by Byrne, Leigh
Instantly I felt comfortable in Kat’s room; I pulled off my coat, kicked off my sneakers, and hopped on the bed among stuffed animals and fuzzy blue pillows.
“You stay right here,” said Kat. “I’ll go down and tell my mom you’re spending the night with me. I’ll tell her I forgot I had invited you. She won’t mind.”
A few minutes later, Kat popped back into the room. “Everything is cool for tonight,” she said. “We’ll deal with tomorrow, tomorrow.”
It was still early, so we took advantage of our time together. We played our favorite songs on her record player and danced and sang along into a hairbrush. When we grew tired of singing, Kat styled my hair in two ponytails, while we looked at teen magazines and swooned over pictures of David Cassidy. Later we pigged out on hot cocoa and homemade chocolate chip cookies. It was well past midnight before we fell asleep in her bed, as if we didn’t have a worry in the world.
The next morning Kat and I slept in until we got hungry and had to go downstairs to find something to eat.
When we walked into the kitchen, Kat’s mom was pouring herself a cup of coffee.
“Good morning, girls,” she said cheerfully, like Grandma Storm used to. I wanted to run up to her and hug her, but I didn’t. “Tuesday, I’m so glad you could sleep over last night.”
“Thanks for letting me stay, Mrs. Miller,” I said.
“Katherine has wanted you to come for a while. She talks about you all of the time.”
I smiled at Kat, who was filling our bowls with Alpha-Bits.
“You live over on Maplewood, don’t you?” Mrs. Miller asked, stirring sugar into her coffee.
I nodded.
“Do you need a ride home later? You shouldn’t be walking in such cold temperatures. It’s supposed to drop way below zero tonight.”
Kat answered for me. “She’s going to stay until this afternoon, if that’s okay. Her mom and dad are going out of town today, but they’ll probably pick her up later.”
“That’s fine,” Mrs. Miller said. She breezed by us on her way to her bedroom, leaving a powdery smell behind.
Kat and I looked at each other for a second, and then went on eating our cereal. Although we didn’t say it, we both knew what the other one was thinking: we had not thought our plan all the way through, because neither one of us had believed I would have the guts to run away from home.
But I had run away from home, and there was no going back. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t, because my mama didn’t want me there, and Daddy didn’t care. I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about them looking for me, because I was sure they were glad I was gone.
I slurped up the last of the milk in my bowl and followed Kat, who was in a hurry to get back up to her room.
“Okay,” Kat said as soon as she had shut the door behind us. She did her hair-slinging thing, this time because she was nervous. “Before I can ask my mom if you can stay here, I’ve got to tell her everything. But when I tell her you’ve run away from home, she’s going to get mad.”
“Well, don’t tell her then,” I said.
“If you don’t stay here, what are you going to do?”
I sat on her bed and grabbed a pillow, holding it close to my chest. “I’m not sure. Let me think about it for a while.”
Kat sat directly across from me. “Tuesday,” she said, “it would have been better if I had told Mom about everything before you ran away, but you made me promise not to. If you could, like, go somewhere for a while and let me talk to her, and then maybe come back a few days later…”
“I don’t have anywhere to go. I can’t go home, I can’t.” I sounded pathetic, and I wasn’t trying to. “Couldn’t you hide me somewhere?”
She glanced around the cluttered room. “In here?”
“No, outside in the garage or something.”
“Don’t you think it’s too cold to be outside?”
“Not if I stay in your garage. You can give me a blanket, and I’ll bundle up with it. Please, it would only be for a couple of days, until you’ve had time to talk to your mom, and ask her if I can stay here for a while.”
She hesitated for a minute and then gave in. “Okay, I guess.”
We went outside and scouted around for a place for me to sleep. Kat thought the garage was too risky because it was so close to the house. There was an old shed out back; she said it would be better.
At about six o’clock, we decided it was time for me to go out to the shed for the night. I took a shower and changed into some of Kat’s clothes suitable for me to wear to school the next day. She found a heavy blanket that I could cover up with, and stuffed a chocolate moon pie and a bag of chips in a paper lunch sack, in case I got hungry.
We waited until Mrs. Miller was cozy on the sofa watching television, and then Kat announced to her that my parents had come to pick me up. I said my good-byes, like I was leaving to go home, but instead I circled around to the back of the house and went into the shed.
In about half an hour, it started to get dark, and the temperature dropped. I covered up with the blanket to stay warm and sat on a concrete block. It didn’t take long for me to get drowsy, because Kat and I had stayed up late the night before. Under the glow of a streetlight, I scoped out a place to bed down.
An old wooden door with a broken window was leaning up against a wall, and I decided that under it would be the perfect place to sleep. I wrapped the blanket around me like a cocoon, covering as much of my face as possible, and then balled up on the floor, making sure the warmth of my breath was directed down toward my body. Sleep came easily.
A faint, scuffing sound woke me up. I opened my eyes to unfamiliar surroundings. But then I saw the broken glass of the door leaning against the wall above me, and remembered where I was.
I peeked around the side of the door, and saw a light tracing across the floor of the shed. My first thought was that it was Kat, checking on me. Then, I heard a man’s voice. “She’s not in there, I tell you. If she is, she’s frozen stiff by now.”
“The Miller girl told me she was in the shed, so let’s have a good look around to be sure,” another man said.
There was more scuffing, then one of the men called out, “Tuesday Storm, are you in there?” The noises got closer. “Honey, come on out now, it’s time to go home. Your parents are looking for you.”
Home? Oh, no! If I hadn’t been wrapped in the blanket, I would have made a run for it. The only other option I had was to remain still and hope they wouldn’t find me.
“There she is!” one of the men said. “There, under that old door!” I saw the door being lifted away above me. “Tuesday, are you okay?” he asked, shining a flashlight in my face.
Through the glare of the bright light, I saw two police officers standing over me. I wiggled loose from the blanket. Once I was on my feet, one of the officers took my arm with his black-gloved hand and led me out of the shed.
When I got outside, I glanced over at Kat’s house, and noticed her living room light was on. I saw a shadow of someone parting the curtain and peering out of the window, but I couldn’t tell if it was her or her mom. I hoped she wasn’t in trouble.
“You shouldn’t have run away like you did,” the officer holding my arm said. “Your mother and father are worried about you.”
“Don’t you know you could have frozen to death?” the other officer asked.
Sensing he was the more sympathetic of the two, I turned to him and begged. “Please, mister, don’t make me go back.”
As if he hadn’t heard me, he opened the door of the patrol car and motioned for me to get in the backseat. “It’s time to go home now.”
During the ride I didn’t say a word, but my mind was full of questions: How could this have happened? Why did Mama send the cops to bring me home if she hates me? How did they find me? How did they know about Kat?
The police officers were quiet too. They didn’t ask what was so bad at home to make me run away and sleep on the floor of a shed in below-fr
eezing temperature. They didn’t ask me anything at all.
36
Kat felt bad about having to tell the policemen I was hiding out in her shed. “What was I supposed to do?” she asked the next morning when she got on the school bus. “They said that if you were out in the cold somewhere, you could die.”
“That’s okay, Kat; I don’t blame you. Why do you think my parents sent the police to find me when they don’t care about me?”
“I guess they had to do something. I mean, it had been two days,” she said. “Think about it. What if you had frozen to death out in the cold? How would your parents have explained not looking for their own kid?”
“I wonder how the policemen found out I was at your house.”
“They questioned all the neighbors on your street, and all the streets around it, that’s how they found out we were friends. They showed up at our house in the middle of the night, and Mom told them you had been there earlier. They figured I had to know something.”
Mrs. Miller was livid when she found out I’d run away from home. She told Kat she’d better have a good excuse for all that had happened. Kat said she was left with no alternative but to tell her mom everything.
Mrs. Miller didn’t want to believe something so horrible could be true. Then she thought it through. She knew how much Kat believed in me, and she trusted her daughter’s judgment. But according to Kat, her mom was influenced most by something she had seen in me, something that had haunted her the entire day after we met. She described it as sadness in my eyes, a look she had never seen in a child’s eyes before. Mrs. Miller’s instincts had already told her something was not right about me, and Kat’s words only confirmed what she suspected.
As I had thought, Mrs. Miller was indeed a mature version of Kat, in ways other than her outer appearance. She had the same fire and determination. While everyone else looked the other way, she faced the problem head-on, taking a step no one—not even my own family members—had the guts to take. She called Social Services.
Early the following Wednesday, right in the middle of a math test, the teacher came to my desk and whispered that the principal needed to see me in his office right away.
I didn’t know much about our school principal, Mr. Tanner. I had only seen him from a distance, in the halls, and in the auditorium when he occasionally gave a speech. I acquainted him with a powerful and commanding voice over the intercom. Although I had never met him, I was aware of his importance, and of the implications of being sent to his office.
When I got there, Principal Tanner was standing outside the door. He greeted me with a smile, and it put me at ease right off. “Don’t worry, Tuesday, you’re not in trouble,” he said. “There’s someone in my office that needs to talk with you.” Then stepping aside, he put his hand lightly to my back and guided me into his office. The kindness of his gesture made me, for a fleeting second, want to turn to him and throw my arms around him. But before I had the chance to do something so stupid, he shut the door, leaving me alone with a lady I’d never seen before.
It was the first time I’d ever been inside the principal’s office; I had only peeped in curiously as I passed by on the way to my class. Mr. Tanner’s burgundy leather chair and cherry wood desk looked much larger than they had appeared from the hallway.
“My name is Mrs. Blackburn,” the lady said, pulling two wooden chairs from a row of four that were lined up against the wall. She positioned them facing each other, and sat in one. “Have a seat, Tuesday. I’d like for the two of us to talk for a while, if that’s okay with you.”
The air in the room was close, and smelled of a mixture of leather and coffee. My stomach turned. I didn’t know exactly what was happening, but I knew it couldn’t be good. I didn’t feel like sitting down. I was too nervous and afraid, but because she had the authoritative advantage of an adult, I did as she said.
Mrs. Blackburn was small-framed, and her mousy brown hair was in a pixie cut. She had a plain face, free of makeup, with no distinguishing features, the kind of face you forget. A pair of black cat-eye glasses hung from silver beads around her neck, and a small black notebook lay neatly in her lap. In a soft, polite voice, she told me she wanted to ask me a few questions.
I nodded my head in agreement, as if I had a choice.
“Tuesday, why did you leave your home last week without telling your parents where you were going?”
The question made me feel like I was in trouble, like I had done something wrong. “Because I didn’t like it there,” I said.
“But your parents were worried about you. Didn’t you care?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your parents provide you with a place to live and food to eat. Don’t you think they deserve some respect for that?”
I was confused. I couldn’t understand what she was getting at. “I don’t know, I guess so.”
“Tuesday, you told your friend, Katherine Miller, some awfully bad things about your mother. Why did you do that?”
“Because it’s all true.”
“What’s true?”
“My mama treats me bad. Sometimes she does mean things to me.”
“Like what?”
“Like hit me.”
She put on her glasses and wrote something down in her book. I strained to read it, but it was too far away. Then she leaned in, narrowed her eyes, and peered down at me through her glasses, suspiciously. “Tuesday, all children get spankings,” she said. “Did you get mad at your mother because she spanked you? Is that the reason you ran away from home?”
I tried to look into her eyes, but the sparkling rhinestones around the outer edge of her glasses distracted me. So did the dust particles floating in a slant of sun behind her. I clenched both my fists. “No, I didn’t run away just because she spanks me. It was because of all the mean things she does to me. ”
“Why don’t you tell me what your mother has done to you besides give you a spanking? Tell me what you told your friend, Katherine.”
I was afraid if I told her, it wouldn’t help my situation. I was afraid somehow Mama would find out, and I would be the one left to suffer the consequences. Even if I wanted to tell, I didn’t know how. It had been hard to find the words to tell my best, most trusted friend in the whole world. How was I supposed to tell a stranger, a stranger I’d just decided I didn’t like?
I uncurled my fists to allow my sweaty fingers to air. To keep from looking at Mrs. Blackburn, I inspected my hands. They were shaking, and I had squeezed my fists so hard, my fingernails had left indentions in my palms.
Then I thought of something, a possible way out of the predicament, a way I could tell her without actually saying the words. “Didn’t Mrs. Miller already tell you?” I asked.
“Yes, she did, Tuesday, she told me some things, but I need to hear about them from you.” Her cat-eye glasses slipped down the thin bridge of her nose, and she pushed them back up again with one quick shove of her forefinger. “You see, it’s very important that you tell me how your mother treats you, because it’s my job to make sure that children are safe in their homes.”
As soon as she said “safe in their homes,” I started bawling. She stopped talking, but she didn’t try to comfort me. She simply sat back and let me cry for a while.
“How can I help you, Tuesday, if you won’t tell me what’s wrong?” she asked in a much more sympathetic voice.
Help me? Is she really here to help me? I wondered. My crying tapered off, and I managed to say, in jerky fragments, “My… mama…really…does…hate me.”
She pulled a folded pink tissue from her purse and offered it to me. “Sweetheart, your mother doesn’t hate you. Mothers don’t hate their little girls.”
I took the tissue from her and wiped the snot from my nose with it. “She does too! You don’t understand! She beats me with a wire hanger, and makes me eat gross things, and she even tried to drown me once!”
The corner of one of Mrs. Blackburn’s eyes started to twitch. It was
the only indication she had been moved by what I had said. She reached over and pushed back a piece of hair that had fallen into my face. “Well, I’ll just have to go have a visit with your parents, won’t I?”
The thought of her talking to Mama scared me. “When?” I asked.
“Soon,” she said. She got up and opened the door to the office, and with the same gentle nudging Mr. Tanner had used, helped me out the door. “Very soon.”
For the rest of the morning, I couldn’t concentrate on my schoolwork. My mind was like a scrolling marquee with thoughts trailing through continuously: Am I going to be placed in a foster home? Will they take me away right after Mrs. Blackburn talks to my parents? Will they put Mama in jail?
When lunchtime rolled around, I was too upset to eat in the cafeteria. The idea of being a part of a loving family elated me, but the dreadful occurred to me too. What if Mama talks her way out of it, and I am left to suffer her revenge? I knew the minute they left me alone with her, she would surely make me pay, and pay big, for telling.
Then I remembered Daddy would be there too, and I felt better, because even though he hadn’t gone out of his way to help me like he had promised, if the opportunity presented itself, I was sure he’d come through.
Mrs. Blackburn wasn’t fooling around. By the time I got home from school, Social Services had already contacted Mama to set up a meeting. She must have called Daddy, and he took off work early. When I walked in, they were both sitting in the living room discussing “the problem.” They had been drinking. I recognized the fruity smell of Southern Comfort, their favorite alcohol.
“Why did you do this to us, Tuesday?” Daddy screamed. “I told you not to tell anybody. I told you I would handle it!” The veins in his neck popped out. “Do you realize what you have done? Do you know I could lose my job over this?”
