Small as an Elephant - Jennifer Richard Jacobson [30]
He slipped on the extra shirt and his Windbreaker and pulled a cereal bar from his backpack. He ate as slowly as he could, hoping it would feel as if he’d had a full meal by the time he finished. Also, by concentrating on every bite, he didn’t have to think about what came next. He sort of wished the What next? would take care of itself. Like, maybe the couple would come out, throw their suitcases in the back, and say, “OK, we’d better get going if we want to get back to Melrose in time to see the Red Sox game.”
Of course, if they lifted up the tarp to cover their suitcases, there would be major problems. It might be better if he figured a few things out for himself. He crawled out from under the tarp and, keeping his head down, jogged toward the cottage. The rain made him brave. He scooted onto the front porch and crouched beside a wicker chair. The chair was under a window, and although the window was closed, the couple spoke loudly enough to be heard.
They were playing Scrabble. First thing in the morning. Like they didn’t have a care in the world other than how to get a triple-word score. Jack slid down, sitting on the porch with his back against the wall of the house, and listened. There was no planning, no talk of a schedule, no clues about when they might get into their truck and drive out of here. It definitely didn’t look as if they were getting ready to go anywhere.
Way too impatient to sit around on a porch all day, he decided to pack up his things and start walking. Heck, a little bit of rain never hurt anyone.
There seemed to be only one main road, and he could see from time to time that the ocean was on his left. Both of these facts reassured him: he couldn’t take a wrong turn, and he had to be heading south. After walking for forty-five minutes in the pelting rain, making sure to turn left at a fork, Jack ducked under the extended roofline of a school. A plaque told him that it was the Lamoine Consolidated School, which probably meant that he was in the town of Lamoine — wherever that was! He was drenched.
“Are you going in, sir?” asked a woman who had rushed up and was now closing her umbrella. She said it in that voice teachers use when you’re temporarily out to lunch.
“No — no, I don’t go to school here. I was just getting out of the rain.”
“Where do you go to school, if you don’t go here?”
“I go to school in —” He started to say Massachusetts but stopped himself. What if she had seen another news story about the missing boy? What if they had said the boy was from Massachusetts? (He’d already told the librarian as much, he remembered.) “I mean, I used to go to school, but now I’m homeschooled.”
“Then what are you doing here, soaked like a washrag?”
His left hand folded around the little elephant in his pocket. It gave him comfort. It gave him courage. “I returned some supplies we borrowed,” he said, and then, for effect, pointed to his backpack. Wow, he should be a spy or something when he grew up. He was becoming a professional liar.
“Well, you’d better get on home, then. This rain isn’t going to stop anytime soon.” She entered the school.
Jack nodded — though the woman hadn’t even waited for a response — and headed back down the road.
He was pleased to have stumbled upon the perfect excuse for being out of school on a Wednesday. But it didn’t exactly come out of nowhere. When he was nine, his mother was asked to attend a meeting at school — a meeting because the school guidance counselor had concerns. After the meeting, she told Jack she was thinking of yanking him out. “You won’t be homeschooled, Jack. You’ll be unschooled. You’ll learn the ways of the world through experience, without all these silly adults, with their silly rules and their silly concerns, breathing down our necks.”
That was the same month she had just shown up at school three different times and pulled him out for the day. The last time was during morning