Orphan Train(2)

Molly couldn’t care less about Jack’s prowess on the soccer field, but smart she respects. (The cow eyes are a bonus.) Her own curiosity is the one thing that has kept her from going off the rails. Being Goth wipes away any expectation of conventionality, so Molly finds she’s free to be weird in lots of ways at once. She reads all the time—in the halls, in the cafeteria—mostly novels with angsty protagonists: The Virgin Suicides, Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar. She copies vocabulary words down in a notebook because she likes the way they sound: Harridan. Pusillanimous. Talisman. Dowager. Enervating. Sycophantic . . .

As a newcomer Molly had liked the distance her persona created, the wariness and mistrust she saw in the eyes of her peers. But though she’s loath to admit it, lately that persona has begun to feel restrictive. It takes ages to get the look right every morning, and rituals once freighted with meaning—dyeing her hair jet-black accented with purple or white streaks, rimming her eyes with kohl, applying foundation several shades lighter than her skin tone, adjusting and fastening various pieces of uncomfortable clothing—now make her impatient. She feels like a circus clown who wakes up one morning and no longer wants to glue on the red rubber nose. Most people don’t have to exert so much effort to stay in character. Why should she? She fantasizes that the next place she goes—because there’s always a next place, another foster home, a new school—she’ll start over with a new, easier-to-maintain look. Grunge? Sex kitten?

The probability that this will be sooner rather than later grows more likely with every passing minute. Dina has wanted to get rid of Molly for a while, and now she’s got a valid excuse. Ralph staked his credibility on Molly’s behavior; he worked hard to persuade Dina that a sweet kid was hiding under that fierce hair and makeup. Well, Ralph’s credibility is out the window now.

Molly gets down on her hands and knees and lifts the eyelet bed skirt. She pulls out two brightly colored duffel bags, the ones Ralph bought for her on clearance at the L.L.Bean outlet in Ellsworth (the red one monogrammed “Braden” and the orange Hawaiian-flowered one “Ashley”—rejected for color, style, or just the dorkiness of those names in white thread, Molly doesn’t know). As she’s opening the top drawer of her dresser, a percussive thumping under her comforter turns into a tinny version of Daddy Yankee’s “Impacto.” “So you’ll know it’s me and answer the damn phone,” Jack said when he bought her the ringtone.

“Hola, mi amigo,” she says when she finally finds it.

“Hey, what’s up, chica?”

“Oh, you know. Dina’s not so happy right now.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It’s pretty bad.”

“How bad?”

“Well, I think I’m out of here.” She feels her breath catch in her throat. It surprises her, given how many times she’s been through a version of this.

“Nah,” he says. “I don’t think so.”

“Yeah,” she says, pulling out a wad of socks and underwear and dumping them in the Braden bag. “I can hear them out there talking about it.”

“But you need to do those community service hours.”

“It’s not going to happen.” She picks up her charm necklace, tangled in a heap on the top of the dresser, and rubs the gold chain between her fingers, trying to loosen the knot. “Dina says nobody will take me. I’m untrustworthy.” The tangle loosens under her thumb and she pulls the strands apart. “It’s okay. I hear juvie isn’t so bad. It’s only a few months anyway.”

“But—you didn’t steal that book.”

Cradling the flat phone to her ear, she puts on the necklace, fumbling with the clasp, and looks in the mirror above her dresser. Black makeup is smeared under her eyes like a football player.

“Right, Molly?”

The thing is—she did steal it. Or tried. It’s her favorite novel, Jane Eyre, and she wanted to own it, to have it in her possession. Sherman’s Bookstore in Bar Harbor didn’t have it in stock, and she was too shy to ask the clerk to order it. Dina wouldn’t give her a credit card number to buy it online. She had never wanted anything so badly. (Well . . . not for a while.) So there she was, in the library on her knees in the narrow fiction stacks, with three copies of the novel, two paperbacks and one hardcover, on the shelf in front of her. She’d already taken the hardcover out of the library twice, gone up to the front desk and signed it out with her library card. She pulled all three books off the shelf, weighed them in her hand. She put the hardcover back, slid it in beside The Da Vinci Code. The newer paperback, too, she returned to the shelf.

The copy she slipped under the waistband of her jeans was old and dog-eared, the pages yellowed, with passages underlined in pencil. The cheap binding, with its dry glue, was beginning to detach from the pages. If they’d put it in the annual library sale, it would have gone for ten cents at most. Nobody, Molly figured, would miss it. Two other, newer copies were available. But the library had recently installed magnetic antitheft strips, and several months earlier four volunteers, ladies of a certain age who devoted themselves passionately to all things Spruce Harbor Library, had spent several weeks installing them on the inside covers of all eleven thousand books. So when Molly left the building that day through what she hadn’t even realized was a theft-detection gate, a loud, insistent beeping brought the head librarian, Susan LeBlanc, swooping over like a homing pigeon.