Read Online Not the End of the World by Rebecca Stowe - Free Book Online Page A

to. I wondered what would happen if I stayed there all night. I doubted that the Pervert would come, because the whole point of his being there was to trap little girls and since there weren’t any little girls in the woods at night, there was no reason for him to be around.
    I could hear mothers calling their kids—Mrs. Keller calling for Rick’s little sister Casey and Mrs. Peterson Jr. calling for Kevin. I baby-sat for both of them, not overnighters, just if their parents were going out for dinner or something. Mother couldn’t get over it: “They must like you!” she’d say in wonder as she handed me a message from Mrs. Peterson Jr. or Dr. Keller But getting kids to like me was easy, the trick was not trying to control them, not trying to strap them into the rules their parents handed over to me, along with the keys to the house. We’d become friends, conspirators, staying up way past their bedtime and eating popcorn and playing the one last game or reading the one more story their parents would never allow So when I’d look at the clock, the kids would be as amazed as I was and skip docilely off to their beds while I stayed up to watch the horror movie on TV or write in my diary, and we were all perfectly happy. Sometimes I worried about breaking the parents’ rules, thinking they’d find out and brand me a Bad Influence andban me from baby-sitting circles, but I suspected they already knew and that they didn’t really care—it was worth it to them to get out of the house without their kids kicking and screaming and clutching their evening gowns.
    “Casey! Casey!” Mrs. Keller called and I felt kind of sad. My mother never called for me and I suspected she didn’t care if I came home or not, even though when I did come in the door she’d make a big deal out of it and say, “Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick!” Maybe she was embarrassed to go running around the neighborhood calling for me, because she thought it made her look like she hadn’t trained me well enough to be home on time.
    “C’mon, Goob,” I said and we sneaked out of the bushes to see if the coast was clear. I disliked having to sneak around the Bensons’. First you had to hope their monster St. Bernard wasn’t out—that dog would attack anything that moved and he’d already bitten half the boys in the neighborhood. Getting past Hans was an endurance test the boys imposed upon one another and having a bite scar was a badge of honor in Edison Woods. Then you had to hope Clara wasn’t out. Clara was the Bensons’ daughter and there was something wrong with her. She was as old as my mother and the Bensons kept her shut up most of the time, or let her walk to the beach and back with her “companion,” who was as crazy-looking as Clara, only she wore a uniform.
    Clara had red hair and big green eyes that never looked at anything. They were always darting around in their sockets, like hummingbirds, hovering but never lighting. She was tall and skinny and Mother said she’d been quite beautiful as a girl and that she’d been normal all through high school. “What happened to her?” I asked, but Mother didn’t know or wouldn’t tell; she just said Clara came back from her first semester at college and never went out of the house aloneagain. “Didn’t you ask?” I asked. “Didn’t you want to find out? She was your friend , wasn’t she?” Mother said she’d tried to see Clara, but the Bensons wouldn’t let her in. “They were probably ashamed,” she said, as if that explained everything. “I assume they felt it was their fault.”
    That was the first time I realized that if I went crazy, not only would I suffer from the craziness itself, but also from the guilt of having made my parents feel bad. They’d have to build a wall round the house and get a bunch of Dobermans to keep out the neighborhood kids who would come to gape and taunt. I vowed to be more diligent about hiding my crazy streak—I hated the