Bigger than a Bread Box

by Laurel Snyder

  I reached into my backpack for a pen and a notebook. At first I thought I might try to write a poem, but that just felt too … silly. I wasn’t a poet, and I didn’t have any idea how to write a poem, not a real one. In school back home, whenever we were supposed to write a poem for an assignment, I just made a list of words that sounded good together, words that were kind of emotional—dark, cold, rain, night, blah blah blah. I usually got an A, but the poems weren’t very good, not really. I knew that. Especially not after hearing the poems in Mr. Cook’s class.

  Instead I decided to just write down everything that had happened, as best I could, because it was something to do and because I thought it might be a little like talking to someone—even if I was only talking to myself and a piece of paper. I wasn’t trying to make it sound good. I was just trying to get it all down. All the things that had happened so far. I wrote about Mom, and Dad, and the night the power went out. I wrote about driving to Atlanta, and about Gran, and the bread box. I wrote about everything I’d wished for and about my walks with Lew. I wrote about Megan’s poufy hair, about laughing at all Hannah’s stupid, mean jokes, even when it felt wrong. I wrote about telling Hannah off. I wrote for hours in that funny closet that smelled like bleach, but then, when I got to the part about the jacket, I felt myself start to get all prickly and upset again.

  I tried to push that down. I clenched the pen in my fingers and gritted my teeth and stared at my feet. I said under my breath, “She isn’t worth it. No crying. Dad would never cry over someone like that.”

  I was not going to cry over her. I was going to keep writing. I took a deep breath and wrote down, “So what? I took a jacket. Big deal.” I added, “It was an accident and I am not a thief.”

  But staring at what I’d just written, I began to think about whether that was true. If the bread box had magically whisked the one-of-a-kind jacket away from Hannah’s house, then where had all the other stuff come from? In fact, maybe I was a thief. The candy and the chips—maybe everything was stolen. I closed my notebook, chewed my pen, and thought.…

  The fries had come from Jimmy’s Diner, after all. I’d wished for them to be from Jimmy’s specifically. Of course, I’d only been imagining they’d be exactly like Jimmy’s fries. I hadn’t meant to steal them from Jimmy himself, but maybe they’d flown right off the table under some poor guy’s nose, just as he was about to take a bite. Was that what had happened?

  Wow.

  If that was true, I guessed the chips and cookies had been whisked to me from other places in Baltimore. I imagined Lew’s Kandy Kakes flying off a rack in a 7-Eleven, right in front of some startled teenager who was reaching for them. I thought of a bag of chips, blinking out of sight at the Royal Farms.

  Of course, the keys really had been my mom’s, so they’d been taken from wherever Mom had left them. Why hadn’t that occurred to me at the time? It wasn’t like there were two identical sets of keys floating around the world, each with a worn leather tag that said OCEAN CITY, MD. The box had just retrieved them.

  Then … what about the spoon? Mom had said it was expensive. Who had I taken that from? I remembered it being cold. Where had it been the moment before I found it? Who were Adda and Harlan?

  And what about the TV? Had I stolen a TV? The magnitude of what I’d been doing all these weeks hit me. Wow. I really was a thief! I was almost impressed with myself. Ashamed too, but wow.

  Of course the phone hadn’t worked for long, because whoever the number really belonged to had probably gotten a new one and canceled their service.

  And the iPod filled with songs—whose was it? Who had picked all those songs carefully, only to have me take it?

  At last I thought about the money, and I wanted to fall over. I had stolen a thousand dollars!

  And a diamond! I was a diamond thief!

  I didn’t want to cry now, not at all, but I also didn’t want to write anymore. I only wanted to run home and bash the bread box to pieces. Throw it into traffic to be hit by a truck. I knew not to steal. I knew I had to return everything. But how? How could I possibly do that? How could I make this right? How could I figure out where it had all come from? There was no way to know, was there?

  I remembered all the crumpled ones and fives. Were they even all from the same place? Maybe they were from different places, from the pockets of people who really needed that money. Maybe they’d come from Gran! Had I stolen from Gran? I groaned out loud.

  Too loud I guess, because right after that, I heard someone call out, “Who’s in there?”

  Moments later, someone was banging on the door. And when I opened it, a white-haired lady with a huge ring of keys, someone I’d never seen before, peered in. She asked me where I was supposed to be. When I didn’t answer, she dragged me up to the main office, where Mrs. Cahalen gave a deep sigh as I walked through the door. Then she motioned me into a chair for a little talk about how everyone knew I was having a hard time but that I needed to try harder, for Gran’s sake.

  “You don’t want to be a burden to Ruby, do you, dear? Not when she’s opened her home to you?” Mrs. Cahalen raised her eyebrows at me and peered into my face.

  I didn’t want to be a burden, actually, but I also didn’t think Gran would ever say that about me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll try harder.” I glanced over at the white-haired lady, who was still standing by the door to the office. Didn’t she have anything better to do?

  “Well,” said Mrs. Cahalen with a sigh, “I guess we can give you one more chance without bothering your poor grandmother, or Principal Harding. As long as you promise to try …”

  I did not like Mrs. Cahalen.

  With an irritating glance at the white-haired lady, Mrs. Cahalen opened the door to her office. “Can you be sure that Becky makes it to Mrs. Hamill’s class, please?”

  Mrs. Hamill? Third period already? Had I been in the closet that long?

  Perfect.

  The next thing I knew, I was headed back down the hall with my arm clenched in the white-haired lady’s skinny fingers. She had a mean grip.

  The old lady opened the door on a roomful of kids with their heads bent over their desks, bent over the big unit test on mass and matter. She raised her eyebrows at Mrs. Hamill, who beckoned me in with a concerned look.

  Hannah looked up from her paper as I slid into the seat beside her. She slitted her eyes and smiled as she whispered, “Thief.”

  I just looked down at my test. I stared hard, until the letters got all blurry, and I said to myself, No crying, no crying, no crying. It worked. After a while, the letters unblurred and I could read the first question. I took a deep breath.

  1. To what Greek philosopher do we attribute the following sentence? “The sum total of all things was always such as it is now, and such it will ever remain.”

  I was starting to scribble “Epicurus” when the meaning of those words hit me.

  I reread the sentence: “The sum total of all things was always such as it is now.” I scanned farther down and saw the words “in a closed system, matter is neither created nor destroyed.” I couldn’t read any further. The letters swam and blurred as I thought about the magic, about the unicorn horn the box never gave me, and the keys it did. I thought about where everything had come from.

  Of course I’d been stealing. I’d been stealing all along. Things couldn’t be wished from thin air. Of course, of course, of course. We’d been talking about it this whole time, in school of all places. I just hadn’t been paying attention. The more I thought about it, the crazier I felt. Everything was coming undone inside and outside me. So I decided to stop thinking altogether and concentrated instead on simply trying not to scream. I stared out the window and left the whole test blank. It didn’t matter anyway. It was just a stupid test some girl named Becky was taking in a school she didn’t really go to that was full of people who hated her, because she really was a thief and she deserved it.

  When the bell rang, I flew out of that room. I fle
w out of the building. For the first time in my life, I cut school. I didn’t think twice about it. I was never going back, not ever. I didn’t care what my mom said. Becky was gone, and Rebecca was lost, and nothing made good sense because nothing made sense at all.

  CHAPTER 13

  I bolted out into the chilly day, down the steps of the school. I ran and ran, barely glancing around me for traffic, just staring at my feet, flashing in a red blur above the cracked sidewalks. I ran away from the school, away from the house. I ran along a hilly street, past the park with the zoo in it and along a bridge that crossed a highway. I stopped on the bridge for a minute and pressed my face and hands against the chain-link fence that was there to keep people from jumping. The metal was cold against my cheeks. Below me, the highway rushed loud like waves crashing. It sounded strangely like the ocean, like home.

  A woman walked past me and gave me a concerned look, so I started running again, through intersections. Somewhere along the way, I lost my headband. When I finally stopped, to bend over double and take a deep, painful breath, I looked up and found I was in front of a deserted gas station, staring across four lanes of traffic at the wall that surrounded the old cemetery. Where I’d walked that day with Lew in his stroller.

  I wished I had Lew with me now.

  No, I didn’t. I wished I were home with Lew. Home home. And I wished that none of this had ever happened: not the box or Mom and Dad fighting or Atlanta or Hannah or any of it. But that was one wish I couldn’t even steal.

  A few feet away, on the bench in the old gas station, a man was asleep under a dirty blanket for everyone to see. Surrounded by shopping carts of dirty clothes and aluminum cans. I thought about how tired he must be, to sleep like that, in public. I guess people get to a point where they don’t care what anyone else thinks of them. I almost wished I could feel like that.

  I didn’t have anywhere else to go, and I figured the cemetery was as good a place as any to waste time, so I crossed the street and climbed over the brick wall. Then I wandered around for a while, staring at the old names and the overgrown plots, picking up trash and stuffing it into a torn McDonald’s bag I found on the ground. The wind was biting, and I didn’t have a jacket on; plus there was a lot more trash than I could stuff into the bag. What good was it doing? I stopped trying to pick up the graveyard and sat in the doorway of a mausoleum—one of Lew’s “little houses.” The stone floor was frigid through my jeans, but at least I was out of the wind. I pulled up my knees and hugged myself, shivering.

  I tried not to think of all the dead people, or of the jacket, or of Baltimore, or of my dad. I realized I had a lot of things to not think about. But the thoughts that kept coming back, the ones I couldn’t shove away, were questions: How could I possibly fix any of this? How could I return what I’d taken? I wanted to feel clean again. I wanted to undo what I’d done. As bad as it had been to be in Atlanta without Dad, it was even worse to be in Atlanta without Dad and feel like a dirty, rotten thief—a dirty, rotten, freezing, lonely thief who couldn’t tell anyone what she’d done.

  I couldn’t go anywhere warm, not to the library or to the coffee shop, because I was so obviously twelve years old and supposed to be in school. Kids are never invisible during the day. Everyone knows if you’re alone and you’re not at school, you’re cutting. I couldn’t go home because Gran—and Mom if she was around—would want to know why I was back home in the middle of the day. So I sat there, shivering and thinking about how much my life had changed in a month. What would my old self in Baltimore make of where I was today? I didn’t think she’d believe it.

  Then something weird happened. I was just sitting there, cold and awful, stuck and lonely, when I heard a flapping of wings above me, on the roof of the mausoleum. I didn’t pay too much attention at first, because I was absorbed in feeling crappy. Until, over the sound of my own teeth chattering, I heard a skrreeee! I jumped up and spun around. Sure enough, there on the roof of the little stone building sat a seagull, just one.

  I didn’t know if it was one of my gulls or if it was some other lost bird, but I felt a little better when I saw it, a little less alone. I looked at those ugly, beady eyes just a few feet above my head and remembered a line from English class. One of Mr. Cook’s poems had somehow stuck in my head.

  “Hope is the thing with feathers,” I said out loud.

  The gull, apparently, didn’t care about poetry, because it flew off. But somehow, the words made me feel better. So I said them again, louder. “Hope is the thing with feathers.” It felt good to say something out loud.

  Then I sneezed, and that made me realize how badly my nose was running.

  “This is stupid,” I said to the graveyard, as though the dead people were listening, bored in their coffins. “I don’t have to sit here like this. I don’t. Even if I am a thief.”

  So I headed home, walking now instead of running, and thought about how nothing here mattered, none of it. Not Hannah, not the other silly girls at the lunch table, not even Megan. Not the test and not Mrs. Hamill. That school wasn’t my school. This life wasn’t my life. I could walk away from the bread box, and nobody would ever know a thing about what I’d done, except me. I could walk away from the school, and Becky too. Anyway, we’d eventually go home to Baltimore. Wouldn’t we? It was taking a long time, but we would go back in the end. One way or another. Then all of this would lift out of my story, and I’d be okay again. Myself again.

  If I got in trouble at home … Well, if I got in trouble, I got in trouble. It didn’t matter. What was the very worst Mom could do to me? So all the way home I planned to tell my mom I refused to go back. I was done with lying. Instead I would simply inform her that I’d left school, and I didn’t care what she thought about it.

  “I will go to school, to my school, at home, just as soon as you can get me there!” I rehearsed the words under my breath.

  When I walked through the front door, I found them all in the living room, playing Chutes and Ladders. Mom was there, drinking coffee in her scrubs, and right away she asked me, “What are you doing home so early?”

  I lost my nerve. I stood there, all sniffly and cold, with my teeth chattering, and I didn’t have the energy for a fight. I didn’t want to argue today. It had been a bad-enough day. I just wanted to be home.

  “Um, I’m sick,” I said, without meaning to. “They sent me home.” I didn’t mean to lie. It just kind of popped out.

  “Really?” asked Gran, looking up from a seed catalogue. “How sick? What kind of sick?”

  “Sick sick sick sick sick.” Lew sang the word like a nursery rhyme.

  “Just … sick. You know, like a bad cold,” I said.

  I knew it was a pretty weak lie, but it was too late to change my story. So I coughed as loud as I could. I was almost certain I could throw up if I needed to. Just from feeling miserable.

  “Why didn’t they call us?” asked my mom, setting down her coffee. “To come and bring you home? What kind of school lets a kid just leave like that?”

  “It’s only four blocks,” I argued lamely. “It was easier to walk.”

  “That so?” Mom answered me, chewing her lip. I could tell she didn’t believe me, but she surprised me. She said, “Well, get into bed, and I’ll be in to see you in a minute.”

  With an extra cough, I headed for my room.

  Behind me I heard Gran say, “Well, now, that’s a load of bunk if I ever heard it!”

  Mom answered her, “Of course it is, but let’s let it go this once. She’s got a lot going on right now. And I’m hardly worried about Rebecca becoming a juvenile delinquent. She’s not that kind of kid.”

  With a sigh, I climbed into bed and turned over, thinking that my pillow was the warmest thing I’d ever felt in my life. I also wondered if there were any other diamond thieves who were so misunderstood. I wondered how, exactly, you knew a juvenile delinquent when you saw one. I wondered just what kind of a kid I really was. Then I wondered what everyone was saying about m
e at school. I could just imagine Hannah’s sneer. After that I wondered when the school would call, and I started to get scared. Now that I’d lied, I didn’t want to get caught.

  And this may be the worst thing I did with the bread box, because when I did it, I knew better. It was just downright sneaky, but I did it anyway. Climbing out of bed, I went over to the bread box and whispered, “Gran’s phone, please?” Her little black phone appeared in the box, with all those silly numbers taped to the back.

  I turned it off and slipped it under my mattress.

  That night, maybe as some kind of karmic punishment, I really got sick. I guess I caught a cold sitting in the windy graveyard. I even had a fever, but it wasn’t so bad, really. Sometimes it’s nice to be sick, to give up trying to function, to crawl into bed and be cared for a little. Nobody suggested I go to school the next morning, and Gran brought me chicken soup for lunch. Lew shared his crayons with me, and his gross blue blanket. He read me a story, holding the book upside down. The Runaway Bunny. In his version, the baby bunny actually got caught on the fishhook. Then it turned into a dinosaur.

  Mom had to work during the day, but when she came home in the afternoon, she brought me a stack of library books. They all looked really great, just the kind of books I liked best. How had Mom done such a good job of picking them out? How could she be so smart about me in some ways and so dumb in others?

  All day Friday I just lay there in bed, reading and drinking ginger ale. The whole time the bread box sat there on the table, and when I wasn’t reading, I stared at it. I thought about how to try and return the things I’d taken. I thought that might make me feel better, to send everything back where it had come from. The only thing I could think of was to put everything in the box and say, “I wish you would all go back to wherever you came from!” When I tried that, nothing happened.

  That night, just as I was drifting off to sleep, a thought struck me. “Adda and Harlan!” I said, sitting up in the dark room. “Who are Adda and Harlan?”