“I don’t know.” I guess unlike me, Jeanine hadn’t been pretending to believe my parents wanted to move just because they wanted something different. She actually believed it.
“I know you don’t know if they’d move back. But what do you think? If we’re really not happy?”
What I thought was that even if my parents wanted to move back, they wouldn’t have the money to. What I thought was that this, Petersville, was it for good. But what I knew was that Jeanine wasn’t really asking me to tell her what I thought, even if she didn’t realize it. Jeanine was asking me to tell her what she needed to hear to fall asleep on our first night in a place that was not and might never feel like home. So I did. “Maybe they’d let us move back. Definitely maybe.”
“Do you think we should ask them?”
“Definitely not.”
“Why? I’d feel better if I knew for sure we could go back if things weren’t…working out here.”
“If Mom and Dad know you’re thinking we might move back, they’re never going to believe you’re really trying here.”
“I guess you’re right,” she said and then took a big breath that caught a couple of times on the way in.
“Look on the bright side, we’re not trapped in an orphanage starving while some evil woman tries to kill our parents and steal the family fortune, right?”
“Right,” she said sadly and let her head fall onto my shoulder.
“You can read more if you want. I don’t mind.”
“Thanks. It helps.” She turned the flashlight back on and leaned the open book against her bent legs. After a few minutes, I found myself reading over her shoulder again. She was right. All the horrible stuff did suck you in. One of the wolves had jumped through a train window and a passenger was fighting it off with a knife.
Jeanine must have known I was reading because when I got to the end of the page, she said, “We can start back at the beginning if you want.”
“Okay,” I said. I’d thought she’d meant we’d go on reading to ourselves, but when she flipped back to the first page, she began reading out loud, which was actually kind of nice because I could close my eyes and just listen and picture what was happening.
I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I remember is waking up to Jeanine drooling on my shoulder. She must have conked out while reading because the flashlight was still on and the book was crushed between us. Her room did smell better than mine, but she was hogging the one pillow so I turned off the flashlight and went back up to the attic.
5
When I woke up that first morning, it was still dark and my bed was wet. I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t wet the bed since I was two. It had to be just one more sign from the universe that I wasn’t where I was supposed to be.
Then something dripped onto my nose and I realized that my wet bed was actually a sign that it was raining and that there was a hole in the ceiling.
Welcome to Petersville!
Since it was still early, I tried to sleep some more but it was too quiet, and I couldn’t find a comfortable position out of the wet spot. So when the sky finally started to pink up, I decided to bike into town. Just because there wasn’t a restaurant in Petersville didn’t mean there was no bakery or bagel place.
Somehow, I made it down the rope ladder in the dark without breaking my neck or waking anybody. I wasn’t interested in company or being told I couldn’t go because it was too dark or too rainy or too whatever else my parents could come up with.
The rain had almost stopped by the time I got outside, but there were puddles everywhere, and I really regretted my decision not to wear socks since they would have been useful to soak up the mud seeping into my sneakers.
I ran across the lawn and around the back of the car.
Ugh. Dad had loaded my bike on the rack first. I was going to have to undo all the straps on each bike and drag everybody else’s off to get to mine. If I’d known what it was going to take, I probably would have stayed in bed, but it was too late now. My shoes were already soaked. I might as well have something to show for it, something like breakfast.
Because I don’t have a death wish, I walked my bike down Terror Mountain, my pet name for our driveway. Even walking though, I had a hard time keeping control of the bike, and by the time I got to the bottom, my shins were sore from banging them so many times with the pedals.
I walked the bike onto the main road, then climbed on and wobbled off. I hadn’t ridden with cars before, and I kept turning around to check if one was behind me. My parents thought it was too dangerous to bike in city traffic, so I’d only ever ridden in Central Park on weekends when cars aren’t allowed. Even though I didn’t see any cars as I set out for town that morning, I was sure one was bound to whizz by any second, knocking me into some ditch too deep to climb out of.
But the cars never came, and the longer I rode without seeing any, the more I relaxed. It was actually easier than biking in Central Park. The road was smoother, and there were no people or strollers or other bikers. It was just me and the road and the woods all around. Flying downhill, I opened my mouth and whooped without knowing why, except that I wanted to, and nobody was around to tell me to stop.
I don’t know how long I’d been riding when I started up a monster hill, but it
