Overnight

by Adele Griffin

  If her dream gave her some clues to find Gray, then Zoë would get more attention than Shelton, more attention than anyone at Fielding, and maybe even in the whole town.

  Now she had pushed herself into a dream that was not quite going her way. Swimming through murk, she had found Gray, who was stuck underwater in a dark cave, so it was lucky that Zoë could breathe underwater. The problem was that Gray was screaming and ruining Zoë’s rescue.

  “I’ve got you! I’ve got you!” Too late, Zoë realized the dream had turned nightmarish, because she didn’t have Gray. No, in fact, it was just the opposite—Gray was trying to drag Zoë down into the cave.

  Zoë’s eyes snapped open. Her heart was beating fast. Sweat was sticking to the back of her T-shirt. What time was it? How long had she been sleeping? She listened to the room. Caitlin was snoring, but otherwise the room was quiet. Outside Caitlin’s room, down the hall, the house was awake with muffled goings-on, but none of the noise suggested that Gray had returned.

  “Hey,” Leticia, on her side, whispered so quietly, Zoë could hardly hear her. “Are you okay?”

  “I was having a nightmare,” Zoë whispered back. She was still breathing hard. She flattened a hand to her heart.

  “You were talking in your sleep. You seemed mad.”

  “I was?” Zoë yawned. Had Leticia been sleeping next to her before, or had she moved places?

  “Yeah, and I wondered if it was because of the science test.”

  The science test? What was Leticia talking about? “Well, I think I got an A plus,” said Zoë, trying to keep her voice nonchalant. It was unc to brag about grades.

  “Well, guess what? Martha got an A plus, too,” whispered Leticia.

  “Nuh-uh. Martha never gets A’s.”

  “Not on her own. When she asked to copy off me. I said no, so she went and sat behind you. To cheat off you. I thought you knew about it.”

  Zoë frowned. She hadn’t known. It irritated her to think of Martha copying her test. Without cheat permission, even. But she did not want Leticia to think she cared more than she did. “It’s no big deal, I guess. We’re friends.”

  “Oh. I thought you two were in a fight about it. But I guess it must be about something else.”

  “No, no—we’re not fighting, Martha and me. Why would you think that?”

  “It’s just…” Leticia turned on her side to face Zoë. Her breath smelled like bubble-gum toothpaste. “Just that Martha’s been especially on your case tonight. Right from saying you didn’t win Enchanted Castle when we all knew you did. Then telling you that you don’t have ESP. She makes you out to be such a loser.”

  “You think? Do other people think that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know…Listen, I’m sorry,” said Leticia. “I guess I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “No,” said Zoë. “I’m glad you did.” Her mind wound back through the night. Now that she thought about it, Martha had been pretty mean. Worse than usual? And was Leticia only saying this because she and Martha were in a fight?

  “You’re sure she got an A plus?”

  “Positive.”

  “And it was from cheating off me?”

  “Positive.”

  “Huh.” Zoë gnawed the edge of skin around what was left of her thumbnail. “Um, Teesh? Do you also think Martha made that stuff up, about the lady? Because I really do believe my ESP was right. About the caves.”

  “I don’t know. I was thinking, though. Probably we should go to the police and tell them what Martha told us.” Leticia’s voice was the barest whisper. “Just to double-check. Don’t you think?”

  “Except that it might get Martha in trouble,” said Zoë. “I mean, what if she really made it all up? As a prank or whatever.”

  “See, that’s how we’d find out for sure,” said Leticia. “If she was telling the truth or not. Because she couldn’t lie to the police.”

  “It seems kind of a big deal, going to the police.”

  “So what? C’mon. It’d be like a dare.”

  Zoë rolled on her back. So what? “Maybe. In a few minutes,” she said. “Let’s make sure everyone is asleep.”

  “Hey, I wanted to ask you something.” Leticia’s whisper lifted, lightened. “In a couple of weeks, my parents and I are going to visit Celeste at her college. They said I could bring one friend, anyone I wanted. But just one, you know.” She paused. “Maybe you’d want to come?”

  “Yeah, that’d be cool.” In the dark, Zoë smiled and nodded. She knew, all right.

  Martha

  MARTHA HAD STRAINED TO hear what Leticia and Zoë were whispering about. Now it seemed that they had fallen asleep. Martha could predict what was going to happen, though, and it infuriated her. Tomorrow morning, there would be two pairs. Caitlin and Kristy, Leticia and Zoë.

  Martha despised the image of herself at breakfast the next morning, being called Meow, being laughed at or frozen out, plus in trouble with the Rosenfelds and Donnelleys and the police.

  She shouldn’t have been so hard on Zoë.

  She tried to put her secret out of her mind. Maybe she had just imagined it. She wished something else would happen. Something to distract everyone. Something to shake things up.

  The idea opened her eyes. A hush of balanced breathing, like a soft ocean, washed in and out around her, its calm broken by the hovercraft of Caitlin snoring in her bed above.

  All clear.

  She slithered out of her sleeping bag, then groped in the dark for her overnight bag. Fumblingly, she retrieved her Kleenex-wrapped mothball and her other bag of candy and chocolate hearts. She tiptoed into the bathroom, shut and locked the door, and snapped on the light, which made her squint. After she stopped squinting, she looked at herself in the mirror and touched her face gently.

  “My freckles are where I’m bulletproofed,” Martha whispered to her face. It was a silly thing she used to tell kids back in kindergarten if any of them dared to make fun of her freckles. Only tonight she didn’t feel bulletproofed. Tonight, she felt as if she had been shot with a thousand darts.

  She dropped, cross-legged, on the bath mat. Carefully, she used the edge of her fingernail to push into the chocolate heart. She made a small dent that slowly cleaved into two perfect halves. She licked out liquid chocolate. Then she fit the mothball into the heart, neat as a toy surprise, and she closed it up.

  She tiptoed out of the bathroom, out of Caitlin’s room, closing the bedroom door quietly behind her. She tiptoed past the den that rumbled with voices of the grown-ups.

  A fresh pot of coffee had been brewed in the pantry and the lights were on in the kitchen. She would have to be quick and careful.

  Bumpo was in his basket bed. He raised his head to watch her. She paused.

  Maybe this was not such a good idea after all.

  But if she could make Bumpo sick, Martha reasoned, then she could rescue him. She would call for help from Topher. Best of all, they would blame Leticia, for feeding Bumpo chocolate earlier. And when she finally told about the lady, there would be potentially two people in trouble tonight instead of just herself.

  A perfect plan. She dared herself to try. She was good at dares.

  “Here, boy,” Martha coaxed. She slid to her knees on the floor next to the dog basket. She scratched Bumpo’s ears and under his collar, the way he liked it. “I’ve got a treat for you.”

  One single mothball would not really hurt him, Martha figured. Her parents were always cautioning about the dangers of this and that, but experience had taught her that nothing was ever as bad as they warned. The mothball would only make him sick. Sick enough to help her.

  She held the chocolate heart to Bumpo’s mouth. At first, she thought he wouldn’t eat it. His pink tongue lolled and licked the chocolate heart absently.

  “Come on, boy! Please!”

  Bumpo sighed, licked the candy again, then took it between his teeth as if to please her. The mothball crunched in his teeth. He gulped it down and immediately started
to cough. An awful hacking sound from deep in his throat.

  Martha stood. “It’s okay, boy,” she told him.

  She spun on her heel and ran downstairs to the family room.

  “What are you doing down here?” asked Topher.

  “I went down to get some juice, and I found Bumpo. I think he’s sick.”

  Topher used the remote to snap off the television. He stood and followed Martha up the stairs.

  “Dude! What happened?” He pointed to the puddle. “What did he barf up?”

  Together, they inspected it. “I think that’s chocolate,” said Martha. “One of our friends was feeding him chocolate hearts earlier tonight. Leticia Watkins.”

  Bumpo stared at Topher and whined slightly. Then gave a giant, shuddering, teeth-baring yawn. Topher dropped on all fours to check Bumpo.

  “It smells like something else,” he said. He sat up on his heels and propped open Bumpo’s eye to inspect, as if he were a veterinarian. “Poor ole guy. Poor ole Bumpo. Getting long in the tooth, as they say.” Topher scratched and rubbed Bumpo, who whined and panted. “You want some water, boy?”

  “And I want something to drink, too.” She could stretch out her time with Topher a little longer. And maybe if she explained about the lady to him first, he would be so excited to break this news to the police that she would not get in as much trouble.

  “Let me take care of the dog first.” Topher filled the water bowl and set it in front of Bumpo, who began to slurp it down greedily.

  “Poor Bumpo,” she said. “Probably Leticia didn’t know any better.”

  “There’s lemonade and Cranapple and diet sodas. Or I’ll microwave you some Ovaltine, if you want. That’s what I’m gonna have,” said Topher, moving to open a cupboard. “I should have known you’d be bopping around—Martha, right? Little Grasshopper! You’ve been jumping out of my sight all night. All the other kids are sleeping?”

  “Yeah. The other kids.” She leaned against the counter. When Topher said kids, did he think Martha was a kid, too? She wondered if Topher thought she was cute. She wondered if she could get him to believe she was, even if he didn’t think so now.

  “I’d like Ovaltine, too,” she said, since it would take the longest to make.

  “Coming up.” Topher pulled down two mugs and the Ovaltine. He dropped three spoonfuls into each mug and filled them both with milk and placed them in the microwave. While he set the timer, Martha looked at Bumpo’s throw-up. She could not tell if the mothball was in it, so maybe it was still in Bumpo. Would he still be sick tomorrow? He didn’t look too bad. Definitely not bad enough to get Leticia in trouble.

  She cleared her throat. “I’ve been trying to get a reading on Gray,” she told Topher. “In my family, a lot of us have ESP.”

  “Is that right?”

  Martha thought she saw Topher smirk. It made her feel extra small and freckly. Quickly, she added, “Some people don’t believe in it. I don’t even know if I do, either, but I guess I’m getting worried about Gray.”

  Topher’s face turned serious. “At school, we’re studying all that stuff in the class I’m taking. Psychology. Pretty strange. I wish I didn’t know as much as I do. About human nature and all.”

  “Wow. You must be really smart,” said Martha.

  “No, not…I mean, I get by.” Topher rubbed his eyes. “My grades would be way better if I studied, put some effort in.”

  “Me, too,” Martha agreed.

  “Tell you a secret,” Topher said. “You look like the type who can handle a secret, and it’ll be news by tomorrow, anyway.”

  “What?”

  “They think Gray got picked up. Abducted, you know?”

  “Abducted.” Martha took a breath. The shame of the secret flooded through her.

  “Mmm-hmm.” Topher nodded. “No signs of forced entry or struggle. But there’s no sign of her, either. A kid who runs off gets sighted along the way. Cops have got nothing. So far, at least.”

  “Gosh,” she said. “That’s scary.”

  “She might have even let him in, is what they’re thinking.”

  “Into the house?”

  “Yep.” Suddenly, Topher jogged a couple of steps to the back door and checked the lock. He returned, grinning sheepishly. “Sorry. Paranoid. But it’s wild to think, how you can buy a nice house in a nice neighborhood, and you can lock the doors, set the alarms, buy the big dog, everything, and still some kind of evil might find its way into your house. You’re never safe enough, you know? It’s never zero risk. Freaks me out.”

  Martha suddenly felt dizzy. She slid onto one of the counter stools. “Me, too.”

  The timer binged. Topher took the mugs out of the microwave and handed one to Martha. “Careful. Hot.”

  She took the mug. “Thanks.”

  “Sure.” Topher yawned. “Not much sleep going on in this house tonight. There’s a night patrol, but the real deal starts at the crack of dawn. Then they’re gonna start a helicopter search.”

  “Helicopters!” Nobody ever paid this much attention to Mouse before.

  “But know what? I have this hunch a phone call will come in, and it’ll be somebody who saw something and then we’ll sniff out a clue. There’s always a clue. There’s always one person who remembers something. I mean, if she was taken. Somebody sees something, right? A car, a creepy dude…well, not to scare you.”

  Martha raised her mug to hide her face. “I’m not scared.” In her mind, she saw the lady again, her glittering eyes and yanked-back smile, wrapped in that feather coat.

  She would tell the secret as soon as she was finished with her drink. Even though she was definitely getting in trouble for it. Helicopters were serious. She took another tiny sip of Ovaltine.

  Bumpo shuddered and whined. His tail thumped the floor and his eyebrows knit as he looked at Martha and then Topher reproachfully.

  Martha shook her head. “I told Leticia a million times not to give Bumpo chocolate.”

  Upstairs, something was going on. Was that Zoë’s voice? And now footsteps were running up and down the hall, and people were speaking, moving with new energy. Mrs. Donnelley suddenly called down, loud and demanding. “Topher? Is Martha Van Riet downstairs? We need her upstairs. Now!”

  “Yeah, yeah. She’s down here. We’ll be right up.” Topher made a face. “Guess they discovered your escape hatch, prisoner. Back to the pen, huh?”

  Martha shrugged her shoulders. She could not seem to find enough air to breathe. Her secret was out. Zoë had beaten her to it. Zoë, of course, who always had to win everything.

  “Now!” Mrs. Donnelley’s voice cried. “In the study!”

  Martha was sick from the secret, anyway. Relieved, even, that it no longer belonged to her. She set her mug on the counter.

  “I’m ready,” she said. “I’m finished.”

  “Yep.” Topher knelt down to give Bumpo one last pat. “All right, doggy, okay, ole boy,” he said. “You’re gonna be okay. Jeez, Bumpo. I wonder what got into you?”

  Gray

  SHE PRESSED HER HEAD against the car window and watched the broken white lines on the road. They moved so fast, white black white black white black. Sometimes she saw the white and the black separated and sometimes she saw the blur, depending on how she watched.

  She wondered where they were going.

  What was out in the movable dark? Past her house and her friends’ houses on the roads close by and past Knightworthy Avenue and past Fielding Academy.

  “You can drop me off here,” she said.

  Now they were getting onto a ramp. Now they were on the highway.

  “You can drop me off here,” she said again.

  Gray felt too-scared again. She was crying softly, hoping that something better would happen to her. Hoping that her parents would pull up out of nowhere or that the car would get a flat tire or that she would wake up from this terrible dream.

  She wondered what happened to girls when they got kidnapped by kidnappers who had
n’t planned on taking them.

  Because wasn’t she getting kidnapped, even if it was an accident?

  Katrina was singing a soft song along with the radio. Drew was talking to himself under his breath. They were not real grown-ups, Gray thought. They had the bodies of grown-ups but inside they were fragile and see-through to their strange kid selves. None of their rules were right or fixed or understandable.

  “Are you going to drop me off anywhere?” she asked again.

  “Just calm down and let me think,” Drew snapped.

  She was not going to get the answer she needed. Maybe she was asking the wrong question. She wished she could think of something wise and calm that would lead the way to a wise, calm decision. All she was good at, though, was crying.

  Crying was the best that she could do.

  She started to cry. Loud. Her hands pounded on the window. Her breath and fingers marked the glass. “Let me out! Let me out!”

  “Shut up! Shut up!” Drew barked. He glanced up at her through the rearview. His eyes drilled into her. “Stop being such a girl!”

  Now she was really crying, and it was too hard to stop. Crying might be the best that she could do, and she could cry pretty well. She could cry great.

  In the front seat, Katrina started to whimper, copycatting Gray, the way Robby had this morning.

  “Shut up, both of you!” Drew yelled. The heel of his hand hit the steering wheel. “I can’t concentrate!”

  Katrina sniffled and hid her face.

  “I can’t help it!” Gray screamed. “I can’t help it!”

  In the next moment, the wheels screeched and the car skidded to the side, guttering into the shoulder of the road, nearly hitting the guardrail, and stopped. Drew slammed open the door.

  “Get out!” he yelled.

  “Here?” she choked.

  “Right here. Here is where you’re getting dropped.”

  “But there’s nothing out here.”