All day long, but especially during math, Gilly kept stealing glances at Miss Harris. Surely at any minute, she would pick up the book. Surely she could see the end of the card sticking out and would be curious. But Miss Harris left the book exactly where it was. She borrowed a book from a student when she needed to refer to one. It was as though she sensed her own was booby-trapped.
By lunchtime Gilly’s heart, which had started the day jumping with happy anticipation, was kicking angrily at her stomach. By midafternoon she was so mad that nothing had happened that she missed three spelling words, all of which she knew perfectly well. At the three o’clock bell, she slammed her chair upside down on her desk and headed for the door.
“Gilly.”
Her heart skipped as she turned toward Miss Harris.
“Will you wait a minute, please?”
They both waited, staring quietly at each other until the room emptied. Then Miss Harris got up from her desk and closed the door. She took a chair from one of the front desks and put it down a little distance from her own. “Sit down for a minute, won’t you?”
Gilly sat. The math book lay apparently undisturbed, the edge of the card peeping out at either end.
“You may find this hard to believe, Gilly, but you and I are very much alike.”
Gilly snapped to attention despite herself.
“I don’t mean in intelligence, although that is true, too. Both of us are smart, and we know it. But the thing that brings us closer than intelligence is anger. You and I are two of the angriest people I know.” She said all this in a cool voice that cut each word in a thin slice from the next and then waited, as if to give Gilly a chance to challenge her. But Gilly was fascinated, like the guys in the movies watching the approach of a cobra. She wasn’t about to make a false move.
“We do different things with our anger, of course. I was always taught to deny mine, which I did and still do. And that makes me envy you. Your anger is still up here on the surface where you can look it in the face, make friends with it if you want to.”
She might have been talking Swahili for all Gilly could understand.
“But I didn’t ask you to stay after school to tell you how intelligent you are or how much I envy you, but to thank you for your card.”
It had to be sarcasm, but Harris-6 was smiling almost like a human being. When did the cobra strike?
“I took it to the teachers’ room at noon and cursed creatively for twenty minutes. I haven’t felt so good in years.”
She’d gone mad like the computer in 2001. Gilly got up and started backing toward the door. Miss Harris just smiled and made no effort to stop her. As soon as she got to the stairs, Gilly began to run and, cursing creatively, ran all the way home.
DUST AND DESPERATION
All at once, leaving Thompson Park became urgent. Gilly knew in the marrow of her bones that if she stayed much longer, this place would mess her up. Between the craziness in the brown house and the craziness at school, she would become like W.E., soft and no good, and if there was anything her short life had taught her, it was that a person must be tough. Otherwise, you were had.
And Galadriel Hopkins was not ready to be had. But she must hurry. It didn’t matter whether the people who hovered over her had fat laps or computer brains. For if a person could crack under heat or cold, a combination of the two seemed guaranteed to do in even the gutsy Galadriel.
By now she would have preferred to get Mr. Randolph’s money on her own and leave both William Ernest and Agnes Stokes out of it, but in her haste she acted stupidly and used them both.
The opportunity fell into her lap unexpectedly. Trotter had never asked her to baby-sit with William Ernest before, but suddenly two days after the card joke bombed, Trotter announced that she was taking Mr. Randolph to pick up a few things at the dime store and would Gilly watch William Ernest while they were gone.
It was too perfect. She should have realized that, but her anxiety to get the money and get going had fuzzed her common sense. With shaking hands, she leafed through the fat suburban phone book until she found the number for the Stokeses in Thompson Park who supposedly lived on Aspen Avenue. (Another of the world’s lies. The senior Stokeses had long before left the Washington area, abandoning Agnes to a maternal grandmother, seventy-five-years-old, by the name of Gertrude Berkheimer. But Agnes’s delinquent father was still listed in the directory just as though he had never left her.)
Agnes arrived immediately, nearly falling over herself with joy that Gilly had not only invited her over but was actually asking for her help in carrying out a secret and obviously illegal plot. She agreed, without objection, to being the lookout at Mr. Randolph’s house, although Gilly suspected she would have preferred an inside role. Agnes was to do her whistle, which she claimed could be heard a mile away, should the taxi bearing Trotter and Mr. Randolph return while Gilly was still inside.
Prying W.E. away from the TV and explaining his part to him proved far more difficult.
“I don’t understand,” he said for what seemed to be the thirtieth time, blinking stupidly behind his glasses.
Gilly started all over again from the beginning as patiently as she could.
“Mr. Randolp
h wants you and me to do him a favor. He’s got something on the top shelf in his living room that he needs, and he can’t see to get it down. I told him you and me weren’t too busy this afternoon, so he says, ‘Miss Gilly, could you and William Ernest, who is just like a grandson to me, do me a tremendous favor while I am busy at the store?’ So of course I told him we’d be glad to help out. You being just like a grandson to him and all.” She paused.
“What kind of favor?”
“Just get this stuff down off the shelf for him.”