To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie. Ellen Conford

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СКАЧАТЬ Grace patted her hair and tugged at her turquoise pedal pushers. She ran to the twins’ room and called out the window. “I’ll be right there!”

      She came back into my room. “I’ll see you later, dear. I hope you feel better. You just rest and take care of yourself.”

      The doorbell rang again.

      “I must run.” She fluttered her fingers at me and hurried out of my room.

      “Good-bye, Aunt Grace,” I said softly.

      I waited until I heard Betty Kramer’s car pulling away, and then I jumped out of bed. The first thing I did was to run downstairs and make myself a bologna sandwich, because I was starving from not having eaten anything but toast since yesterday. I could only finish half of it. I guess I was too nervous to eat. I filled up much faster than I thought I would.

      I took a shower and sprinkled myself all over with Cashmere Bouquet. I wished I had time to shampoo my hair, but it would have taken too long to dry. Even though I don’t have oily-type hair, I like to wash it twice a week to keep it looking its best, and I hadn’t shampooed since Friday. But I had to settle for just brushing Minipoo through it. I figured it would be all right since I wasn’t wearing it loose, but in a French twist, which makes me look at least eighteen.

      I pulled the suitcase down from the top of the closet. I nearly dropped it on the floor, it was so heavy. I put on all the crinolines and my pink dress and clipped my white pop beads around my neck. I pulled out the bottom drawer of the desk and yanked the envelope from the back. I put it inside the zipper pocket of my straw pocketbook.

      I took a long, careful time with my makeup. I put on pressed powder and some rouge and black mascara and curled my eyelashes so they’d look even longer and more dramatic. I dabbed some “Strike Me Pink” lipstick onto my brush (all the stars tell you a lipstick brush is an absolute must) and outlined my lips. I filled them in with the lipstick, then blotted them on a tissue.

      I stood back and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked like I could be in the movies, I thought. And with my French twist and my gloves and my white slingback heels, I definitely looked eighteen. Maybe even twenty.

      I lugged the suitcase and hatbox downstairs and put them next to the front door. In the kitchen Aunt Grace kept a pad that has “Shopping List” printed on it, with a little pencil attached.

      I sat down at the table with the pad and wrote my good-bye note.

       Dear Aunt Grace,

       I’m going to my mother. I found out she is in a place in Rochester and I have to see her. I’m sorry to fool you like I did about being sick but it was the only way. Thank you for everything and don’t worry about me. Say good-bye to the twins and Uncle Ted for me.

      Sincerely yours, Sylvie Krail

      I left the note on the table and went to call a taxi.

      This was going to be the only tricky part of my plan. If Mrs. Bates next door saw me getting into the taxi with my suitcase, she’d know something was up. Betty Kramer was our neighbor on the other side, and she was with Aunt Grace at Millie Reemer’s, and the neighbors across the street probably didn’t know where Aunt Grace could be reached because she wasn’t all that friendly with them.

      But Mrs. Bates always did her laundry on Mondays, hanging it out on the turn-around clothes pole in the backyard, so I was hoping that’s where she’d be when the taxi came.

      The taxi company said the cab would be here in fifteen minutes. I told them I had to catch a train, and they said not to worry, the next train to the city wasn’t for half an hour, so I sat down in the chair next to the front door to wait.

      I thought that note was pretty smart. Like I told my mother in the letter, I had a very good plan of how to get away without being found and that note was part of my plan. Everybody would be looking for me all the way to Rochester, and I wasn’t going in that direction at all. By the time they realized I wasn’t in Rochester, I’d probably be in California. And they’d never think to look for me in California.

      I couldn’t sit still. Here I had planned this trip for months, years almost, and it was finally only ten minutes away from beginning, and I thought I’d die waiting for that last ten minutes to go by.

      It wasn’t so hot today, which I was glad about, because when it’s very hot I sweat and my bangs get all limp and the angel wings on the side droop until they’re flat. (Some people call them devil wings instead of angel wings, which I think is funny, that they should be called opposite things.) Anyway, they’re like Brenda Starr in the comics wears her hair. They’re not really bangs, they sort of swoop up and back on each side of my forehead. Some people have to set them to make them go that way, but my hair just waves there naturally.

      I went to the kitchen to get some Kool-Aid and I thought, This is the last time I will ever see this kitchen. Part of me felt a little sad about leaving Aunt Grace and the twins, but I was too excited about my new life and my career to think about much else.

      I was almost tempted to leave a separate note for Uncle Ted, telling him the real reason why I was leaving, which he probably could guess anyway, but Aunt Grace might find it.

      There was another reason I had to leave, but I could never tell that to anybody. Especially not to Uncle Ted.

      A car honked twice outside. The taxi had come. I ran to the front door and threw it open. I hoped no one else would come to their front door at the sound of the horn.

      I grabbed my pocketbook and my hatbox and pulled my suitcase out the door. I closed the door behind me and hurried down the walk to the cab.

      I pushed the suitcase in the back before the driver could even offer to help me with it, and climbed in.

      “The train station,” I said.

      “Okay.” He shifted and the taxi squealed away from the curb. I looked back at the house, a little, salmon-colored box that was exactly the same as all the other houses on the block, except for the paint. I looked at the pink plastic flamingo on the front lawn. Nobody else on the block had a flamingo like that.

      No one seemed to be watching out their windows, so I turned around and stared straight ahead as we turned the comer of Robin Lane. I fixed my eyes on the taxi driver’s collar, and never once turned to look back.

       Chapter 4

       Dear Mom,

       Well, here I am on my way to California! My plan worked out just as well as I expected. I think I was really clever about “covering my tracks.” I ’m not bragging or anything, but I’ve seen enough movies to know how to “lay a false trail ” and that’s what I did. For instance, I left a note saying I was going to visit you in Rochester, which I wish I was, but of course I don’t know where you are, but I made them think I did. Then I had the taxi take me to the train station, but I didn’t take the train to the city, like I told the driver I was going to. Instead I took a bus to the city and the subway to the Greyhound bus terminal and bought a ticket to

      “My, I don’t know how you can write on a moving bus like that.”

      I covered up my letter with my hand and turned to the woman next to me. She was pretty old, СКАЧАТЬ