The Silver Glove Read Free

glove and held it between two fingers as if it was poisonous. Then she whirled, opened the window behind her, and threw the glove out.
    â€œHey!” I yelped.
    Mom banged the window shut. “Go to bed, Valli,” she said. “NOW.”
    â€œOkay,” I said. “Okay, okay.”
    Mom went into her bedroom and slammed the door. After a second, I heard her crying quietly behind it.
    I tiptoed to the living room window and eased it open, hoping to spot the silver glove down in the courtyard for later retrieval. It wasn’t there. It was hovering in the air outside the window, fingers spread. Floating.
    I snatched the glove out of the air and rolled it up and stuffed it back into my pocket. Then I went to bed.

 
    2
Brightner
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    T HE NEXT MORNING I stayed in bed until I heard Mom leave, even though that meant I would have to rush like crazy to get to school on time. Mom didn’t come and roust me out, either. One of the things that happened when she came around to calling me Val or Valli instead of Tina is that she began to insist on my being responsible for running more of my own life, which was actually not so bad.
    The thing was, I really did not want to face her that morning. Her trying to throw away Gran’s glove had been a pretty good indication that she was too upset to even talk to. I thought it wouldn’t hurt to avoid more talk for a while.
    In fact Mom had been moody and irritable a lot lately, ever since she’d quit her editor job and turned herself into a literary agent. What with checkbook struggles and friendships changing and the hassles in getting used to the new people at the office where Mom now rented space, we had both been under a lot of extra strain before the problem of Gran’s disappearance ever came up.
    I had developed certain strategies for avoiding the worst of the fallout, one of them being hanging out in bed until Mom was gone instead of having breakfast with her. That’s the one I used today.
    So when I heard the locks click, I leaped out of bed and made record time for school, which turned out not to be necessary at all. We had an assembly first thing, which was welcome only because it was possible to slip in a little late, as I did that morning, in all the bustle and fuss of a whole school settling into the auditorium seats.
    The assembly started out the same boring way they all do. To keep my mind off my troubles, I read more of The Count of Monte Cristo , the big, fat, unabridged edition which is good for weeks even if you are a fast reader.
    My friend Barbara, who sat next to me, jogged my elbow to let me know that Mr. Rudd was getting set to launch. If he noticed you weren’t paying attention, he tended to take it personally. Mr. Rudd proceeded to present the new school psychologist (the old one had married some kind of therapist and moved to California).
    The replacement shrink made an entrance. He walked out of the wings and stood next to Rudd, looking down at us all. And right then I knew I was in for something, though I didn’t have a clue as to what.
    Mr. Rudd was an ordinary-sized person who wore dull clothes and bright-colored ties and a nervous, plastic smile to fool people into thinking he was dumb, which he was not. Nobody liked him much but he was okay, and he usually looked like a regular, boring, old grown-up person.
    Usually. Next to this psychologist, whose name was Dr. Brightner, Mr. Rudd looked like a jerky little wooden puppet, a sort of bad try at Pinocchio.
    Dr. Brightner was big, and sort of smooth and strong-looking. He had a thick paunch and broad shoulders, and he was a little bowlegged but stood very easily, as if he could move fast if he had to. He had a blobby nose, jowls hanging over his collar, and a pouty sort of mouth with a droopy lower lip. At first glance his face reminded me of Snoopy’s.
    Not the eyes, though. His eyes were small, bright, and quick. He kept his hands folded in front of