Small as an Elephant - Jennifer Richard Jacobson [33]
He kept thinking: You should go now. It’s time to put on your own clothes and slip out of here, but he couldn’t force himself to move.
He picked up his elephant and studied her again. She had these cute folds of skin on her breastbone — skin she was meant to grow into, he guessed. He thought he should name her. First, he thought of the obvious names: Ellie, Ella, Dumbo (whoever came up with that name didn’t really know elephants), Horton, Lydia (like the one here in Maine, the one who had started everything with him and his mom).
No, he wouldn’t name her Lydia. He tried to think of other elephant names from real life, from circuses or elephant sanctuaries. He’d only seen one elephant, and he didn’t remember her name. Maybe he’d never known it. Twice, his class had taken a field trip to the zoo, but neither the Stone Zoo nor the Franklin Park Zoo had elephants. For years, he’d begged and begged his mother to take him to the circus whenever it came to Boston, but the one time she bought tickets, she forgot and didn’t come home that night. After that, she began talking about how cruel circuses were to elephants and how she wasn’t going to support them, and how could he, a kid who loved elephants, even think of supporting that sort of thing?
He couldn’t explain it. He could never explain to other kids why elephants mattered so much to him; nor could he explain to his mother how much he just wanted to see one again — to reach out and feel its skin, touch its trunk, look into its big, lonely elephant eyes.
Lots of sites on the Internet — like the ones for elephant orphanages — had live cams of elephants or provided videos. He’d watched two elephants who hadn’t seen each other for years go nuts after meeting again. He’d seen a video of an elephant whose best friend was a stray dog. (“Like you and me,” Nina had said, laughing.) And he’d heard an elephant keeper say that if you blow softly into the trunk of an elephant, it will never forget you.
This was the last thought he had before dozing.
He woke to shouting. Not frantic or angry shouting, but the kind of yelling people do when they’re talking across a distance. It took him a moment to remember where he was, but it didn’t take him long to realize that the shouting was coming from the people who worked at the store and that they were calling out to one another. Closing time.
Dang! Should he change? Maybe he should just grab his own clothes and run — take off before they had a chance to wonder why a kid was hanging out in a dressing room by himself. Or maybe . . .
He gathered his damp clothes in his arms and quietly opened the door, just a crack — just far enough that the stall would appear unoccupied. Then he huddled on the bench in the corner that was blocked by the door.
He could hear footsteps nearby and held his breath: a girl humming, the opening of another dressing-room door.
After what seemed like an eternity, he heard her shout, “All clear!”
The lights went out.
Jack was going to spend the night in the store.
Eventually, Jack’s eyes adjusted to the dark; still, he reached into his backpack and pulled out his flashlight. Would it work? He knew that wet batteries corroded, but it hadn’t been wet that long. His thumb pushed on the switch —
Light!
As he moved out of the dressing room and into the main part of the store, he realized how foolish he was being. People outside could probably see the flashlight beam through the large windows. They would think the store was being robbed!
Flashlight off!
The store was even cooler when it was empty. There was the futon to stretch out on, and plenty of warm, dry sleeping bags to borrow for the night hanging on the back wall.
The first thing Jack did was head to the main doors to make