Gillian's first sight of the man called Rick O'Neill was across a deck of white tabletops and through a forest of umbrellas that had never been touched by rain. His hand was on her mother's arm, and even at this distance Gillian could sense that Janice was all frozen up as if the hand of a leper was on her and she didn't want anybody to see or know how it felt. The man was smiling and talking, and Janice wasn't doing either. But she was listening.
Gillian went over. They couldn't have been together more than five minutes, because that was how long she'd spent amongst the junior paperbacks in the Dalton's bookstore. This was the recreational end of the shopping mall, a wide plaza with four movie theatres and a handful of fast-food concessions, all of them doing slow early-evening business. The plaza had been set with tables and sunshade umbrellas under a ceiling so high that you could almost kid yourself that you were out in the open air as you sucked on an Orange Julius. The two adults were by a donut stand, which had its shutters down.
The man saw her first. 'Hey,' he said to Janice, 'is this your kid?'
'Yes,' Janice said stiffly.
'She's lucky, she got your looks.' He turned to Gillian, and bent to put his face at her level. This was the moment at which she decided for sure that she wasn't going to like him. He said, 'What's your name?'
'Gillian. What's yours?'
But if he'd heard the question, he obviously didn't intend to respond to it. 'Tell you what, Gillian,' he said, and he dug around in his pants pocket and brought out a crumpled bill which he opened up before her. 'Here's a five. Go to the gift shop over there and pick yourself out something nice.'
Gillian looked at her mother, unsure of what to do. But Janice nodded, barely, and so she took the bill.
'Thank you,' she said.
She glanced back at them once as she headed over toward the gift shop. There were empty chairs close to hand, but neither of them seemed inclined to sit. The man was wearing an expensive-looking lightweight suit, but his haircut looked cheap and his skin was as pale as that of a new-born baby mouse. When he'd stooped to face her, she'd looked into the kind of hard little black-button eyes which would always seem friendly even though most of the time they probably weren't. Janice was ruler-straight before him. At least he wasn't touching her now.
The gift shop was full of crap; of all the places that he could have sent her, this was probably the worst. She couldn't see anything on any of the shelves that wasn't an embarrassment; executive puzzles with blobs of mercury sliding around mazes, transistor radios disguised as Coke cans, toilet paper with a joke or a crossword puzzle on every sheet, a porcelain sneaker, barbecue aprons with belly-dancer tassels. . . the soft toys at the back of the store seemed decent enough, but they were also priced way beyond the five-dollar bracket. Besides, Gillian had more or less decided on the way across the mall that she was going to spend the money on a present for Tom. Her father's birthday was coming up in a couple of days' time, but she'd only got to hear about it that morning when they'd dropped him at the airport. Even then, it had only been something that had been mentioned in passing. Gillian's birthdays were big occasions but her parents never seemed to make much fuss about their own, so a present from her would be a real surprise. And being surrounded by so much junk made it easy to feel selfless.
Maybe adults saw this kind of stuff differently. Who was to say? She picked up a head of Elvis Presley which started to play Love me tender, Love me true like a music box as she held it, but she set it down again quickly at the sight of the fifteen-dollar label. From where she was standing, she could look right out through the shelves and the open front of the store. Her mother and the stranger made a subtly different picture now, one that Gillian could read even over the distance. The one-sided chill had developed into a one-sided argument, Janice coming up to the boil but with the lid still tightly on; she looked briefly toward the gift store and Gillian knew then that she'd better be heading back, if only for the sake of the stranger's future health. From a shelf at eye level she took a glass paperweight with a tag that was just within her price range, and carried this out to the counter by the entrance.
The boy who took her money was tall and good-looking, and he didn't bend down to talk to her. Turning the paperweight in his hand as if to inspect it for flaws, he said, 'Have you ever seen one of these before?'
Gillian shook her head.
'Watch,' he said, and then he shook the globe twice before setting it down on the counter.
What Gillian had taken to be solid glass now proved to be hollow, and filled with a swirling blizzard that gradually settled to reveal the village scene inside. For a moment she stared, caught up in the effect, and for that moment it was touch and go whether Tom would get his hands on it after all.
'Now what you do is,' the young man said, 'you make a wish while the snow's still falling.'
He wrapped it in tissue and put it into a paper bag with a picture of Snoopy on the side. Gillian was thinking that it was going to make a perfect present, because Tom was always wishing out loud for more of what he called The Slippery Green Stuff. Gillian had gone queasy just thinking about it, until Janice had explained that her dad was talking about money.
This time, neither of them saw her coming until she was well within earshot. 'I'm warning you, Rick,' Janice was saying, 'you're getting way out of your depth,' and the man - Rick? - said, 'A warning for what? For old times' sake?' But then suddenly their radar seemed to sense her, and they both clammed up at the same time and turned at her approach.
She took the paperweight out of the tissue and held it out to show him. 'This is what I bought,' she said. 'There's five cents' change.'
'Keep the change,' he said. 'You can owe it to me.'
But Janice had been rummaging around in her bag, and now she brought out something which she stuffed into the man's breast pocket. She did it so quickly that she was finished before he'd realised what was happening.
'Here's a ten,' she said. 'Now nobody owes you anything.' And then she put her hand on Gillian's shoulder to turn and steer her away. 'Come on, tiger,' she said, and they walked away from the man without even saying goodbye. Gillian glanced back once before the stairs and the fountain came between them, and the man was just standing there with his hands in his pockets as he watched them go.
Out in the parking lot, you knew that it was November; a lot of the women were in those long quilted coats and the men were in sleeveless body jackets, loading all the stuff that they'd bought into their open hatchbacks. There was still some light in the sky, but it was getting grey and weak compared to the glare of the elevated Interstate which passed so close that the lot was almost in its shadow. Janice couldn't remember where she'd left their yellow Pinto, as usual, and Gillian had to lead her to it.
They waited as a blue pickup reversed out of its slot. Gillian saw Janice take a quick look back at the mall entrance.
Gillian said, 'Was he one of your friends?'
'Not a friend,' Janice said, her gaze lingering on the glass doors as if willing them to fuse and lock together. 'Just somebody I used to know. We won't be seeing him again.'
The pickup accelerated suddenly, making a too-showy turn at the far end of the row. Gillian waited to hear Janice's usual under-the-breath muttering of asshole, but it didn't come; instead she walked across to the Pinto, weighed down more by the things on her mind than by the few store bags that she carried.
The bags went on the back seat, the two of them got in. Gillian held onto the paperweight, thinking that it might roll around and break if she left it. The more she thought about it, the neater a gift it seemed likely to make. Tom was always working at home, really late into the evenings sometimes, and his desk was always a mess. Even if the wishing part was only so much bull, as she strongly suspected, it would still be something that he could use. It might even help in the pursuit of The Slippery Green Stuff. She was tempted to take it out of its bag again for another look at the way the snow inside shook up into a blizzard, but thought it maybe wouldn't be tactful while Janice was watching.
Janice hadn't started the car yet. She was sitting with her eyes closed and her head bowed forward, forehead almost touching the rim of the steering wheel.
'What's wrong?' Gillian said.
'Nothing's wrong,' Janice said, opening her eyes and straightening slowly. 'Just a slight headache, that's all.'
It was properly dark by the time that they reached the house, a half-hour later. Gillian got to operate the remote control to open the garage door, and once they were inside she ran through the kitchen to switch off the beeping alarm control box before all the bells and howlers could let loose. The house felt dead with nobody in it, but that feeling went away as the room lights came on. Then, as Gillian brought the shopping bags through and set them on the kitchen table, she could hear that Janice was on the phone out in the hall; she seemed to get halfway through dialling a number before changing her mind and abruptly hanging up. The next thing that Gillian heard was Janice climbing the stairs.
It was wrong, all wrong. The best part of shopping was always when you got your new stuff home and took it out for the very first time, but here the bags lay unopened and with all the excitement slowly leaking out of them. There were some dungarees for Gillian, two pairs of Gloria Vanderbilts for Janice ('the only kind of jeans I can get my ass into these days,' she called them), some knitwear, and some ski gloves that had been marked down in a sale; but the only bag that Gillian felt able to open on her own was the Snoopy bag, crumpled around the top now from the way she'd been holding it. She drew out the shapeless lump of tissue, and from the tissue uncovered Tom's present-to-be.
Her fingermarks had clouded up the glass a little, like pawprints, but the tissue cleaned them off. She gave the paperweight a good long shake and then set it down so that she could watch, and make a wish.
The snowstorm swirled, flurried, began to settle. It seemed ungenerous to think it of the man who'd given her the money to buy the thing, but she wished for him to leave their lives as completely and as abruptly as they way in which he'd made his appearance.
*
Rick O'Neill drove on past the lighted Haddon house, and turned his car around in the next cul-de-sac. He hadn't seen anything to change the impression that he'd formed when he'd first located the property that same morning. Not poverty row, he'd thought, but a long way from rich. It was a disappointment, but it didn't deter him. Having made the turn, he headed back in toward Arlington with the idea of finding somewhere to eat and to kill a couple of hours. Now that Janice and her kid were home, he wanted to give them time to get settled before he came back.
And he would be going back, only they wouldn't know of his visit until some time after he'd gone. Rick O'Neill had once made a reasonable living out of his ability to slip un-noticed through other people's houses, leaving behind rather less than the full inventory of valuables; his career had suffered a recent interruption of more than nine years' duration, all of them spent in the state penitentiary over in Pinal County, Arizona, but he had no doubt that the old skills would come back to him as easily as the driving had. He'd been out of jail for nearly four days now, and already he was starting to feel back on top of it all. His first act - apart from buying himself a beer which he found he'd lost the taste for - had been to bus out to Sky Harbor airport from where he'd returned with someone else's luggage from the terminal building and some distant stranger's wheels from the parking lot. His second act had been to make like an arrow across three states to get himself to this spot.
His third would be to pass through the Haddon house without taking anything, leaving some small but unmistakable sign for Janice to see. This was to be the opening shot in his planned campaign of psychological warfare - more effective and harder to pin you down for than any other kind, if he understood the experts on these matters. He'd taken out every psychology book in the prison library at one time or another, and at least two of them he'd read all of the way through. He'd take money from them if they had it, although by the look of their second-hand car and their second-rate house they probably wouldn't have much, but the main object of this exercise was going to be to give the Haddon household a lesson in fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of exposure. Fear of what the future might turn out to be like for them.
And more than anything else, fear of what a one-time housebreaker named Rick O'Neill could do to their lives.
The diner that he found had all the looks and character of a cinderblock shoebox, but it was dark and it was quiet. He sat at the back of the room at a table from where he could watch the door, and when the waitress came over he ordered the all-day breakfast. 'Anything else?' she said, and he thought about a beer.
'Make it a glass of milk,' he said.
Sometime over the next couple of days he was going to have to give some close consideration to his finances. There had been about fifteen hundred in travellers' checks in the luggage that he'd boosted, and if he could make the right contacts he could probably get back about half of their face value. He was no bad-check specialist himself, he didn't even want to think about trying to pass them on his own; that was the kind of move that could put him back in jail and it wouldn't be through bad luck, it would be through stupidity. Stupidity, he thought, was when you failed to organise things that should rightly be within your control; bad luck was when you gave a screaming householder a little tap to silence her and the bones of her skull caved in like a stale piecrust. That kind of luck, in Rick O'Neill's case, had translated into a murder charge which his sharp and eager lawyer had bargained down with the help of the testimony of Rick's girl.
Tom Haddon had been sharp in the courtroom, all right. But he hadn't been sharp enough to see through Rick's girl at her most calculating, had he?
Rick had grown weary of hearing the story again and again. Every new face on the block seemed to have something to add to it, right up to the point where Haddon and Janice - Janice Frick, in those days - had been married in a quick and quiet ceremony across the county line before moving out of state altogether. And after a while, when everything had quietened down, Rick began to wonder. . . could the two of them really have been doing their best for him? He'd heard of people in worse spots getting away with it altogether.
'Heading West?' the waitress said from by his shoulder, snapping him out of it. She put his order before him, and his milk on a coaster to the side.
Rick said, 'Why?'
'Radio says to keep off the I-thirty for the next hour. A big truck turned over, or something.'
She was a big girl, bleached-blonde, and kind of interesting to have leaning over him so close. But it didn't last for more than a moment. He said, 'I'll be staying around here for a while.'
'What line of business you in?'
'These days I'm into debt collection,' he said.
The meal was about as enticing as the architecture, but with a slice of anaemic-looking cherry pie to follow it passed an hour. He kept checking his watch, but the time wouldn't move any faster. The watch belonged to the same poor sap who'd a) been unlucky enough to be around the same height and build as Rick, and b) had left his baggage trolley unattended outside the men's room back at Sky Harbor. It was a fancy little digital job on an expanding bracelet, brand-new and with lots of push-button features. There hadn't been anything like it around before he'd gone away, but fortunately Rick had managed to keep in touch with the real world through the TV and the advertisements in the slick magazines.
He spun it out for as long as he could, but eventually he became aware that the bleached-blonde was shooting him curious looks down the length of the counter. He paid up, left her a small tip. Maybe if he'd told her that he was an airline pilot instead of that debt-collector business, she might have been sitting on his lap by now.
Once in the car, he headed back into town and picked up the Forest Park road. Within twenty minutes he was making the turn, and five minutes after that he was cruising slowly past the Haddon house for the third time that day. There was still a light on in what he took to be one of the bedrooms. He passed on by and, less than a mile further along, found a little spur where he could leave the car without it being visible from the road.
Walking back in the dark? No problem, he was a professional. If you were a professional you weren't deterred by jail years, they simply beat the pity out of you so that the same mistakes wouldn't be made again.
The light had gone out by the time that he reached the house; it was after eleven, now. It was a split-level place built into the hillside, rambling and not too well-maintained. When he'd first come by he'd been expecting something newer, far more chic and high-profile; this place didn't even run to a swimming pool, and wouldn't have been hurt by a lick of paint here and there. Cheap, cheap, cheap, he thought as he squatted in the bushes upslope and studied the angles of the house by moonlight. Janice had hooked herself to a rising lawyer, but obviously the shakeup that their marriage had given to his career had stopped that rise dead. Rick would probably have to forget about squeezing them for money. . . but then, this wasn't really about money at all, was it?
He went down, and hopped over the fence into the yard. The easiest access looked to be via a set of flimsy-looking french-windows reached across a patio that was halfway through being relaid and which had been in that state for some time. Rick bridged a plank over the gravelbed and stepped silently across it. Within two minutes he'd cheated the simple alarm contacts on the frame and was inside the house.
He crossed the sitting room without a sound; born to burgle, that was Rick O'Neill. All of the internal doors on this level stood open. He could hardly have asked for an easier time of it. Through the open hallway and over into the kitchen, reading the grey tones of the night like a cat; he glanced up once at the high rail of the upper landing as he passed beneath, but there was no sound from any of the bedrooms beyond. Tom Haddon wasn't a problem to be worried about right now, Rick knew because he'd followed them out to the airport that same morning. This had also been his first sight of the kid, a big surprise for him because such a thing had never even crossed his mind. Janice, a mother? And, in a strange kind of way, he'd thought as he'd watched them coming out of the house, the child was more like the bright and hungry Janice that he'd known than the well-padded stranger who'd been squeezing herself behind the wheel of the yellow Pinto.
Once in the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator door to give himself a working light. After a few seconds the appliance's motor kicked in, a shivering rumble that took the hard edge out of the surrounding silence. He looked around; there, on the wall opposite, was exactly the kind of thing that he was looking for. It was a wipe-off memory board with a grease-pencil hanging on a string alongside; a homely feature, something belonging to a world where the Rick O'Neills were never more than just predators passing through.
He went over, his shadow scaling-down to meet him as he reached for the pencil in the weak illumination from the refrigerator. There were already the beginnings of a list on the board, salt, scourer, Shake 'n Bake. All that he needed now was to add a couple of words of his own, something completely innocuous but enough to start the ball rolling. Some hint at an IOU maybe, to get her thinking and to make her sweat for a while.
Then he had it, something simple but meaningful. He'd leave her the date on which his sentence had begun.
'I could blow your brains out,' Janice said as the room light came on and almost blinded him. 'But who'd notice the difference?'
*
It wasn't the sound of voices from downstairs that woke Gillian; that had been accomplished by the creaky board on the landing just outside her room, the one that she'd learned to listen for around midnight every Christmas Eve. But this time nobody came in even though she held her breath, and after a few moments she'd heard the faint shuffling of Janice descending the stairs.
No, the voices didn't wake her. But it was the voices that got her out of bed.
She went to the landing rail and looked down into the hall. 'You're an even bigger fool than I thought,' she heard, 'and that's really saying something.' It was her mother's voice, and it was coming from the kitchen. A broad fan of light spread from the kitchen doorway across the floor of the darkened hall, and in the fan a shadow moved.
'Now, wait a minute,' a man's voice said. No, not a man; the man, here in their house.
'Get wise, Rick,' Janice said. 'You walked straight into this.'
'Just give me one minute to tell you why you don't want to use that.'
'You're a known housebreaker, it's nearly midnight, and nobody invited you in. You went into jail a loser and you've obviously learned nothing.'
Gillian looked down at her hand. Her small fingers were curled around the snow-scene globe; she'd fallen asleep clutching it, wishing this same man away and out of their lives again before he could push his way in too deep. Now it caught the light with a dull gleam, and she shook it and wished again and tried to make out the blizzard as it swirled around the little houses on the hill.
'You know what's going to happen, don't you?' the man was saying. 'I'm talking about all your new friends in this town getting to find out that the lawyer's wife used to be a teenage whore. You got close neighbours, Janice, I checked the area. Somebody hears a gunshot, and the police'll be here before you've dragged me five yards. So why don't we calm down and talk?'
Gillian looked up from the globe as a silhouette filled the kitchen doorway, making a small mental note someday to check up on what a hoar might be.
'Talk about what?' Janice said, and Gillian saw that the man was backing out of the kitchen with his hands raised in the air as if to push away something that he couldn't quite touch.
'About how little it would take to make me go away,' he was saying, but now he was sounding nervous. 'One thing I did learn, it's not to shake the tree too hard.'
'There's no money, Rick. But I think you must have known that anyway before you broke in here.'
Janice was emerging now, preceded by something that Gillian recognised as the ugly little handgun that her father kept high on a shelf in his closet where Gillian wouldn't be able to reach even if she should ever get it into her head to try. The man seemed scared, quite different to the way that he'd been in the mall, and he kept on backing away from her mother as if from some intense kind of heat. He glanced behind him, briefly, but he didn't look up to where Gillian stood. He seemed to be making for the sitting room.
He said, 'Now, you don't want to do anything you're going to regret. I've written some letters.'
He was almost directly below Gillian now; she had to lean out over the rail a little in order not to lose sight of him. He had a balding spot on the back of his head, where he'd tried to comb his hair across to cover it.
Janice said, 'You, writing letters? You could never even write your name without sticking your tongue out the corner of your mouth. Tell me something I might believe.'
But then everything seemed to change.
'You're not going to use that,' the man said, and there was a note of wonder and discovery in his voice.
'You really think not?' Janice said, but there was uncertainty in hers.
'I know it. I can see it from here. You've changed too much, Janice. You lost your edge. Now you're just another fat Texas housewife, and you know it too. You spent too long thinking about stuff like what color toilet paper you ought to be buying. So I'm going to turn around now, and I'm going to walk straight out of here.'
'I'm warning you, Rick. . . '
'I can hear you, Janice. It just don't worry me as much as it might, that's all.' And he started to turn as he'd said that he would, slowly so that he wouldn't startle Janice into anything.
Here comes the wish now, Gillian thought.
The globe took forever to drop; one moment it was hard and warm in her hand like a newly-forged steel bearing, the next it was toppling into the long fall with its base turning upward as the main centre of its mass led the way.
It seemed to punch Rick's head down into his shoulders as it burst in a coronet of thick fluid and broken jewels. His hands made sudden fists but the only sound from him was a far-off squeak, as if everything had been instantly clenched-up and bottled-in. His legs gave way and he took a couple of uncertain steps sideways before dropping like an old sack. Janice stood aghast and open-mouthed, unable to take it all in as Rick lay on the hall floor and shuddered and twitched and trembled like a dog in the worst of all bad dog-dreams.
He kicked, and he bucked. And finally, he stopped.
And when the last of the life had finally rattled out of him, Janice belatedly turned her face upward to the landing, where Gillian stood at the rail in her night-dress.
'Where are we going to put him?' Gillian said.
*
Three days felt like too long for Tom Haddon to have been away from home, even on expenses. And then they'd messed around with his return flight so that he couldn't be sure of his arrival time, which meant that there had been no point in him phoning ahead to arrange to be met. So instead he took a cab from the airport, and had to be set down at the end of his own drive with his travelling-bag like some visitor.
The first thing that he saw as he turned from paying off the cabbie was Janice standing in the doorway; and then the second was Gillian, squeezing out around her mother's legs to come running down the drive toward him. For a moment he got that strange sensation of seeing the utterly familiar as if for the first time, something that always happened when he'd been away and which never lasted for more than a few seconds. It was already fading as, with his bag shifted to his left hand, he scooped Gillian up in his free arm and hitched her onto his hip in order to carry her back to the house.
Janice said, 'How was it?'
'It went okay,' Tom said as Janice stepped aside to let him and his double-burden come sideways into the hall. 'The first meeting got pushed back a day, but I got the rest of it through in record time. Mostly because I didn't want to spend my birthday in a hotel on my own. I don't suppose I got any cards?'
'Sure you got cards,' Janice said with a smile. 'You got something else, as well.'
'What?'
'Come and see.'
He set his bag down, but Gillian was hanging on like a monkey and so she stayed in place as he followed Janice through into the sitting room. The french-windows stood open, and for a moment he wasn't sure exactly what he was supposed to be looking at; but then it clicked into place, and he said, 'I don't believe it.'
'They really worked fast,' Gillian added. 'I watched.'
'I can imagine,' Tom said, and he went over to the windows to look out at the newly-laid patio. The concrete base looked as if it had more or less set already, and the stone paving that he'd said that he wanted was stacked ready to one side. He wondered if it was solid enough to step out onto yet.
'Careful!' his wife and daughter said in sudden unison, as if they'd both read his mind, and Janice added, 'They said not to disturb it for a couple of days.'
He said, 'When did they do it?'
'I charmed them into coming over yesterday. It's not your main present, but I thought you'd be pleased.'
'You must really have charmed them. They told me they were backed up a month.'
'Yeah, well. . .' she put on one of her mysterious smiles. 'That was you, and this was me.'
Gillian said, 'I got you a present, too. Want to see it?'
She wriggled free and slid down to the floor, and Tom said, 'Another present? Now I know it's my birthday.'
Gillian ran out across the hall and thundered up the stairs to her bedroom. Tom looked at Janice, but this seemed to have taken her by surprise as well. She gave a shrug, and said, 'Don't ask me.'
He glanced at the patio and, lowering his voice so that Gillian wouldn't hear, said, 'You sure we can afford this right now?'
'I'll juggle the books. We'll get by.'
He put his hands in his pockets and looked out again at the newly-smoothed concrete. He said, 'Anything else happen while I was gone?'
'Yeah, we had some excitement. The police found a car with out-of-state plates hidden about a mile down the road. Turned out it was stolen about a week ago, they don't know who by. They towed it away.'
Gillian was back. 'You'd better like this,' she said sternly. 'I've been saving up forever.' And as he stepped back into the house she thrust at him a red paper bag with a picture of Snoopy on its side.
Tom opened it and took out a wad of tissue paper. The paper unfolded to reveal a digital wristwatch on an expanding bracelet.
'Like it?' he said. 'I love it.' He glanced quickly at Janice, suspecting some kind of conspiracy here. But if her expression was anything to go by, she was as surprised as anybody; in fact, she appeared to be faintly stunned at the sight of the gift.
'You press those little buttons and it does all kinds of things,' Gillian explained as he slipped off his gold Rolex, a graduation present from his parents, and put it into his pocket. The watch that took its place must have cost his daughter all of twenty-five dollars - probably less, since it wasn't quite new. The band was a little loose, but he could take out a couple of the links. As he held out his arm to admire it, she added, 'You'll have to work it all out for yourself, because I lost the instructions.'
'Hey, thanks,' he said. 'And now if you'll go and bring my bag through from the hall, maybe I'll find something in there for each of you.'
Gillian ran to get the bag. Janice was smiling, and her smile was a little glassy.
She was obviously as touched by the unexpected gift as he was himself, he thought.
The two of them could be so alike, in so many ways.
*
Gillian lay on her bed a couple of hours later, the conversation of her parents a comforting buzz that filtered up through the floorboards. She was inspecting the turquoise pendant that Tom had brought for her. Real Indian workmanship, he'd said. Hand-crafted. She wondered how much she'd be able to get for it at the pawnshop down by the stockyards, and how long she'd have to wait before she could take it along without Janice noticing that it had gone. Janice was probably going to be watching her for a while. Gillian had readily agreed that the entire incident with Rick O'Neill was a bad dream that had never really happened and that there was no need for it to be mentioned ever again, but still she'd seen the wariness in the looks that Janice had been giving her whenever Tom's back had been turned that evening.
She wondered if the pawnshop would go as high as twenty dollars. She already had thirty in a savings account that she could get her hands onto without either of her parents having to be present; twenty plus thirty made ten of the wishing globes, plus change. She'd have to buy them one at a time and never from the same place twice, or at least not when the same person was handling counter sales.
She thought about Mrs Turner the English teacher, who'd slapped her hand in front of everybody one time because she didn't write her A's in quite the way that Mrs Turner wanted. Mrs Turner cycled into school every day, dismounting and pushing her Schwinn the last few yards along a path that took her directly beneath the chemistry lab windows. Very handy. She thought about the plumber who'd once said a rude thing to Janice, which Tom knew nothing about. She thought about the drugstore owner who'd accused her of stealing when she hadn't, and an old man she'd heard of who told kids he'd pay them a dollar for mowing his lawn and then gave them nothing when they'd finished.
Gillian did a lot of thinking.
You never realised how many enemies you had, until you started trying to count them all.
© Stephen Gallagher 1987