Weird Girl by Mae McCall Read Free Book Online Page B

over there?” he asked. “You were tied to a
chair.”
     
    “You tied my ankles, but not my hands,” she replied around a
mouthful of cereal. “Kind of a dumb move.”
     
    His oxygen-starved muscles were screaming, and his brain was
having trouble keeping up. How had he missed her untying herself, walking to
the other end of the room, and making a bowl of cereal for herself? “How long
have you been loose?” he asked.
     
    “About two hours,” she said, milk running down her chin.
     
    “Two hours?” he squeaked. “You’ve been eating cereal for two
hours?”
     
    “No,” she said, very slowly, as though she were speaking to
a child. “First, I went to the bathroom. Then, I poked through your medicine
cabinet, dresser, closet, and the pockets of all of your clothes. I spent a
little time moving the furniture out of your way so that you wouldn’t keep
knocking things over, and now I’m eating cereal.”
     
    Santo thought about this, trying to put together a mental
picture of the entire sequence of events. “Wait,” he said. “If you untied
yourself two hours ago, then why are you still here? Why didn’t you escape?”
     
    Cleo slurped the last of the milk from the bowl and wiped
her chin with the back of her hand. “I liked watching you dance,” she said.
     
    This was almost too much for Santo, who had spent the last
six hours trying to dance the child into a frenzy of fear. She was supposed to
be crying, cowering, worrying about what he was going to do to her. He was a
grown man with no pants, who had kidnapped a little girl from the woods. It was
supposed to be about sweat and terror, not a child calmly eating what looked to
be the last of his crispy rice cereal.
     
    He was trying to dredge up some sinister dialogue to get
this thing back on track, when she spoke again. “That one you did in the
middle—can you teach me how to do that?” She mimicked some of the movements so
that he would know which one she was talking about. All other thoughts fled
from his mind. He straightened his spine, walked to the stereo, pushed a few
buttons, and turned up the volume, until a popular nineties song erupted from
the speakers. And they danced.
     
    ***
     
    Later, Cleo scribbled furiously in her notebook while Santo
cooked breakfast. When he put the steaming food beside her, she looked up and
said, “Wow, those are really nice plates. Is that real gold?”
     
    He smiled proudly and said, “Yeah, I stole these from a
wedding once. I have a twelve place setting.”
     
    “Do you steal from weddings a lot?” she asked.
     
    Santo started buttering his toast. “Not really,” he said. “I
used to break into houses, mostly.”
     
    He passed a piece of toast to Cleo and slid the butter dish
across the table. She was quiet as she applied butter to bread, but then she
asked, “So, how old were you when you first started stealing?”
     
    “My dad taught me to pick pockets when I was five,” he
replied around a mouthful of scrambled eggs.
     
    “What does that mean?” she asked.
     
    He swallowed and wiped his mouth with a monogrammed linen
napkin. “It means I took people’s wallets and keys and stuff.”
     
    “Don’t people notice when you take stuff out of their
pockets?” she asked. Santo smiled nostalgically. “Not if you do it right.”
     
    Cleo took a deep breath while she considered her next
question, but before she could ask it, he interrupted her. “So, what’s with the
notebook?”
     
    She looked down at her shorthand. “I like to write down
everything that happens,” she said.
     
    Santo took another bite of eggs before asking, “But, what do
you… do with it?”
     
    Cleo shrugged. “I write in it until it’s full, and then put
it on the shelf and start on a new one.”
     
    “So, you don’t let anyone read it?” he asked nervously.
     
    “Well, I read from it every night at dinner with my
parents.” She took a bite of food. “This is really good. What kind of meat