Hannie cried as she bumped the unicorn down the trailer steps behind her. “H-Hannie k-keep unicorn, Mags?” she asked, sniffling.
I felt crosser than broken bones, thinking about those clothes waiting in there for me, wondering if I’d ever get to try them on, thanks to Hannie and that stupid unicorn.
“I told you not to bring it in the house, Hannie,” I said. “I told you.”
Hannie started crying harder, and Mooch kind of leaned up beside her, looking all serious. I swear if they didn’t look like Tweedledum and Tweedledee from the play at the high school last year.
“Look,” I said. “Mama’s right. The unicorn got left in Newell’s field ’cause it’s wore out and nobody wants it, Hannie, and that’s the truth.”
“No!” Hannie said, shoving her fists into her ears. “Hannie want unicorn.”
Hannie can be as stubborn as tar.
I looked around, expecting Brody Lawson to pop out any second, but there was still no sign of him. I started wondering if the unicorn was one of his tricks after all. I took Hannie’s hands from her ears. “Well, Hannie, if we’re not taking it back to Newell’s field, what are we going to do with it?”
“We got to hide it,” Mooch said. “So nobody steals it.”
I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to steal that sorry old toy, but it didn’t surprise me that Mooch would think such a thing. Mooch knows all about stealing. He’s snuck in every house along our road just to get food. He does it while Mama’s sleeping and we’re at school. I caught him with Twinkie wrappers a couple times. Mama never buys Twinkies.
He got caught by the neighbors just down the road from Brody Lawson’s house last year. They didn’t call the police or anything, but they spread the word all over town that Mooch was a thief. It got so I couldn’t go anywhere without hearing about Moochie.
Brody told me if his parents ever caught Moochie stealing from them, they’d make sure he went to jail. I didn’t tell Mama what Brody said. She was angry enough. Mama taught Moochie a thing or two about what happens to children that steal, and he said he wasn’t ever doing that again, but sometimes I worry.
“Hide unicorn?” Hannie said.
“Where we gonna hide it?” I asked.
“Under the bed,” Hannie said.
That’s where Hannie hides everything—I mean everything, from half-eaten bread to dirty underwear.
“We can’t hide the unicorn under the bed, Hannie,” I said. “Not after Mama told us to get rid of it. If she found it under there, she’d tan us good.”
“I know a place,” Mooch said.
I raised up my eyebrows.
“I do,” Mooch insisted. “But you have to promise not to be mad if I tell you.”
“I’m not promising anything,” I said.
“It’s that place back up to the road, that sort of tunnel under the highway,” Mooch said.
“That old drainage ditch?” I asked. “Moochie, you’re not allowed up there. You know that.”
Moochie looked down at his feet.
“Moochie,” I said. “Have you been going up there?”
“We got to hide the unicorn somewhere, Mags,” Mooch said.
“Well, you can just forget about hiding it there,” I said. “That’s all the way back up to school.”
Hannie’s eyes lit up. “School? Hannie go roundy-round?”
The roundy-round is one of those wooden things on the playground that spins in place. You sit on it, holding on to a metal rail while somebody else spins you until you get real dizzy. That’s Hannie’s favorite place to play. She’d live on that thing if they’d let her. Her teacher, Mrs. Zobris, has to pry her off it at the end of recess. When it gets to spinning, you can hear Hannie’s laughter all the way to town and back. Mama says I’m not supposed to let her on it on account of she might let go and fall off, but Hannie’s as stubborn as boot leather and I never can get her away from it.
I knew the place Mooch meant. It was a stinking drainage ditch with concrete sides all scribbled where kids had spelled their worst words out in spray paint. Mama’d told Mooch never to go near there. “Everybody knows that place,” I said. “What kind of hiding place is that?”
“You don’t know nothing, Mags,” Moochie said.
“Anything,” I said, correcting him. “And I sure do. I know there’s snakes and broken glass there, and you’ve got no business being there in the first place.”
“I can go any old place I want,” Mooch said. “And you can’t stop me.”
“You just watch your sass,” I warned. “I can stop you fast as a sink plug. Don’t push me.”
“Oh, don’t wet your pants,” Mooch said.
I wondered how come he was two years younger than Hannie and acted ten years older than me.
Hannie pushed up alongside him. “Moochie hide unicorn?” she asked.
“Follow me,” Mooch said, heading back up the road toward school.
“Now, just hold on,” I said. “Who’s oldest here anyway? I don’t think that old place is any good. It’s not safe there.”
Besides, if we went up that way, Hannie’d beg to go over and play on the roundy-round, and I sure wasn’t crossing her over that whole highway myself. It was bad enough getting across it with a crossing guard.
I hated that road, with its two lanes going in one direction and two lanes going in the other and that little strip of grass between them. I don’t know just where my daddy died on that highway, but I do know I wasn’t taking Hannie across it all alone.
“Forget it, Mooch. We’re not hiding it there.”
“Yes we are,” Mooch said. “Where else we gonna put it? Mama knows all our other hiding places. But down the ditch there’s this good hole for hiding things.”
I scowled, wondering what all that boy had been doing at the ditch, but he wasn’t about to give me a chance to ask.
“I got a wish on the unicorn, Mags. And you got a wish. You got all them pretty clothes. But Hannie didn’t get a wish. We can’t let nobody else get Hannie’s wish.”
Moochie had a point, sort of. Not that I really believed the stuffed unicorn had any power or anything, or that it could make our wishes come true, but Hannie believed it could. And she ought to have a chance at a wish. I looked at her, her head cradled in the dirty neck of the unicorn.
“Well … maybe,” I said. “If we just shove the unicorn into that hiding space of yours, Moochie, and hurry back home. We wouldn’t be hanging around there or going across to the playground or anything. You hear that, Hannie? No roundy-round. But before we go anywhere with that unicorn, we’ve got to disguise it.”
“Skies it?” Hannie asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
Brody hung around down at that ditch sometimes. Even if this unicorn wasn’t one of his tricks, I didn’t want him seeing me carrying it around. We could put the unicorn in a big old plastic bag. Then if Brody saw us, he wouldn’t know what we had. He might just think we were taking a little trash to the dump.
“We don’t want anybody seeing your unicorn, Hannie, and stealing it. If we wrap it up, it’ll just look like a heap of rags we’re carting away. It’ll be safe. That is, unless you already know what you want to wish for. Then you can just make your wish and we’ll leave the unicorn down Newell’s field like Mama said. We can leave it for the next person.”
“No!” Hannie cried. “Hannie’s unicorn.”
Shoot. I could see she was gonna be extra stubborn about that mangy old thing.
“Hide unicorn, Mags?” she asked as we lumped the toy into an old plastic garbage bag Mama’d left crumpled under the trailer steps.
“Yeah,” I said, starting off toward the ditch. “As long as you two promise not to go anywhere near the road. Swear it.”
“Pinky swear,” said Mooch, reaching up to hook his little finger around mine.
“Pinky swear,” echoed Hannie.