Emmy and the Home For Troubled Girls

by Lynne Jonell

  Emmy had a brief, uncomfortable feeling at the thought of Sissy, which she quickly suppressed. The stoning incident was over, and Sissy was safe. Emmy didn’t need to keep beating herself up about it.

  Emmy stared at the reflected moonlight on the ceiling. Of course Ratty’s powers had to be kept secret. If everyone knew what he and Sissy could do, the rodents would be taken, and caged, and experimented on, and analyzed, and made to run mazes and who knew what else. Ratty would hate that. And, it would be pretty hard to keep Rodent City secret, and free, after Raston and Cecilia’s powers became known. People would question the professor, and Brian, and investigate and dig and search, and pretty soon all the rodents would suffer the same fate, if they didn’t first escape into the wild.

  No, it was best to keep quiet about the rodents of power. But that didn’t solve the question of how to rescue the tiny, troubled girls.

  Emmy rolled over impatiently, dragging the blanket with her, and thumped at her pillow. She had to figure something out. If she thought long enough—if she stared out the window at the moon—maybe something would come to her …

  She sat up suddenly on the mattress, fixing her eyes on the sliding glass door. There, near the bottom, flattened against the pane, was the familiar silhouette of a rodent—no, two of them. And one looked suspiciously like Raston.

  Emmy picked her way among the sleeping forms of her friends. She flipped the lock and slid the door slowly, quietly open.

  “What are you doing here?” She slipped outside. “How did you know where to find me?”

  Raston shrugged. “Joe told me.”

  Emmy sat on the flagstones, shivering a little in the cool night air, and wrapped her arms around her pajama-clad knees for warmth. “How did he know I was here?” She glanced at the second rodent, a scruffy specimen with light-colored fur and a habit of holding up one of his hind legs. She didn’t remember seeing him before, but she wasn’t that interested in meeting new rodents anyway—not after Gus, the dancing gopher.

  But the new rat spoke in an oddly familiar voice. “I heard the girls say you were going to sleep over at Meg’s, and I knew where she lived.”

  Emmy stared at the strange rat. “Who are you?”

  The scruffy rat grinned. “Criminy, Emmy, I’m not that different. Blond hair, broken ankle—” He held up his hind leg, wrapped in a miniature splint.

  Emmy’s mouth hung open for a full minute. “Joe? You let Ratty bite you twice?”

  The scruffy rat nodded happily. “I figured a broken ankle wouldn’t matter so much to a rat, and I was right! I can hold my hind leg off the ground, and I’ve still got three feet for running.”

  Emmy shook her head in awe. Joe was braver than she. It took guts to turn yourself into a rat, knowing that the last one who’d done it hadn’t managed to change back.

  Of course, Joe probably wouldn’t have any problems turning into a human again. His blood wasn’t like Miss Barmy’s, all gunked up with resentment and hatred.

  Still, there was no way Emmy was ever going to try it. “So why did you come here?”

  “Well,” said Joe, scratching behind an ear with his paw, “it’s been fun being a rat—you can smell everything!—but I’ve got to change back before Peter gets us up in the morning. We went looking for Sissy, but we couldn’t find her anywhere.”

  Emmy felt a sudden emptiness in her chest, as if something had caved inside her.

  “We asked around at Rodent City, but no one has seen her since yesterday morning, since I sent her on an errand to you.” Raston’s voice wavered with anxiety. “You got my message, didn’t you? Where did Sissy go afterward? Do you know?”

  “But you told me,” Emmy faltered, “you said that Sissy gave me your message. You knew she’d found me, so you must have talked to her afterward—”

  “Well, of course I assumed she gave you the message! She’s so conscientious, I knew she’d never rest until she delivered it! Are you telling me she never did?”

  Emmy’s fingers trembled slightly, and she clasped her hands. “She started to,” she said in an unsteady voice, “but then some kids started throwing rocks.”

  Raston and Joe looked at her, waiting tensely.

  “She ran into a tunnel!” cried Emmy. “I thought she went back to Rodent City!”

  “Didn’t you check to make sure?” asked Joe.

  “I-I went to the crack in the art-gallery steps, but no one came when Thomas called—and then Miss Barmy and Cheswick were measuring a pipe or something, and said something mean to Thomas, and he ran off to the Antique Rat, and I ran after him. And I was going to tell the professor, and ask Buck to check on her, but then Buck was napping under Brian’s chin because they were trying to see if he could give a full night’s sleep—and after that Thomas kicked a ball through the shoe-shop window, and the professor fell asleep because he got upset when Mrs. B bashed him with her purse, and I had to get Mr. Peebles to help me because Mrs. B was dragging Thomas away …”

  Emmy decided against telling them about the attic and the tiny girls just now, and soldiered on. “And then Mr. Peebles got us out of the shoe shop, and called your parents, Joe, and then you all came in the car, and then Meg and the other girls came and told me I was late to the party …”

  Emmy trailed off into silence.

  “So all this to say,” said the Rat, his voice cold, “that you left Sissy alone in a tunnel after some kids scared her. And you didn’t check on her to make sure she was okay. And now she’s lost.”

  “I don’t think she’s lost,” said Emmy desperately. “I can show you the tunnel she went into. At least I think I can; I know almost exactly where it is.” She stopped talking, afraid to say any more.

  “You’d better tell us where you saw her last,” said Joe slowly. “She’s been gone a long time.”

  A foot scraped on the flagstones, and a door slid softly shut.

  “What’s going on?” asked Meg. “And how come you’re talking to rats again, Emmy?”

  THE NIGHT WAS FILLED with the gentle creaking of crickets. The pool, lit from beneath, glowed a soft, watery blue. On the patio, a girl and two rats waited, motionless, as Meg tiptoed across the flagstones, trailing a blanket.

  She sat down, settled herself with the blanket around her shoulders, and looked at Emmy and the rats expectantly.

  Emmy shut her eyes. This was going to take a lot of explaining.

  “Get rid of her,” snapped Raston. “We have to find my sister.”

  Emmy looked at Meg helplessly. “Would you just—go back inside and pretend you didn’t see anything?”

  “Nope,” said Meg promptly. “There’s something going on, and I want to know what it is. Besides, I’ve already pretended I didn’t see anything. Like that time on the boat when you jumped in after a rat, and in your room when you shouted down a mouse hole, and then yesterday on the field when Kate hit that rat with a rock and you started yelling at us to stop.”

  “Sissy was hit?” cried the Rat.

  Joe lifted his pale, furry head and stared at Emmy as if he had never seen her before. “She was hit?” he echoed. “And you didn’t tell anyone?”

  Emmy looked at him miserably.

  “Okay,” said Meg after a pause. “And now you can tell me why that rat is speaking English. And why the other one is squeaking.”

  “Forget it, Meg,” said Joe, his voice suddenly flat and emphatic. “There’s no time to explain. We’ve got to find the rat that Kate hit.”

  “Who are you?” Meg exclaimed, staring down at the pale-colored rat. “How do you know my name? And what is this all about?” She stared Emmy down.

  Emmy stood up wearily. “It’s too long to explain. Seriously, Meg, just go back inside and cover for me, will you? I’ll tell you everything later, I promise.”

  Meg shook her head.

  “Okay, then don’t,” said Emmy bitterly. “Everything else has gone wrong, why not this? Go ahead, get me in trouble, tell everyone I’m weird, whatever—just move out
of my way, because I’m leaving.”

  Meg shrugged. “Then I’m coming with you.”

  Emmy looked at her, nonplussed.

  “I don’t want to get you in trouble,” Meg said quickly. “I just want to be in on whatever it is you’re doing. I mean, talking to rats? Running off in the middle of the night?” She grinned. “That’s way cooler than anything I’ve got planned.”

  “Come on, come on, come on!” cried the Rat, dancing in his impatience.

  Emmy looked Meg square in the eyes. “If you’re in, then you’re in all the way. Will you let the Rat bite your finger?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. The Rat bites your finger or you don’t come with us. I’m not going to spend the whole time explaining what everybody is saying.”

  “Can it be the English-speaking one?” Meg frowned.

  “Oh, criminy,” said Joe. “Stick out your finger and get it over with already.”

  “Ouch!”

  “All right, that’s done,” said the Rat. “Can we get moving now?”

  “Hey!” said Meg, pointing. “The squeaking one talks, too!”

  “No kidding,” said Joe.

  They had gone half a block when Emmy realized she was still in her pajamas.

  “Of course we are!” said Meg. “That’s what makes it so fun!” She bounced alongside Emmy, holding one end of the blanket that they had slung between them as a carrier for Joe and the Rat.

  “What’s so great about being outside in your pajamas?” Emmy wanted to know.

  “Well, none of my other friends would do it,” answered Meg.

  Emmy padded over well-kept lawns and smooth driveways, her bare feet pressing on hard asphalt, then damp thick grass, then asphalt again.

  “See, you’re different,” Meg went on. “All I do is ride bikes and hang out with friends and have sleepovers and swim. Your life is much more interesting. You have these weird adventures, and you talk to rats, and it’s just so cool.”

  Emmy sighed. “It gets cooler,” she said resignedly.

  The rodents in the blanket sling made no comment. For once, Raston and Joe weren’t complaining, or fighting, or saying anything at all. It put Emmy on edge.

  “Do you want to go straight to the field?” she asked nervously, looking down into the sling. “I’m not sure I can find the hole in the dark. Maybe we need a flashlight.”

  Joe’s voice came muffled from the blanket. “I think we should go to Rodent City and get a search party together. There are lots of burrows in that field.”

  “We should tell the professor, too,” Ratty added, his voice high with worry. “He’s a doctor, isn’t he? Sissy might be hurt.”

  Emmy immediately suppressed a mental image of Sissy dragging herself into the tunnel. “He’s a professor,” she said slowly. “I don’t know if he’s a doctor.”

  “But he knows all about rodents,” said Joe. “He probably knows more about rodents than anyone in the world.”

  “Are you still talking about the rat that Kate hit?” asked Meg with interest. “Because she’ll need a doctor for sure. I mean, she was bleeding and everything.”

  The Rat gave a sharp, anguished cry. “Bleeding?”

  There was nothing Emmy could say. There was nothing she could do except just to keep on walking, block after block, hanging on to her end of the blanket. The sling seemed to grow heavier, as if the silence within had weight, like a stone.

  At last they came to the park bench on the green. Meg and Emmy set the blanket gently down on the grass. Emmy hardly dared look at the Rat.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said in a choked voice. “I never meant to leave her.”

  “Sissy would never have left you,” said the Rat, slipping into the Rodent City tunnel without a backward glance.

  Joe curled his tail, carefully avoiding Emmy’s eyes. “You’d better go wake the professor,” he said somberly. “We’ll meet you at the art-gallery steps in a little while.”

  Emmy and Meg rang the bell of the Antique Rat until Brian came to the door. He invited them to wait inside while the professor got dressed, but Emmy declined. It was easier to sit outside, in the dark, where she wouldn’t have to see the professor’s face when Brian passed on the news about Sissy.

  The girls sat on the park bench, looking up at the lighted attic window of the shoe shop, and Emmy told Meg everything. Somehow she felt she wanted at least one other person to understand that she really hadn’t meant to be so awful.

  At last the door of the Antique Rat opened. Emmy stood up, glancing at Peter Peebles’s place. She wondered if his house was as full of mouse holes as her own. It had obviously been easy for Joe and the Rat to go in and out. They must have left Thomas still sleeping … For a little while more, then, Thomas wouldn’t know what she had done.

  There was a sudden stinging behind Emmy’s eyes, and a tightness in the back of her throat. She held herself rigidly and blinked. She was not going to cry. She followed Professor Capybara and Meg, with only a single look back at the lighted attic window in the Home for Troubled Girls.

  She couldn’t rescue them. She couldn’t even find out why their light was on in the middle of the night. Mrs. B or Miss Barmy could be using the little girls for slave labor, for all she knew, but there was not one thing Emmy could do to stop it.

  Meg took her arm and gave it a comforting squeeze, but the same stiff feeling that had kept Emmy from crying was with her still, and she didn’t squeeze back. She felt as if something inside her had frozen solid.

  She sat hunched behind Meg and the professor on the gallery steps and watched as rodents streamed from the crack. Each one carried a stick with a bit of greasy rag wrapped around the end.

  Buck emerged, a wooden match between his teeth, and scraped it along a chunk of broken sidewalk. It flared suddenly, and he lit the first torch.

  One by one the rodent faces were illuminated. The tips of their fur shone golden, and their beady eyes glinted with reflected fire. Emmy recognized Ratty, and Joe, and Mrs. Bunjee, and even Gus the dancing gopher, but Chippy was nowhere to be seen. Cheswick and Miss Barmy were missing, too, a fact for which she was dully grateful.

  The torches were all ablaze. The rodents waited, a silent, furry mass. Emmy met their collective gaze and slowly rose. There was a hiss from somewhere in the crowd.

  “None of that!” said Buck sharply. “She’s here to help. When she brings us to the place where Sissy was last seen, dive into every tunnel and burrow you can find nearby. Use your noses!”

  Emmy led the way across the street, through the schoolyard, to the soccer field, and stopped at the great tree where the girls had sat the day before. “I think it was here,” she said in a low voice. Meg nodded agreement.

  “All right. You humans stay out of the way,” said Buck, not unkindly. “With your big feet, and all these rodents running around in the dark …”

  Professor Capybara bowed gravely, pulled out his pipe, and went to stand in the street.

  Emmy followed at a slower pace. She was a little shy of the professor, who hadn’t had much to say to her, and she sat on the curb a short distance away. Meg sat beside her, and for a time they watched the small flickering torches moving here and there on the field, low to the ground.

  Meg curled up her knees and rested her chin on her forearms. “I’m sorry about throwing rocks with the others. I thought that rat was going to bite you.”

  “That’s okay.” Emmy looked intently at the torches. They were clustered in one spot now, unmoving.

  “I can see why you didn’t protect her at first, though,” Meg went on. “It’s like, do you help the one getting hurt, or do you side with your friends? It’s hard either way.”

  Emmy cast her a grateful look, and turned back toward the field. The torches were moving again, all together, and getting larger as they advanced. The shifting flames outlined a wedge of bobbing, furry heads, with an unlit patch in the center.

  “They’ve found her,” whispered Meg. />
  “Yes.” Emmy forced the word past the cold dread in her throat.

  The procession came near. Two burly squirrels carried a limp, gray form on a stretcher. As they passed, Emmy saw the dark blood that crusted Sissy’s side and a thin trickle of red coming from the newly disturbed wound.

  The professor bent swiftly, putting his ear to Sissy’s chest, touching the side of her neck, pulling back the closed eyelids with his thumb.

  “She’s alive,” he said soberly. “Where was she?”

  One of the gophers jerked his paw back in the direction of the field. “I found her in an abandoned rabbit warren. It branched off from the main tunnel to Rodent City, but I don’t know how she could have missed the signs.”

  “She can’t read.” The Rat rubbed his eyes with the back of his paw.

  “Why didn’t she use her nose, then?” piped up a meadow vole.

  “She had a cold,” said Mrs. Bunjee. “She couldn’t smell anything.”

  “She’ll probably have pneumonia by now,” said the gopher, shaking his head. “The burrow was damp. That’s probably why it was abandoned—poor drainage. Some rabbits just don’t know how to build.”

  Professor Capybara looked at Emmy. “How long was she left in the tunnel?”

  Emmy swallowed hard. She looked pitifully at Meg.

  “Since noon yesterday,” said Meg, her voice barely audible.

  There was a hushed gasp from the rodents nearby.

  “About fifteen hours,” the professor said slowly. “In a damp burrow. Alone and wounded.” He gazed down at the unconscious Sissy and covered her gently with his handkerchief. “I don’t care if it is the middle of the night. I’m going to call the vet.”

  Emmy stood next to Meg outside the Antique Rat and watched the truck pull away from the curb. Brian, his expression serious, was driving. The professor sat hunched over the small gray lump in his hands, looking tense. No one waved good-bye.

  The Rat stared after the receding taillights. “I can’t just wait here and do nothing.”

  Joe threw a furry arm over his shoulder. “We’ll wait with you, Ratty.”