Lost in Cyberspace Read Free Page A

forward,” Mom said. She’d rounded up Heather and me to meet Fenella at the airport. She even hinted we might wear our school clothes.
    â€œNo way,” Heather said. “We’re only inmates during the day.” She wanted to stay home because she said Camilla Van Allen might call. Heather says Camilla Van Allen is her best friend. But we hadn’t seen anything of her.
    â€œShe’ll leave a message for you on the machine,” Mom told Heather. “If she calls.”
    Heather looked sulky in her parachute silk puffy jacket, jeans, and her biggest shoes. I wore the Bulls warm-up jacket Dad sent me from Chicago after one of the Sunday nights when he didn’t call. We cabbed out to JFK Airport in the middle of the evening rush. Then Fenella’s flight was two hours late because snow was blowing. Only one runway was open.
    That gave Mom time to run over the Au Pair Exchange printout. Fenella was seventeen, a recent “school leaver,” whose interests included
    reading
field hockey
gardening
needlework
flower-arranging
and gourmet cooking
    Her career aspirations were in the areas of
    teaching
editing children’s books
or interior design
    Halfway through the printout Heather wandered off to browse the airport arcade shops.
    There was a fuzzy Xerox picture of Fenella in a school uniform and straw hat. It didn’t look too recent and could have been anybody.
    The contract said Fenella could be expected to “assist with light household work, food preparation, and child care, no more than twenty hours a week, with opportunities for extended travel experience in the United States.” She had a right to her own room.
    â€œDo we pay her, or does she pay us?”
    â€œWe pay her,” Mom said.
    Heather came back and said, “Let’s eat.” We went to the Skyteria until they announced that the London plane was on the ground.
    Passengers came pouring out through the Customs doors, pushing their luggage on carts. Mom kept the picture handy and was watching everybody. “Let’s be very careful about our speech patterns,” she said. “English people speak so beautifully.”
    I lost count after a hundred and eighty people. Aaron would have had his calculator with him. “Maybe she’s not coming,” Heather said, perking up. The waiting crowd was pretty much just us by now. Most of the people coming out were flight attendants. “When we see the pilot,” Heather said, “let’s leave.”
    Then the door banged open, and this girl appeared, dragging a giant laundry bag with tags. She was fairly giant herself, dressed in total, recycled black. Several layers over a black body stocking and big elf boots below.
    But what you really noticed was her face. It was a large pale moon with black lips, three nose rings, and a small spider tattooed on her right cheekbone. The hat on top was hard to miss too. It had a big floppy brim pinned back by a bunch of black plastic flowers.
    Heather blinked. “Beyond grunge,” she said.
    Mom was still looking for somebody to match the picture. But the girl came toward us, getting bigger and bigger. We weren’t hard to spot. We were the only people left.
    â€œFenella here,” she said, gazing over our heads with big sleepy brown eyes.
    â€œOh,” Mom said. “Oh. I’m ... Mrs. Lewis.”
    â€œI’m Josh,” I said, staggering back because Fenella had dropped her laundry bag on me.
    â€œI’m like amazed,” Heather said, staring.
    Â 
    The snow was blowing out to sea, and the air was crisp and clear. You get a great look at Manhattan on a night like that: all the twinkling towers and the chains of lights on the bridges. Mom wanted to show Fenella the view. But she slept through it. She was zonked right to our door. We had to wake her up to get out of the cab.
    â€œJet lag,” Mom said in a hushed voice. “It’s just temporary. But I wonder if