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

seemed too much and once again she had to battle tears. She took off her sandals and yanked on the new sneakers. They, too, had to be torn to separate them. She made a ponytail of her long hair, threaded it through the hole in the back of the baseball cap, and tugged the visor low on her forehead.
    Her face puckered like a lemon, and then, horribly, her stomach, too. Alice whirled, bent, and threw up very neatly into the tiny toilet. She stayed clutching the white porcelain sides while her stomach and her face settled back into position, and then it was over.
    You can fool your mind, she thought, but not your gut.
    The awful quick animal panting returned for a minute and then Alice forced herself to the sink, washed her face and mouth and teeth with her hands, shoved her old clothes back into the shopping bag, slung her purse over her shoulder, and headed out the way she had come.
    One class had left book bags outside their door.
    There were movie character book bags: Pocahontas and 101 Dalmatians. There were teddy bear book bags and L.L. Bean book bags, tiny second-grade-sized book bags, and huge Dad-goes-camping backpacks.
    Alice did not even pause. She picked up a Dad-goes-camping, slung the backpack over her shoulders, and headed on out. There. She had committed her first crime.
    It horrified her. She had to escape this place, this innocent stretch of hall, where she had become a thief. Alice dropped the shopping bag and fanny purse in among some poor kid’s chapter book, forgotten permission slip, and the remains of a snack.
    She ran.
    The running felt wonderful. Alice always felt thin and athletic in jeans, as if she had longer legs and a better personality. She loved any sport with a run. In softball, she was always sorry the bases weren’t farther apart.
    The slamming of her feet felt useful, as if she were accomplishing something. She liked the speed at which she put distance between herself and Margaret P. Trask. Running was good because it replaced thought, and Alice had not been doing well on the thought front.
    Alice ran about a mile, and then got hit by exhaustion as if by a train. All at once she could not even lift her feet, and her shoulders trembled under the weight of the backpack, whose wide padded ribs kept falling off. Her throat burned where she had thrown up.
    The tears spilled again.
    Stealing a little kid’s book bag. It was disgusting. It was the most low-life thing Alice had ever done. She would have preferred to get caught stealing the Windstar.
    How could she make up for it? How could she ever explain what made her decide to do it?
    It was nothing, it was minor, anybody in her position would do it, she told herself.
    But nobody had ever been in her position before, had they? Did this happen to other high school sophomores?
    Alice walked facing traffic, but not really, because she was keeping her chin down and her eyes on the pavement. She reminded herself that she looked exactly like a million teenagers; nobody could tell she was Alice, nobody would stop and ask.
    Please don’t hit me, she said silently to the cars she was not looking at.
    But somebody had hit her father. Hit in the television series manner: killed. I killed him good. How could that have happened to her father?
    Dad hadn’t been at Austin & Scote very long. He changed jobs a lot. He was so good at what he did that he kept getting offers he couldn’t refuse.
    Alice could vaguely picture Mr. Austin and Mr. Scote. Middle-aged, going gray, and going bald. She remembered then—cars, of course: a stunning silver Jaguar and a black Mercedes that looked like part of a presidential cavalcade.
    Would Mr. Austin or Mr. Scote recognize Alice? Did Daddy keep a photograph of Alice on his desk? But it didn’t matter, because Austin & Scote was not a place where Alice could slip in unnoticed and riffle through the papers on her father’s desk, or open up his computer files to see who his enemies were.
    The company was high-security: You