Revenge of a Not-So-Pretty Girl Read Free Page A

since there’s really nowhere on them to stash any money. The skirts take a little longer because she has like a million of them—tweed ones, wool, cotton—but most don’t have pockets. Some have matching suit jackets, but those pockets are mostly empty. Every now and then I come across something and think it could be a wad of cash, but when I pull it out, it’s only crumpled-up tissues or an old receipt.
    We have to get a chair from the kitchen to reach the ten or so hatboxes stacked on the shelf at the top of the closet. But we don’t find anything there either—except for big, flamboyant hats.
    I follow Caroline into another room, which has a desk and chair and daybed. There’s no money there either. And Caroline begins breathing all hard and looking all crazy. I’m thinking, Maybe she needs a slice of cake or something. Then I look down at my watch to see that it’s nearly five-thirty. An hour and a half till Mama gets home, and I haven’t even started dinner or washed the dishes I left in the sink this morning.
    “Caroline, it’s getting kinda late,” I say. “I need to get—” But it’s as if she doesn’t even hear me.
    “Gillian!” she yells. “You find anything in there?”
    “Um, no,” Gillian yells back, only her voice soundsmuffled. Caroline glances at me and walks out of the room. I follow behind her.
    The old lady is where we left her, but her coat is now completely unbuttoned, and for the first time, I notice her patchwork quilt sweater and the giant flower brooch with a silver stem and different-colored petals clasped up near the collar. Then my eyes drift down to her hands, which are resting on her lap, and for some reason, this makes me a little sad. See, her fingers are Keebler-elf small and bowed. And there are so many brown spots, her hands don’t even seem like they belong to a white person. My eyes make their way back up to her face, and she suddenly lifts her head and stares right at me. And there’s a strange look in her pale green eyes. It kind of gives me the creeps, so I turn my back to her and face Gillian, who’s standing near the counter, removing ginger snaps from a cookie jar.
    “What the hell are you doing?” Caroline yells.
    “I don’t know. I couldn’t find nothing. And all this looking around made me a little hungry. I didn’t have lunch today at school, you know.”
    Caroline just glares at her for a while, then, as if she suddenly remembers the lady is still there, she turns and looks at her. And then she grabs the ginger snaps right out of Gillian’s hand. She doesn’t say a thing, just sits down across from the lady, laughs her weird forest-creature laugh, then stuffs the three cookies into her mouth, never taking her eyes off the old woman. She stares and she chews. She chews and she stares. There’s just this weird silence that continues on forever. I hold my left arm up a little and pointto the time with my right hand, but Caroline doesn’t even glance my way. And so we stay like that—Gillian at the counter with the opened cookie jar next to her, Caroline sitting across from the lady at the table, and me standing right at the doorway thinking that Mama will be home in an hour and a half.
    Then Caroline jumps up. I knew she couldn’t sit quietly forever. She runs over to the counter, grabs another cookie, eats it, and throws the cookie jar against the white tiled floor. The crash startles the lady, and I hear this little gasp. Hell, it startles me. What startles me even more is Caroline wasting perfectly good food. There’s another glass container on the counter—one that’s see-through, and it has either sugar or salt in it. Caroline picks that one up too and throws
that
to the floor. Then she picks up one with oats in it and does the same. One after another, they go crashing to the floor. With each bang, the lady flinches, but she still doesn’t move. Near the table, there’s a china cabinet. Caroline opens it and takes out these pretty