Wanted! by Caroline B. Cooney Read Free Book Online Page A

mason or a housepainter, amused by some weird girl’s antics? A shoplifter, willing to bail out a fellow criminal?
    The truck disappeared around a curve, and Alice was alone.
    Ordinary houses looked like fortresses.
    Garage doors looked like traps and small dogs like Dobermans.
    Alice tried to walk as if she belonged here and knew where she was going. Anxiety turned to crippling fear, and now her ankles hurt, and her knees, and hip joints, and spine, and she wanted to lie down on something soft, and curl up, and pull a blanket over her face, and then have Dad kiss her awake from her nap and her nightmare.
    What am I doing? she thought. What do I do next? I need help.
    The only person who could explain this horror was Mom.
    What if explaining was not enough? What if, after Mom finished explaining to the police, they still thought Alice had killed her very own father?
    Every house she walked by must have a telephone, or two or three or four. She actually thought of breaking into a house just to use their phone; explaining to whoever was sitting there, This is an emergency.
    A yellow sign warned oncoming cars to be careful of children crossing the street. Alice crossed in the crosswalk, to establish how law-abiding she was. How filthy the back of her dress must be. The dress was cream with scattered tiny red and black flowers, a vaguely Persian pattern. She felt extremely visible.
    Around the corner was an elementary school, named for a person, probably a local heroine. Margaret P. Trask School, it said.
    Alice’s school had a day off. A professional day, during which teachers were supposed to be learning a ton of useful stuff and you got to stay home, learning how to use nail polish. But this school must be in another district, because it was open. Playing fields stretched on three sides of the school, and kids were struggling with various forms of baseball and T-ball. School must be almost over; empty yellow buses had begun to line up.
    Alice was not wearing a watch. Was it two in the afternoon? Three? When had Dad phoned? Eleven? It seemed to Alice that she had a commitment this afternoon. What was it?
    This did not seem the time to worry about whether she had a dentist appointment or had promised to call Kelsey.
    If Alice had ever needed a best friend, it was now. But Mom would have phoned Kelsey to see if Alice had gone there. The police would be asking Kelsey to guess where Alice was.
    What guess would Kelsey make? Would Kelsey tell the police anything? Would she believe for a single instant that Alice—who had spent the night with Kelsey a million times, and shared pizza, and rented movies, and popped popcorn, and most of all discussed boys, boys, and still more boys—was a killer? Whose side would Kelsey be on?
    My own mother is not on my side, thought Alice.
    A class bolted out a side door of Margaret P. Trask, scattering over the grass. Their teacher clapped her hands. Her students were like little magnet filings, coming back to her. “Hi, how are you?” Alice said to the teacher. Alice smiled at the class, and went in where they had come out. It felt very schoolish in here, with light tan tiles, and art papers on the walls, and the sounds of chatter and chalk coming out the doors.
    She was walking toward the front of the building, toward the principal’s office, where phones would be, when she remembered that in elementary school, you had to ask to use a phone. Phones were behind the secretary’s desk. Or in the nurse’s room. They were not lined up, mall-style, in the hallways. How could she use a phone here, considering the conversation she expected to have?
    She walked past two closed doors, two open classroom doors, and came to a Girls’ Room.
    Inside, the toilets were tiny, and the sinks very low.
    She stepped in a stall and changed into her new jeans and T-shirt. She had no way to cut the tags and had to rip them off. It tore a hole in the shirt. Alice had plenty of T-shirts with holes, but this hole