The Girl Who Stole A Planet (Amy Armstrong Book 1)

by Stephen Colegrove

  “Exactly,” said Tony. “I’ll take the kids home for lunch. Amy, stay at the hospital. Call the house if anything changes.”

  Lucia came out of surgery in the afternoon.

  Amy felt bad about trying to leave the hospital earlier. She stayed in Lucia’s room all afternoon, and left only once to grab a sandwich and once to break into a storage room. No luck in the storage room and the sandwich was too dry.

  “Hello, darling,” was the first thing Lucia said, her mouth and eyes sleepy from the painkillers, her West Virginia drawl even more syrupy than normal.

  Amy jerked up from the chair beside the bed.

  “You’re awake!”

  Lucia blinked slowly. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “Scaring y’all. I was carrying a box up the drive of this house on Grand Avenue. It kept getting heavier and heavier, and I started to sweat through my shirt––”

  “It’s okay, Lucia,” said Amy, and squeezed her hand. “You don’t have to worry about it. Tony’s watching the kids and I’m here if you need anything.”

  The slow rumble of a laugh traveled through Lucia’s sunken chest. She turned her head of short, graying hair on the hospital pillow, causing the plastic cover to crackle noisily.

  “Don’t tell a mother not to worry,” she said to Amy. “Sometimes worrying’s all we got.”

  Amy stayed with her foster mother until about eight-thirty in the evening, when Tony and the little kids showed up. Visiting hours ended at nine, and then Tony drove everyone back to the house on Pine Avenue.

  The street where they lived was long and wide, and a few blocks up the hill from the main drag on Lighthouse. Like that street, Pine ran west to the ocean and east to Monterey, but happily for the residents of the stucco-covered ranch houses, lacked the hustle and bustle of the sidewalk cafes, liquor stores, sandwich eateries, organic breakfast joints, and ceramic butterfly shops of Lighthouse. Although safe from retail shenanigans, the placid environment of Pine Avenue could be disturbed by sirens from the fire department at the intersection of Pine and Forest. Since Pacific Grove was full to the brim with armies of seasoned, white-haired citizens, these pealing disturbances seemed to happen day and night.

  Lucia’s house was on Pine several blocks west of Forest. A massive three-story house belonging to E.G. Woodley, eminent lawyer and raconteur, had burned to ash in 1912 on the very spot. The parcel never returned to its former glory, but still retained the massive dike of earth that Woodley had had trucked in from the valley to serve as foundation for his mansion. Perhaps he disliked the gravel sidewalks on Pine, or simply wished to rise above the rest of the street. Over the next fifty years the grassy slopes supported dwellings of a more humble nature, until 1963 when Lucia’s great uncle Luccesse sold every one of his artichoke fields near Castroville and bought a grocery store in Monterey. He leveled the rickety shacks on the parcel and built a sturdy ranch-style house with four bedrooms. Uncle Luccesse had the money for a grander design that included a second story, but his sister had fallen down a staircase at the tender age of seven, forever prejudicing his opinions on a house with more than one floor.

  Upon his death in 1991 the house traveled through the probate system and ended up in the lap of the nearest relative, Lucia Armstrong, who pulled her children out of their schools in Salinas before the signatures on the deed had time to dry. If there was anything to complain about living in Pacific Grove, it certainly wasn’t the schools. Uncle Luccesse had let the place go a bit in his dotage, but the cozy heart of the cottage was still there. Lucia and the children pulled off the red clapboard siding and slapped on chicken wire and stucco, painting everything a blinding shade of white. The overgrown front yard was weeded, seeded, and fertilized, and a tall redwood fence sprang up to surround the house on the little hill. The cedar shakes on the roof were replaced with safer asphalt shingles. The rusted garden hut was tossed out and a large, wood-framed shed was built in its place. Painted white, of course.

  Tony pulled the car into the driveway at the back, the headlights shining on dark windows and an empty house. This time of night they should have gleamed, should have rattled from Lucia’s call to bedtime and hummed from her loud toothbrush commandments. The house was a constant hive of children. Sometimes there were as few as six foster kids like now, but sometimes there had been as many as ten, including a baby. Since Lucia was just down the street from the police department, they quickly got to know her. If someone got clipped for possession or a felony and they had kids, Lucia watched them for a few days or a week until relatives or more permanent arrangements could be made. Amy had been one of those kids, but the difference was that she’d stayed. Nobody liked asking about it because it had been a long time ago and you didn’t ask about those kinds of things anyway.

  Tony unlocked the house and escaped to his room, while Amy played Lucia’s part and led the four younger kids in their bedtime routines. She may have been only fourteen, but she’d learned that people are slaves to the same old patterns, day after day. It made stealing from big, bad adults so much easier when you knew what time they woke up, ate breakfast, went to work, visited the relatives, or played bridge.

  Amy took a shower, brushed her teeth and hair, and changed out of her school uniform into an old t-shirt. She turned off the light in her room, climbed to the top bunk, and lay on top of the covers. Eugenia was supposed to sleep in the bottom bunk, but Amy paid her a weekly stipend to stay in Billy and Anna’s room and so she could have the room to herself. Amy listened to the squeal of a siren going down Forest while she stared at the glowing stars on the ceiling. The constellations were all in the right places, but it wasn’t the same thing as the big sky out in the mountains, or in Carmel Valley. You couldn’t make a ceiling spin round and round every night and with the seasons.

  She closed her eyes and might have fallen asleep if something hadn’t tapped on the glass of the bedroom window.

  Amy slid off the top bunk and crept across the room. After three more taps on the glass she grabbed the window sash and pushed it up.

  “What’s the password?” she whispered at the darkness.

  Helen giggled and climbed into the room. “There’s no password, silly.”

  “Just checking,” said Amy. “Could be anyone out there.” She inhaled in mock fright and held both hands up to her mouth. “Maybe even a boy!”

  “Now you’re really being silly,” said Helen. “Every boy in the school is scared to death of you after you put that dead pelican under Leroy Jenkins’s bed.”

  “He deserved it. Always staring at me in homeroom.”

  “I think he just liked you.”

  “The last thing I need is for people to like me.”

  “Apart from grown-ups, you mean?”

  Amy snorted. “Of course. They don’t count.”

  Bedsprings squealed as Helen sat on the lower bunk. She had changed into street clothes––jeans and a long shirt.

  “I heard what happened. Is Lucia okay?”

  Amy stretched out on the fluffy rug at Helen’s feet. “Maybe. She’s at the hospital now. She’s talking, and I guess the operation went okay.”

  Helen nodded. “Good. I mean, it’s not good that she’s in the hospital, but … aw, you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I do,” mumbled Amy. She turned onto her stomach and rested her forehead on her arms. “Do you ever wish you came from another planet?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Amy turned her head and brushed the blonde hair away from her eyes. “It’s just so boring around here. Going to the same boring school with the same boring teachers, stealing the same boring crap from the same boring people. Sometimes I dream that my real parents were aliens.”

  “Blonde-haired, blue-eyed aliens?”

  “Maybe. Who knows? I could be a shape shifter. Maybe they left me here to study the human race. Maybe that’s why I like physics and astronomy.”

  “They’re jerks if they left you alone without even a b
eeper or instruction manual or anything,” said Helen. “I thought everything was cool here with Lucia. She’s never hassled you with too many rules like every other parent.”

  Amy sighed. “I know, and I do like her. I just feel trapped here. Like I should be doing something somewhere else.”

  “You and every other member of the human race,” said Helen. “You’re exactly like my Dad right now. He constantly talks about moving to Australia or New Zealand or Singapore or Bali. I think that might be his hobby––wanting to live somewhere else.”

  “Yeah,” said Amy, and lay her head on the fluffy rug. She watched the long, delicate fibers move with her breath in the moonlight. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Amy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why do you steal things?”

  Amy snorted. “It’s not stealing––it’s ‘property relocation.’ Anyway, what a dumb question. I do it because I want bigger and better things, like another house for Lucia.”

  “No. I mean, how did you start?”

  “Tony. He saw me trying to shoplift a candy bar, and showed me how to do it without getting caught.”

  “Did you ever think about … not doing that? About quitting?”

  “And go back to being poor? Never. What’s up with the twenty questions tonight?”

  Helen shrugged. “Nothing. Well, it’s late and everything, so I’ll take off. My parents think I’m still at the youth group meeting.”

  “No problem.”

  “So how’d the thing go with M.K. and her TV?”

  Amy jumped straight up from the rug like a cat on an electric fence.

  “She’s going to kill me!”

  “What? I thought you were going to buy another one.”

  “I didn’t even think about it! I was at the hospital all day.”

  “What do we do, then?”

  Amy pulled on jeans, slippers, and grabbed a puffy jacket.

  “To the Bat Cave, Robin!”

  Uncle Luccesse had been a successful businessman and enterprising figure who looked to the future. In 1963 the future was not expected to be a bright one, and many intelligent people expected radioactive fallout to drastically reduce property values. After the Cuban Missile Crisis many bomb shelters were dug in back yards. Uncle Luccesse was in that group, but he had the time and money to do it right. Since he was digging a new foundation for the house in Pacific Grove, he had the contractors hollow out a rectangular cistern in the back, twelve feet deep and fifteen feet on each side. It was lined with concrete blocks and roofed with foot-wide timbers from an old barn his brother was getting rid of. The air supply could be closed off and had an ingenious filtration system that went through a container of water and required a hand crank. Access was through a metal hatch in the ground that led to a cast iron ladder and a small decontamination chamber. A larger metal hatch, this one vertical, led to the main area of the bomb shelter. Like the other hatch, it had been salvaged from a decommissioned submarine by Uncle Luccesse’s brother in Connecticut and transported at an economical rate by a relative in the freight business.

  Uncle Luccesse kept the shelter clean, the doors oiled, and rotated the food and water stock regularly until November 1989. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and crumble of the Soviet Union, all the fun went out of having a bomb shelter, and Uncle Luccesse had more time to spend on parcheesi and golf.

  After his untimely death in 1991, Lucia took ownership of the property and had no use for the underground space. A bomb shelter was fine for an old man who lived during the Cold War, she thought, but in the modern age it was only good for spiders and millipedes. The garden shed was built directly over the little metal door to keep anyone from getting any ideas. This turned out to be the best feature of the shelter. When eleven-year-old Amy heard about it from Tony, she immediately pried up the floorboards and squealed like it was the fabled El Dorado.

  The metal hatches had stiffened but weren’t yet frozen with rust. A bit of WD-40 cleared that up. The electric wire Luccesse had run down to the shelter was still hooked up to the house’s main panel, although the bulbs had to be replaced. Amy had sworn Tony to secrecy and began converting the underground space for her own purposes.

  Amy and Helen crept out of the window and through the moonlight to the shed. Inside, Amy hooked her fingers in a crack where the floor met the wall, and pulled. The middle section of floorboards swung up on hidden hinges to reveal the iron dome of the old submarine hatch. Amy spun the wheel, pulled up, and the old hatch clanked open, filling the shed with the smell of fresh earth, petroleum grease, and the bitter odor of oxidizing metal. The two girls climbed down the ladder in pitch-black darkness, spun open another submarine door, and stepped into the shelter. Amy flipped a switch and the room burst into brilliant pastel colors.

  She was still a girl and this was her special place. The floor was painted baby blue, the walls pink, and the ceiling beams crisscrossed in a black and white zebra pattern. Amy had been in a brief unicorn and rainbow phase when she’d discovered the shelter and the walls bore the evidence, covered floor to ceiling in mystical animals and curving single and double rainbows, some with pots of gold and tiny green men.

  On the right side of the square chamber stood a pair of cots with sleeping bags, a tall series of shelves packed with purloined books, and a desk with a reading lamp. An old black rotary phone sat on the desk. One of the only things Tony had done for the place was to run an intercom line through the ground up to the house. If anyone got stuck in the shelter, they just had to dial zero and the house phone would ring. Someday Amy wanted to fix it up like a real phone.

  On the left side of the room were the shelves of the old food storage, and this was where Amy kept her “repurposed property.” The light gleamed on a Casio keyboard, stacks of video games, CDs, tapes, watches, action figures, and piles of comic books.

  Helen dropped onto the cot with a sigh. “You’re in a tight spot, Amy. Anything on those shelves that might tame the savage beast, so to speak? I mean literally. She is a beast.”

  Amy put her hands on her waist. “I’m in a tight spot? Once she’s done with me, that savage beast is going to eat all my friends starting with you, little Asian smarty-pants.”

  “She likes games, doesn’t she? Give her a whole stack.”

  Amy thumbed through the plastic cases and shook her head. “None of these are real new. She’s probably played them all. I had a couple of consoles and some nice jewelry last week, but sold everything at the flea market on Sunday. Anyway, I don’t think even the British crown jewels would make M.K. happy at this point.”

  “Not even the new Mariah Carey album?”

  “No. She thinks I ruined her dad’s birthday. Mariah can’t fix that.”

  “How about I stash some weed in her locker and report her like that one girl, what was her name … Victoria Sanchez?”

  “I don’t have any weed and I don’t like how that turned out.”

  “Bring her down here and pretend to be her friend, but wait until she falls asleep and put a pillow over her face?”

  Amy squinted at Helen. “How much chocolate did you eat today?”

  “Couple of Snickers.”

  “Okay. First of all, she wouldn’t fit down the ladder, and second, I’m not killing anyone in my secret stronghold. Think about the smell.”

  “How about give her an empty box?”

  “She’ll be even madder when she opens it.”

  Helen spread her arms. “What if it’s full of cyanide? Or even better––laughing gas?”

  Amy laughed. “Yeah, that’s a good one. Climb out of here and run back to your house, silly girl.”

  “But what are you gonna do?”

  Amy shook her head. “I’ll think of something. I always do.”

  Chapter Two

  Amy tossed and turned half the night, then woke up early and dressed for school. She packed lunches for the four little ones and shooed the groggy children out of bed and into the bathroom. Amy wasn
’t the best cook, but that didn’t matter because Tony was already up. He fixed eggs, bacon, and toast for himself and the kids. Amy wasn’t hungry, but had a boiled egg and a few raw carrots.

  They usually walked to school, but Tony was going up to the hospital to see Lucia so everyone piled into the station wagon. It creaked and bounced up the street like a houseboat with wheels. Tony dropped the kids off at their school, and then turned back toward Forest Avenue.

  “Don’t bother,” said Amy. “I’m going to the hospital.”

  “Are you sure? I was going to watch her today. You can come visit after school.”

  “I’m not going to school today.”

  “What’s going on?”

  Amy didn’t say anything. Tony kept glancing at her as he passed the school and continued up the hill and out of P.G., the old car swaying in the curves and the pine trees full of morning mist.

  They stopped in the hospital parking lot at the top of the hill. The car’s engine clanked for ten seconds after Tony turned the key off, but he just sat there.

  “Amy, tell me what’s going on. If it’s about Lucia … sometimes these things happen. People get sick and we do the best we can for them.”

  “It’s not that. There’s a girl at school who’s going to kick the living crap out of me.”

  Tony laughed. “Is that all? Just fight her. Make sure she throws the first punch, though. I know you want everyone to think you’re as dewy-eyed and innocent as a newborn lamb.”

  “She’s three hundred pounds! One punch and I’ll be dead!”

  “That big, huh? What’s a girl like that doing in eighth grade?”

  “Nothing good, I tell you,” said Amy. “She’s been held back a couple times. All the social promotion in the world couldn’t keep this girl from failing.”

  “Why’s she mad at you?”

  Amy rubbed her nose and looked out the window at the cold pine trees around the parking lot.

  “I promised a TV to her. That one you dropped.”

  “Really? Now I feel like it’s my fault. Come on.”

  Tony got out of the station wagon and swung the back gate wide open. He looked left and right, then pulled carpet and a plastic cover off the cargo floor. Around the spare tire lay an assortment of weapons.