Orphan Train(2)

The probability that this will be sooner rather than later grows more likely with every passing minute. Dina has wanted to get rid of Molly for a while, and now she’s got a valid excuse. Ralph staked his credibility on Molly’s behavior; he worked hard to persuade Dina that a sweet kid was hiding under that fierce hair and makeup. Well, Ralph’s credibility is out the window now.

Molly gets down on her hands and knees and lifts the eyelet bed skirt. She pulls out two brightly colored duffel bags, the ones Ralph bought for her on clearance at the L.L.Bean outlet in Ellsworth (the red one monogrammed “Braden” and the orange Hawaiian-flowered one “Ashley”—rejected for color, style, or just the dorkiness of those names in white thread, Molly doesn’t know). As she’s opening the top drawer of her dresser, a percussive thumping under her comforter turns into a tinny version of Daddy Yankee’s “Impacto.” “So you’ll know it’s me and answer the damn phone,” Jack said when he bought her the ringtone.

“Hola, mi amigo,” she says when she finally finds it.

“Hey, what’s up, chica?”

“Oh, you know. Dina’s not so happy right now.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It’s pretty bad.”

“How bad?”

“Well, I think I’m out of here.” She feels her breath catch in her throat. It surprises her, given how many times she’s been through a version of this.

“Nah,” he says. “I don’t think so.”

“Yeah,” she says, pulling out a wad of socks and underwear and dumping them in the Braden bag. “I can hear them out there talking about it.”

“But you need to do those community service hours.”

“It’s not going to happen.” She picks up her charm necklace, tangled in a heap on the top of the dresser, and rubs the gold chain between her fingers, trying to loosen the knot. “Dina says nobody will take me. I’m untrustworthy.” The tangle loosens under her thumb and she pulls the strands apart. “It’s okay. I hear juvie isn’t so bad. It’s only a few months anyway.”

“But—you didn’t steal that book.”

Cradling the flat phone to her ear, she puts on the necklace, fumbling with the clasp, and looks in the mirror above her dresser. Black makeup is smeared under her eyes like a football player.

“Right, Molly?”

The thing is—she did steal it. Or tried. It’s her favorite novel, Jane Eyre, and she wanted to own it, to have it in her possession. Sherman’s Bookstore in Bar Harbor didn’t have it in stock, and she was too shy to ask the clerk to order it. Dina wouldn’t give her a credit card number to buy it online. She had never wanted anything so badly. (Well . . . not for a while.) So there she was, in the library on her knees in the narrow fiction stacks, with three copies of the novel, two paperbacks and one hardcover, on the shelf in front of her. She’d already taken the hardcover out of the library twice, gone up to the front desk and signed it out with her library card. She pulled all three books off the shelf, weighed them in her hand. She put the hardcover back, slid it in beside The Da Vinci Code. The newer paperback, too, she returned to the shelf.

The copy she slipped under the waistband of her jeans was old and dog-eared, the pages yellowed, with passages underlined in pencil. The cheap binding, with its dry glue, was beginning to detach from the pages. If they’d put it in the annual library sale, it would have gone for ten cents at most. Nobody, Molly figured, would miss it. Two other, newer copies were available. But the library had recently installed magnetic antitheft strips, and several months earlier four volunteers, ladies of a certain age who devoted themselves passionately to all things Spruce Harbor Library, had spent several weeks installing them on the inside covers of all eleven thousand books. So when Molly left the building that day through what she hadn’t even realized was a theft-detection gate, a loud, insistent beeping brought the head librarian, Susan LeBlanc, swooping over like a homing pigeon.

Molly confessed immediately—or rather tried to say that she’d meant to sign it out. But Susan LeBlanc was having none of it. “For goodness’ sake, don’t insult me with a lie,” she said. “I’ve been watching you. I thought you were up to something.” And what a shame that her assumptions had proven correct! She’d have liked to be surprised in a good way, just this once.

“Aw, shit. Really?” Jack sighs.

Looking in the mirror, Molly runs her finger across the charms on the chain around her neck. She doesn’t wear it much anymore, but every time something happens and she knows she’ll be on the move again, she puts it on. She bought the chain at a discount store, Marden’s, in Ellsworth, and strung it with these three charms—a blue-and-green cloisonné fish, a pewter raven, and a tiny brown bear—that her father gave her on her eighth birthday. He was killed in a one-car rollover several weeks later, speeding down I-95 on an icy night, after which her mother, all of twenty-three, started a downward spiral she never recovered from. By Molly’s next birthday she was living with a new family, and her mother was in jail. The charms are all she has left of what used to be her life.