Read Online Outside In by Karen Romano Young - Free Book Online

illustration in
The Saturdays.
Mona, a character in the book, was thirteen, like Wendy Boland. I wondered who was taller: me or Wendy? I was five feet two, and it was four months before I would be thirteen. Suddenly I didn’t want to be.
    I walked slowly outside. The back of the house was cherry red from two-thirds up to the roof and one-third down to the ground. Only the middle was still gray. Pigeon gray? Clay gray?
    “Aunt Bonnie? Where’s Claybury?”
    “Claybury, Connecticut?” Aunt Bonnie said from the ladder. “It’s where Uncle Joe’s school is. It’s, oh, four or five towns, hmm, east of here. Past New Haven. Why, what’s happening there?”
    I shrugged. “Just wondering. It was on the radio.” Hadn’t she heard? No. They’d been clanking the ladder around. And the radio was inside anyway. For me.
    “What about it?” asked Aunt Bonnie.
    I shrugged again and went back inside, deposited myself back into Dad’s chair, picked my book up from the arm where it was lying on its face.
    In the kitchen the Beatles were singing “Eleanor Rigby,” a creepy song that Dad liked, about some woman who had died. I closed my eyes. Mom came in, called, “Are you all right?” to me, and set about making lunch. Soon Aimée would be home from her camp.
    “A Claybury eighth grader is the target of a county-wide search. Last seen at five o’clock last night, Wendy Boland”—I went into the kitchen, turned the radio down, turned it up again—“brown hair and blue eyes. Witnesses or anyone with information should call”—down again, up again—“the driver of a green station wagon—” I slammed the off button and ran up to my room.
    The sun was dull on the Ascontis’ maple trees.
    When I heard the newspaper truck, I got up and went down to fold. “How do you feel?” said Mom.
    “I’ll live,” I said.
    “Cramps go with the territory,” said Aunt Bonnie.
    Well, what about this Wendy kid? I couldn’t say it.
    I went and did my route.
    Wendy Boland was on the front page of the
Bell.
She was a thin girl with braids like mine, except that they were brown. She smiled a little crookedly out of a black-and-white newspaper copy of her last year’s school picture. CLAYBURY GIRL MISSING .
    Her father, the
Bell
said, was a foreman (like Dad) at the submarine yard. The police did not suspect any connection with his employment. I didn’t understand, then wondered if submarines were needed as much as helicopters in Vietnam.
    The article said that the girl had left the area, either on foot or “by some other means.” Like what? Like running away? And what did other means have to do with a green station wagon?
    At six I was sitting at the kitchen table. Mom and Aunt Bonnie and I were having iced tea at the counter. Aimée and Pammy were squishing Play-Doh on the back steps. I wanted to ask Mom to turn off the radio but I couldn’t. I watched the clock.
    Notes. Typewriter keys. Loud and clear in the middle of the kitchen on a warm, sunny summer evening. “Police are looking for clues in the disappearance of thirteen-year-old Wendy Boland of Claybury—” Mom reached over and switched off the radio, as casually as if she’d gotten tired of the static. I jumped.
    “What’s a witness?” I spooned up eggs.
    “Somebody who sees a crime,” Mom said. “Why?”
    Hadn’t she heard? Didn’t she know?
    Wendy Boland, I wanted to say. I couldn’t make my mouth form the name. I shrugged. “Just wondering,” I said.

CHAPTER 8

    W E HADN’T BEEN PLAYING HIDE-AND-SEEK LATELY. Everyone waited for Dave and me to get up a game, but Dave didn’t come to get me. For the first time ever, I felt embarrassed to go get him. He might say no.
    Once when I was sitting on the Rankins’ steps, making a spool wagon with Aimée and Pammy, Sandy had come over to the circle to try to get up a game. He stopped and looked at my work and nodded his head as though he knew what I was making. “Hide-and-seek?” he simply said. I left my