Taken by Edward Bloor Read Free Book Online Page B

father, to scare him. They were showing him the pathetic, sniveling victim, in her little-girl footed pajamas, waiting desperately for the currency to be delivered. It was all standard operating procedure for kidnappers.
    I knew their game, all right.
    I just hoped my father did.

Rituals of Social Inversion
    H aitian? Spanish? Was one of the kidnappers working inside The Highlands, pretending to be a lawn guy? Or a garbage man? I doubted it. All workers at The Highlands, according to the brochure, were “rigorously screened, using FBI databases.”
    So where would a kidnapper have the chance to see me outside of The Highlands? How had I been targeted? Then I remembered. And I felt foolish, because it was so obvious! The kidnapper had seen me in Mangrove on Kid-to-Kid Day, an event co-sponsored by The Highlands and the town of Mangrove.
    Kid-to-Kid Day actually began with Patience Patterson and me. Patience overheard her maid, Daphne, taking an emergency phone call. (RDS employees are forbidden to talk about their outside lives to clients.) Daphne’s family, who lived in Mangrove, had lost their house and all their belongings in a grease fire. Patience and I decided to help them, rules be damned.
    We snooped around in Mr. Patterson’s vidfiles and learned where Daphne really lived. Then we accessed the Martin County Fire and Rescue database. We learned that Daphne’s younger siblings—twin girls in fifth grade, a boy in seventh grade, and a boy in ninth grade—had lost every stitch of clothing except what was on their backs when they ran from the house.
    Patience and I, without Daphne’s knowledge, pulled out lots of our own clothes and put them in two large bags. Then we visited families in The Highlands who had seventh-and ninth-grade boys. When we were through, we had four big bags of shirts, pants, sneakers, dresses, et cetera.
    Our next step was to figure out how to deliver them. Daphne would not be allowed to accept anything from us. She wasn’t even allowed to tell us that she had a family, or that she had a real name. So we asked Mr. and Mrs. Patterson what to do. At first they were mad at Daphne for taking a personal call in a place where Patience might overhear her. But then Mr. Patterson saw a business opportunity. He offered to take the four bags to Mangrove and to deliver them personally to the mayor if my stepmother, Mickie Meyers, would agree to vid the event for her show.
    Mickie jumped at the chance. She arranged for Daphne’s four siblings, their parents, and the mayor of Mangrove to be standing outside the burned-out shell of the house when Mr. Patterson arrived in his bulletproof car, followed by two Highlands security guards in their van.
    Mr. Patterson presented the bags to the kids as Kurt’s camera ran. Then, to Mr. Patterson’s surprise, the kids gave him something in return. It was a
tornada—
a wooden doll with the letter
P
carved in the front and a face carved on the back. One of the twin girls explained to him that the doll symbolized her wish to see him again someday and to return the favor.
    Mickie’s vidcast of the event was such a success that both The Highlands and the town of Mangrove decided to do it again the following year. They didn’t have another burned-out family, so Mickie came up with the idea of using kids from my class and kids from the town in an event she titled “Kid-to-Kid Day.” That outing went smoothly, too, except for an incident where a town kid, some mean boy, tripped Hopewell and gave him a bloody nose. Albert cleaned Hopewell up quickly, though; the vidcast went on as planned; and it scored more high ratings.
    As a result, the third annual Kid-to-Kid Day was scheduled for Saturday, December 22. It turned out to be a very full day—full of people, and events, and details. It was exactly the kind of day that I needed to focus on. I made up my mind to concentrate next on Saturday, December 22.
    I remembered that the students from my class gathered in the