her drive, but so did his older sister Lizzie.

  Lizzie was not one of Janie’s favorite people. Lizzie had occasionally baby-sat for Janie in the past, but not because she liked kids. Lizzie rarely did anything except for the money. Lizzie was supposed to be safely in law school now, being as brilliant there as she had been in Princeton. Janie did not consider Lizzie’s absence a loss to the neighborhood. How annoying to see Lizzie home. It would certainly tense Reeve up.

  Even from the far end of the driveway Janie could see how straight Lizzie’s spine was; how intense her face; how determined her jaw. It seemed unlike Lizzie to come home for a mere football game; Lizzie was opposed to frivolous waste of time. Lizzie was also opposed to Reeve, and had been all their lives.

  But there was a silver lining to this. Reeve would be very eager to go off with Janie.

  She wanted to wave to Reeve but was not coordinated enough to change gears, aim the car, miss the curb, and wave all at the same time.

  Reeve did not act as if Lizzie had crushed him yet; he leaped around like a demented boy cheerleader, signaling with both arms and screaming syllables she could not hear.

  “Look out for that car up there,” said her mother.

  “You’re following too closely,” said her father. “Please,” cried her mother, “not over twenty-five.”

  They were gripping the seats, the belts, and the armrests with white knuckles.

  “How’m I doing?” said Janie happily. She loved driving. The power of it! Even diluted by her mother and fathers panic, power filled her body. She, Janie, controlled destination, speed, passing, radio volume, and stopping time. She felt as if she had been born to drive, as if car designers had molded the driver’s seat just for her. She loved checking the rearview mirror and watching the brake lights ahead of her and reading the route numbers on road signs.

  For Janie it was a perfect hour and a half.

  However, Reeve and Sarah-Charlotte, permitted to drive normal speeds like real drivers, had arrived first. When the Johnsons reached the designated parking lot for tailgate picnics, Sarah-Charlotte and Reeve stood on the pavement shouting, “You’ll never be able to park it!” “Jinx, jinx!” “Try steering, woman!”

  She parked perfectly. “So there,” she said to her parents.

  Her mother said, “This is an excellent weight-loss program. I’m sure I’m five pounds thinner than I was when I left home.”

  “You’ll put it all back on eating your own picnic,” said her father, dragging out the leg of lamb, the wine, the wild rice, and the sheet cake with the footballs. And that was just what the Johnsons had brought. Reeve’s mother had a ham and Sarah-Charlotte’s mother had all the classics: potato salad, coleslaw, macaroni salad, and fried chicken.

  The weather was wonderful: sweater weather. In the shelter of their three cars, they ate till forced to rest their stomachs. “We’ll need a tow lift to get us up into the stadium,” joked Janie’s father, who had had lamb, ham, and fried chicken.

  Janie’s mother played with the aluminum foil hiding the sheet cake while Lizzie discussed the constitutional law cases she was now analyzing. “If Lizzie laughs at my cake …” Janie’s mother whispered to her.

  “Or at you,” Janie murmured back.

  “We’ll murder her,” breathed Janie’s mother.

  “But then we’d need a lawyer,” whispered Janie, “and we’d just have gotten rid of the only one around.” They giggled.

  Mr. Sherwood thought the kids should go away and explore the campus before dessert, thus giving the adults some peace.

  “We’re not babies anymore,” said Sarah-Charlotte irritably, “needing our diapers changed and our bottles heated.”

  “No, but you talk a lot more,” said her father, “and we’d like our own conversation without you, okay? But I still love you. Kind of.” Sarah-Charlotte made a face, claiming this lukewarm parental love meant she deserved her own car, insurance paid and gas supplied, of course.

  “Uh huh,” said her father dryly.

  Reeve turned to his sister, grinning. “Come on, Lizzie,” he teased. “They want the kids to leave. So they can have a mature conversation.”

  “I am the only one here who will bother with a mature conversation,” said Lizzie. “They just want to gossip.” She took a chicken leg, leaned back, and said to Janie’s father, “Your turn, Frank.”

  Janie tried to imagine one day calling her friends’ parents by their first names, failed, and fled with Reeve and Sarah-Charlotte. They wandered around the campus, talking about what college would be like (“If I get in,” said Reeve gloomily) and how they yearned to live in dorms and be away from the confining rules of their parents.

  Janie was lying.

  College terrified her.

  There was nothing she wanted less than to live on her own. The harsh glass-and-steel dorms the freshmen had did not look as if they could ever be home to anybody. They looked like cages for loneliness. Imagine five thousand freshmen you had never met.

  Reeve said, “My parents and Guidance think I should take a postgraduate year, repeat some of my high school subjects to get better grades, and then go on to college.”

  “How humiliating,” remarked Sarah-Charlotte.

  “You’re supposed to tell me nobody would notice,” said Reeve.

  “Of course they’d notice, it would be like staying back,” said Sarah-Cha
rlotte, who was not sensitive. “Jordan Feingold and Linda Lang stayed back in second grade and I never see them without remembering that.”

  “How comforting,” said Reeve.

  Janie wanted to hold his hand. The one whose thumb had drawn itself so lightly down her nose, bumping over her lips, landing on her chin. But she could not tell if Reeve was interested in this or not. He was full of energy. She and Sarah-Charlotte were sloths compared to Reeve, stumbling in his wake.

  They had excellent seats: six rows up, left of center. Janie mostly watched the cheerleaders, who were heavy on gymnastics. They had tiny trampolines and were endlessly catapulting off each others shoulders. She particularly liked how one tiny cheerleader with flowing golden hair stood on the palms of a boy cheerleader who could hold her easily at his own shoulder level.

  With some ceremony, Mrs. Johnson opened her sheet cake for admiration and cut it up to serve during the second quarter. They ate it with their fingers, getting icing all over themselves and licking their fingers clean because nobody had remembered napkins.

  “Lemme have another piece,” said Reeve, nudging his hipbone into Janie’s.

  “You had two already,” she said. “I’m cold, don’t move away.”

  He didn’t move away. She cut another square for him and something gave her the courage to feed it to him, bite by bite. His lips and tongue touched her fingers with every bite. Neither of them saw the second half of the game. They were both startled to find it had ended. People were on their feet. Sarah-Charlotte was saying, “We won, you two. You want me to write out the details so you’ll feel as if you were here?”

  Sarah-Charlotte spent the night at Janie’s.

  They rented movies—comedies they had seen before and knew they’d like. Sarah-Charlotte grilled Janie at great length about Reeve, analyzing the leaf pile and the football game. “He loves you,” said Sarah-Charlotte.

  “You don’t have to sound so irritable about it,” said Janie.

  “I didn’t want to be the one left behind. Pete asked Adair out and here’s Reeve literally eating out of your hand, and who is there for me? Nobody.” This led to the always pleasant activity of ripping apart the personalities of boys who had displayed no interest in Sarah-Charlotte.

  They slept late and their sole activity in the morning was reading the Sunday comics.

  Monday morning in Spanish the teacher passed out information on a winter vacation trip she was chaperoning to Spain. ‘Anybody who wants to may go,’ she said. “First come, first serve.”

  “Oooooooh, let’s,” breathed Sarah-Charlotte, nudging Janie.

  “If you have any thoughts of going at all, and you don’t yet have a passport, you need to apply immediately,” said the teacher. “It can take months. You need your birth certificate and another piece of identification to get one.”

  The bank is open today, thought Janie.

  In English they got back their corrected essays. Janie got a B. “Sweet sense of humor,” Mr. Brylowe wrote, “although not what I had in mind.” At the top of the page he had circled Jayyne Jonstone. adding, “Janie, you having an identity crisis?”

  At lunch Janie got a wrist flick from Reeve, nothing more. She thought: He’s not ready, or maybe not even thinking about doing anything public. She wondered what stages you went through to reach the moment when you could speak to each other in front of your friends, or refer to each other, admitting, I like him.

  “I thought he was going to ask you out,” said Sarah-Charlotte sadly. “Janie, he’s so adorable with that moppy hair.”

  “He needs a decent haircut,” agreed Janie. She didn’t commit herself to anything more. She opened her lemonade carton. The rest opened their milks. She looked at Jason’s milk. There was a different child on the carton.

  A boy.

  Nobody mentioned him.

  Nobody referred to Janie’s claim last week to have been the kidnapee. As far as Janie could tell, nobody even remembered; not even Sarah-Charlotte.

  Adair had everybody’s attention, having skipped first-period class to go to the Motor Vehicle Bureau for her driver’s test. Flushed and proud, she displayed her brand-new license. Everybody politely agreed that she was recognizable in the photo, although she was not; nobody ever was.

  Adair wanted to show off her driving skills. Everybody, she insisted, had to be passengers in her car and go to the mall that afternoon. “You coming, Janie?” said Adair, more excited than Adair ever allowed herself to be. Janie had not known that Adair’s smooth finish, shiny as shellac, was an achievement Adair worked for.

  But Janie wanted to go to the bank, not the mall. She said by way of excuse, “I’ll have to call my mother and ask.”

  “Janie, you’re still not allowed out by yourself?” teased Jason.

  “Her mother is the strictest woman on earth,” said Sarah-Charlotte.

  “How come?” Jason wanted to know. “What terrible history do you have, Jane Johnson?”

  CHAPTER

  7

  She came home to an empty house. Mondays were hospital volunteer days for her mother. Her father would be coaching at the middle school until dark. When did the bank close?

  Janie went into her mothers study. She had a vague idea of finding the key to the safe deposit box and going to the bank herself.

  The desk had two deep file drawers. The upper one was crammed with volunteer-related materials: all her mothers committees, boards, and causes. Girl Scouts (that was ancient history), Hospital Volunteers, Literacy Volunteers, Nature Conservancy Board (Janie had never even heard of this one), Parent/Teacher Association … in alphabetical order, the files went on and on. There was something very reasssuring about those files: full of her mothers time and energy and caring. Paper memories of meetings, fund-raisers, and suburban routines that made the world a better place to live in.

  The frightening daymares of last week had not come back. Janie was more irritated than anything else, wanting to set aside the milk-carton idea; drivers licenses and passports were of much greater importance. If she could just see the birth certificate, she could extricate herself from this dumb idea. In the bottom drawer would be files marked Bills, Income Tax, Insurance Forms.

  The bottom drawer was locked.

  She found the lock strangely frightening. Her mother did not lock up jewelry, nor silver. So why lock a file drawer? What robber would care about her last-years bills?

  No key was mixed in the pile of paper clips and index tabs lying in the shallow pencil drawer.

  Upstairs, Janie changed into old jeans and a sweatshirt. She found herself checking corners of her room for reassurance: Yes, her T-shirt collection was intact. Yes, her bumper-sticker collection was still in its shoebox. Yes, her Barbie dolls still lay silent in their carrying case at the back of the closet.

  I should put them all in the attic, she thought. They’re clutter. I want my room to be more streamlined than it is.

  The attic.

  Boxes and trunks. Whenever they went up those dark stairs for things like Christmas decorations, Janie would ask what was in those boxes gathering dust in the corners. “Junk,” her mother always replied. “Someday well toss it.”

  Now it occurred to Janie that her mother— everybody’s favorite chairwoman—was supremely organized. If she had intended to “toss it,” or if it really were junk, it would never have gone into the attic; she would have donated it to the Salvation Army.

  Janie opened the door to the attic stairs. Cold drafts, like winter coming, sifted down on her face like dust.

  The roof creaked.

  She climbed the stairs. I’ve never been up here alone, she thought suddenly. If I ever needed my old Halloween costumes, or my last-year’s winter boots, Mom went up for them.

  At the bottom of the stairs, the draft made the door shut.

  Janie whirled when it slammed.

  Her heart was pounding.

  She crept down the stairs, in case it was an intruder.

  Of course it was
nothing.

  Putting books on each side of the door to hold it open, she went back up.

  The attic was poorly lit. The previous owners had remodeled the kitchen, dining room, and bathrooms, but nobody had done anything up here, not even dust. The attic felt as old as time. Eaves ran down toward the floor and made dark corners.

  On most boxes, her mother’s neat handwriting spelled out the contents. J—handmade sweaters.

  Janie smiled and opened that one. The sick scent of mothballs filled the attic. Child’s sizes, long outgrown. The sweaters reeked of memory as well as mothballs; a Christmas-tree sweater, cream and green, brought back third grade in a rush of sound and color. That Christmas they’d gone to Disney World. She’d needed the sweater; it was cold in Orlando that year. She remembered sitting in the whirling teacup with her parents, clinging to her father’s chest, shrieking in delight and dizziness. Billy Wadler, a big, mean fourth-grader, had teased her mercilessly all January about wearing a Christmas-tree sweater.

  Billy Wadler had grown up into a really terrific guy. He took out his aggressions in sports now and was nice to girls. Sarah-Charlotte had always yearned for Billy.

  Janie smiled and closed the cardboard box. It was hard to interfold the four cardboard pieces as neatly as her mother had done. She coughed from the mothballs.

  The next box said F—ski boots.

  Her father. Frank. She hadn’t known her father skied. Maybe they’d do that this winter. She’d ask. She wondered why he’d given it up. Too expensive? Too dangerous?

  The whole quest was beginning to feel quite silly. What a good thing that she had not explained anything to Sarah-Charlotte, nor asked anything of her mother.

  Up against the very back, hidden by two neatly stacked rows of cardboard boxes, old jigsaw puzzles, and fishing equipment, a black trunk had been pushed. She remembered the fishing-equipment birthday. Her father had gone out twice, but he was not the fisherman type. He disliked solitary sports. How disappointed he had been when his only daughter preferred a social life to soccer!