The officer bent over and picked up the ball off the floor. He grinned. "Mickey Mantle would be so proud of you, ma"am. Good throw."
My mom smiled through her tears as he handed it back to her. "I need to clean that off and put it back on the pedestal before my husband gets home."
"It could be considered evidence."
"You"d have to take that up with my husband and he isn"t here." She put the teeth-marked baseball in the pocket of her bathrobe. Go Mom! I thought.
Mom sent us to bed with Gretchen while the police officers took her statement and checked the rest of the house and yard with the K-9 officer, Ace, who was a boy dog and did not even pay attention to Gretchen. Wow, he was sure trained!
The police cars zoomed all over the neighborhood for at least an hour but came up empty and finally said they were ending the search for tonight. They offered to send a female police officer over to stay for a while, but I heard my mom say that he wouldn"t dare come back unless he wanted to be hit in the head with a baseball again.
Mom and Gretchen were the night"s heroes with my dad"s thousand-dollar collectible ball with dog teeth marks on it.
I slept fitfully but I was finally able to sleep with my arm around my dog, and this time, she slept right next to me in my bed. The boys slept in my bed, too, each of them with a hand on our dog. Forget the house rules of no dogs in bed. We were terrified!
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
I woke up at six a.m. I was no longer tired, or maybe I was just tired of trying to sleep. In fact, I was starving.
I decided to make scrambled eggs for everyone. My mom came in.
"I will make some toast," she said and hugged me.
"Thank you," I said and sat down wearily and sighed.
"You couldn"t sleep either?" Mom asked.
"Sleep? Are you kidding? Okay, I slept some. I was really nervous, though," I said. "You were amazing last night, Mom!"
"After last night, I"ve had it up to here with feeling scared in my own home. I really think it"s time to let your father get a gun," she said.
"At first I didn"t agree with him, but I do now," I said. "Last night was awful. That was something how you knocked the stalker out with the baseball."
She grinned. "They used to call me Janet the Jet when I played softball in high school."
"Wow, Mom!"
"We are not completely helpless without your dad here, but I can"t live with this fear much longer," she said. "And I won"t. That was the last straw."
"I know what you mean," I said. "I don"t want to go through another night like that as long as I live."
"Thank goodness for Gretchen," Mom said, giving her a slice of bacon. My jaw dropped at seeing Mom feed the dog from her own plate, which was against the house rules for the dog.
"And thank goodness for Janet the Jet," I said, giving Gretchen a pat when she went under the table to rest her head on my knee.
The eggs were soon ready and Mom b.u.t.tered the toast. I hurried and set the table for four. I put the pan of eggs on a hot pad and my mom put down a plate of toast.
She went and called the boys. They came in grumbling, until they saw the breakfast. They settled down and put some eggs and toast on their plates and started eating. I had decided to go to school today. It was Friday so I would have the weekend to get over anything weird happening. I called Chanda and told her. She was very excited to have me back in school. I missed her, too, and I had a lot to tell her about Mr. Weirdo and our crazy night, Gretchen, and my mom and the baseball. I got dressed for school in a cool outfit. It was already starting to get hot. Southern California didn"t have four seasons. They mostly had beautiful days around seventy. Sometimes it rained. Sometimes, summer was quite a bit hotter, but most days were the same.
When Mom saw me dressed, she was surprised that I was going to school. I told her I had to go back sometime and I probably had a ton of homework to do. I said I had all weekend to do it this way.
"Dad is coming home today and I don"t know if I can pick you up."
"You can"t? I asked.
"You know how hospitals are. Dad"s discharge could be eight in the morning or it could be four in the afternoon. I have no way of knowing the exact time."
"I need to go to school and get all the work I missed. I will just walk home. What are you doing about the boys?" I asked.
"Timmy"s mother is going to bring them home if she doesn"t see me. I will pick them up from her house on the way home from the hospital, after I get Dad," she said. "Are you going to be okay?"
"Don"t worry about me. Chanda and I will walk home together," I said.
"I wish you already had a few Tae Kwon Do lessons. I would feel a lot better with you walking home if you had self-defense training," she said.
"Maybe I can get one of the kids to take me home," I said.
"No, that is worse," she said. "No high school drivers. And you know the rule about not getting in a car with a boy. You"re too young for that. Anything even close to that scenario has to be approved by me or your dad."
"Yes, Mom. I know." I knew she wouldn"t go for that sort of thing. She thought that teenage drivers were horrible and she dreaded me getting my license next year.
"I will walk with Chanda and we will hurry home," I said.
"Do you still have your house key?" she asked.
"Yes, it is in my jewelry box," I said.
"Well, get it out and put it in your backpack," she said.
I went in my room and packed my backpack. I put the key on a really cute keychain that my aunt Priscilla had given to me. I threw the key chain in my backpack and put it on. I had forgotten how heavy it was. I came out of my room and the boys were ready to go. My mom said that Chanda was in the living room. When Chanda saw me, she laughed.
"You look like a turtle standing up," she said.
I smiled. "Maybe I"m really a Ninja Turtle, you never know."
She smiled back. "Would you like me to take some of your books?" she asked.
"No, thank you, I need them in almost all my cla.s.ses," I said.
We all piled in my mom"s car. Chanda and I were going to be a little early, but my mom hated to take two trips to take the boys to school and then me, too. We got to the high school. My mom and the boys said goodbye when she dropped us off.
There were about four kids milling around the school. It was sort of creepy, being at school so early. I still didn"t know if one of the students there was the creeper. Juniors and seniors both drove, some juniors had gone to kindergarten when they were four, so by the time they hit junior year, they were old enough to get their licenses at the beginning of the year. I was an autumn baby, so I couldn"t drive until next year when I was a junior. Chanda and I sat down on a bench inside the school and I caught her up on all the weird stuff that had been happening at my house. Her eyes were huge when I was finished telling her about the doll and the fake blood.
"This is so dangerous. You need a bodyguard," she said. "I can"t believe I slept through all the commotion."
"I know, you sure do sleep like a rock. Sometimes I feel like that, too, that I need a bodyguard now. I wish they would let me take Gretchen to school. I know she would recognize whoever is bothering me and bark at him. She saw the person who threw her the meat," I said. "And last night, she wanted to jump through the gla.s.s on the second story of our house and devour that guy. I had to hold onto her collar. She was totally gonna crash through."
"Wow, she hates him!" Chanda paused. "We should line up all the boys at school and let Gretchen show us which one she wants to attack."
"I don"t think the school would go for that." I laughed.
"Oh well," Chanda said. She grinned. "Your mom is so cool."
"Yes, she is. Janet the Jet. That"ll be a story I can tell my grandkids someday."
We laughed together. The first bell rang for a morning cla.s.ses. I said goodbye to Chanda and trotted off to cla.s.s with my heavy backpack. In every cla.s.s, the teacher would make some remark about welcoming me back to cla.s.s. Some were sarcastic but a couple of them seemed to really mean it. In my history cla.s.s, the teacher, Mrs. Lindsey, asked me to come up to her desk. Everyone in the cla.s.s hooted that I must be in trouble. High school students are so stupid. I went up to her desk and she asked me why I had stayed out so long from school.
"I had surgery on my neck. It wasn"t cancerous but they thought it might be and it got infected and my mom thought I should stay home." And I am being stalked, I thought.
"Okay, sweetie, I was just concerned. You never miss cla.s.s and n.o.body knew where you were," she said.
"My mom called the attendance office."
n.o.body in this cla.s.s would be concerned. I didn"t have a lot of friends in this cla.s.s. I mostly kept to myself. I looked around to see if any weird boys were staring at me, obsessed. Nope, they looked perfectly normal and none of them seemed to have a big lump on their heads from a baseball.
I got through the rest of the day okay, including lunch where my few school friends were curious about my neck and everything. Chanda and I already had made a pact not to say anything more about the stalker because it was serious and my friends would make a huge deal about it and I didn"t want rumors spreading around the school. I also didn"t want a lot of attention. I was already nervous enough about every teacher commenting on my prolonged absence. When Chanda and I got out of our last cla.s.s, we met at the front of the school. My mom wasn"t there. I was a little scared, but the walk was only around fifteen minutes and we walked by a 7-Eleven so we could stop and get a drink.
"Well, we are off like a herd of wet turtles," I said to Chanda.
She smiled because my dad always said that when we go on a trip and she had gone on several trips with us. As we were walking, we talked about our day. I told her nothing spectacular happened and she said just about the same thing. She did get to talk to her crush, Jimmy Falks, a few times and that made her happy. It was so funny about this year. Usually, I had a huge crush on some guy and I couldn"t stop thinking about him. This stalker thing had me so preoccupied that I didn"t even want to think about guys. A car drove up next to us and some guy stopped and said hi. Chanda seemed to know him.
"Yo, Ted," she said. "What"s up?"
"Hi, Chanda. You girls want a ride home?"
I was so tempted. My back already hurting.
"Not today," I said smiling at him. "But, thanks for the offer!"
He blushed., he actually blushed to the roots of his hair, he had light coloring and was kind of cute. Chanda looked disappointed that I declined so fast. She gave me an exasperated look.
"Okay, see ya," he said and drove off slowly.
"I didn"t know you knew him," I said. "Who was that? He looks familiar."
"He lives in back of me and I always hear his mom yelling his name," she said, "whether he is there or not."
"That"s funny," I said. "What a weird mom."
"Well, he"s not home much. I think he has several part-time jobs."
"My job is taking care of my little brothers when my parents aren"t around."
"I can"t believe they pay you for that."
"My parents want me to concentrate on school, not working after school."
"What a cushy gig in your own home. Babysitting the X-Box nerds."
"I know it"s seems easy now, but back in the day, Jordan drove away the first babysitter with a p.o.o.py diaper that was pretty nuclear. Jordan had it coming out of one end and the babysitter had it coming out the other."
"Oh, shut up with that p.o.o.p story. I"ve heard it before."
I laughed. "Sorry."
"Let"s get a Slurpee. I am dying of thirst," she said as we got to the 7-Eleven.
As we went in, she said, "We"re in Slurpee Heaven," and we both laughed.
We went in and we each got a large c.o.ke Slurpee, except mine was the Diet c.o.ke Slurpee. I paid for them, feeling bad about not accepting the ride when Chanda really knew the guy and kind of wanted to go.
I have had "don"t ride with strangers" embedded in my mind since kindergarten. And as I got older, that childhood warning changed into Mom"s worry about what happens to "girls who ride in cars with boys." She was old-fashioned, but I always tried to do what Mom would have wanted me to do. After all, she turned out pretty good.
"Hey, thanks for the Slurpee," Chanda said.
"No problem," I said.
When we walked out of 7-Eleven, I heard a familiar voice say, "Babe!"
I cracked a smile and looked over at a cla.s.sic convertible Mustang with the top down. It was candy-apple red with white leather interior. A *Happy Birthday" balloon was tied to the radio antenna. I walked over to the athletic driver, put my drink down and leaned over the car door to give him a big hug.
"Happy birthday, Brendan," I said to my ex-boyfriend. I picked up my Slurpee cup again and took a sip.
"What, no birthday kiss?" he said, lifting up his lips in a mock smooch.
"Cute," I said. "There will be no kiss, smooth operator."
He laughed good-naturedly as we b.u.mped fists.
"I knew that. How about you, Chanda? Got a birthday kiss for your best friend"s ex?"
She shook her head. "Whitney warned me about you a long time ago. I"m saving myself for marriage," she joked.
"Aww, you good girls are something else," he said. "Want a ride in the Brendan-mobile?"
"The Brendan-mobile?" I said. "Honestly, how does your big ego not explode your tiny head?"
We both knew I was totally kidding because he was a really smart kid. He"d tutored me through honors geometry and I"d gotten an A. I still occasionally called him for help with trigonometry, which football players should be good at, and he was. Chanda and I giggled and looked at each other. She looked hopefully at me.
"Come on, Ex-Babe"s best friend," he said, a wicked grin on his face, now aimed at Chanda. "What"s one kiss?"
"No," I said to her firmly. "Don"t even think about it, Chanda. That car is his lair."