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Ordinarily she would have asked him to please stop using that baby name, but not today. “Yup, it’s<br />
me.”<br />
“School go okay?”<br />
The steady click-click-click had stopped. Please don’t come out here, Abra prayed. Don’t come out and<br />
look at me and ask me why I’m so pale or something.<br />
“Fine. How’s the book?”<br />
“Having a great day,” he said. “Writing about the Charleston and the Black Bottom. Vo-doe-deeoh-doe.”<br />
Whatever that meant. The important thing was the click-click-click started up again. Thank<br />
God.<br />
“Terrific,” she said, rinsing her glass and putting it in the drainer. “I’m going upstairs to start my<br />
homework.”<br />
“That’s my girl. Think Harvard in ’18.”<br />
“Okay, Dad.” And maybe she would. Anything to keep herself from thinking about Bankerton,<br />
Iowa, in ’11.<br />
6<br />
Only she couldn’t stop.<br />
Because.<br />
Because what? Because why? Because . . . well . . .<br />
Because there are things I can do.<br />
She IM’ed with Jessica for awhile, but then Jessica went to the mall in North Conway to have<br />
dinner at Panda Garden with her parents, so Abra opened her social studies book. She meant to go to<br />
chapter four, a majorly boresome twenty pages titled “How Our Government Works,” but instead the<br />
book had fallen open to chapter five: “Your Responsibilities As a Citizen.”<br />
Oh God, if there was a word she didn’t want to see this afternoon, it was responsibilities. She went<br />
into the bathroom for another glass of water because her mouth still tasted blick and found herself<br />
staring at her own freckles in the mirror. There were exactly three, one on her left cheek and two on<br />
her schnozz. Not bad. She had lucked out in the freckles department. Nor did she have a birthmark,<br />
like Bethany Stevens, or a cocked eye like Norman McGinley, or a stutter like Ginny Whitlaw, or a<br />
horrible name like poor picked-on Pence Effersham. Abra was a little strange, of course, but Abra was<br />
fine, people thought it was interesting instead of just weird, like Pence, who was known among the<br />
boys (but girls always somehow found these things out) as Pence the Penis.<br />
And the biggie, I didn’t get cut apart by crazy people who paid no attention when I screamed and begged them<br />
to stop. I didn’t have to see some of the crazy people licking my blood off the palms of their hands before I died.<br />
Abba-Doo is one lucky ducky.<br />
But maybe not such a lucky ducky after all. Lucky duckies didn’t know things they had no business<br />
knowing.<br />
She closed the lid of the toilet, sat on it, and cried quietly with her hands over her face. Being<br />
forced to think of Bradley Trevor again and how he died was bad enough, but it wasn’t just him. There<br />
were all those other kids to think about, so many pictures that they were crammed together on the<br />
last page of the Shopper like the school assembly from hell. All those gap-toothed smiles and all those<br />
eyes that knew even less of the world than Abra did herself, and what did she know? Not even “How<br />
Our Government Works.”<br />
What did the parents of those missing children think? How did they go on with their lives? Was<br />
Cynthia or Merton or Angel the first thing they thought about in the morning and the last thing they