CHAPTER 17

Well, in spite of everything that happened to me I didn’t get to miss a single day of school because the abduction—from ab, away, and dutere to lead—a much better word than kidnapping—took place on a Saturday night. I can’t believe I was home in my own house by noon on Sunday. Mom wanted me to take it easy the rest of the day so I propped myself up in bed and opened Pride and Prejudice again, thinking it would put me to sleep. It did. When I woke up the sun was going down and Jane Austen was lying on the floor open to chapter ten where Elizabeth refuses to dance with Darcy.

I won’t even list the reporters for newspapers and TV stations who showed up that afternoon. Mom had a hard time getting rid of them, but she did sort of organize them so I wouldn’t have to tell the story over and over. I didn’t pose for a single picture but a swarm of photographers got me anyway. Brianna came to help control what she called the paparazzi, who are those sneaky photographers who hang around movie stars like pigeons, always moving just far enough away so you can’t catch them. But the story of my abduction and rescue wasn’t just local, it was national news! It made my flesh creep to see the replay of Mom and me being interviewed on every channel. And then a thousand pictures of Julio’s shack, but they couldn’t get inside it to snap the trapdoor because there was a cop there around the clock. You can be sure that if they could have opened it up to see the root cellar, they would have. Well, you can imagine, the emails back and forth with Trippy just flying through outer space. Now I had a real-life drama to tell her about. That’s how they say it on TV. She had already read about the abduction on the Clarion & Bugle’s web page. I told her it was weird being famous all of a sudden. I didn’t think I liked it much.

“You poor goonie!!! I would have died down there in that root cellar!!! But the famous part ought to be fun. I wish I could be down there with you and your mom and all.”

I promised to keep her up-to-date every day from now on. Trippy was lobbying for another trip to Florida for her graduation from eighth grade. Her mother said the weather was awful in Florida in the summer and no one in their right mind would want to go there but if that was what she wanted. . . . Did Lizzie think her mother would let her come again?

“Of course she is welcome,” Mom said. “It’s important to hold on to old friends.”

And speaking of old friends, a big surprise came in the snail mail. A letter from Tony! His dad had come home from the broadcast studio in Madison with the news right off the wire from the AP. That stands for the Associated Press. Tony said the story of my abduction was sick, really sick. He said it was boss, a hundred times bigger than the little kid stuff we had done like tying our sleds to his dad’s car bumper, bigger than trying to sniff homemade snuff. It made him feel way boss to be my old friend. And he hadn’t forgotten those two candy bars. He wrote to me snail mail, just addressed to Woodvale, FL, with its zip code, because he didn’t have my email but here was his. I emailed him a quick note saying more to come.

This was what being famous felt like and except for hearing from Tony, I hated it. The whole next week I cringed every time some kid at school would tell me she read the whole story in the South Florida Gazette or something. I just wanted to be normal again, or as normal as an eleven-and-a-half-year-old girl in a wheelchair who is graduating from eighth grade in couple of months can be.

Josh was the only one who didn’t badger me with questions. In fact he didn’t ask a single one. But I asked him to ask his dad when Digger would get out of the hospital and he wheeled up to me the next day and said, “Good news.”

We were just on our way to the cafeteria for lunch. “The angioplasty was a piece of cake according to the cardio.” (That’s med-speak for cardiologist.) “They put in two stents—you know, those little mesh things that hold the arteries open—and got him up that afternoon. He only has to stay overnight and then they’ll discharge him.”

“So then he won’t just have another heart attack?”

“Nope. He should be good to go, but he has to show up three times a week for six weeks for cardio rehab.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s like a class for people who’ve had heart attacks and are now recovered but they have to work out on exercise bikes to get their heart rate up and learn how to eat right and stuff like that.”

“Poor Digger! No more jelly doughnuts.”

“No, but he got his life back.”

Speaking of hearts, mine was just about broken by Josh’s big news. He’s been accepted by Phillips Andover Academy, which is a fancy prep school way up in Massachusetts. Josh claims it isn’t fancy at all and that they have a very diverse student body which Graver doesn’t have—though we do have two Indians from India in our school and one of them, Vijay in the class below us, is so smart it’s scary. “If you do well at a prep school like Andover your chances of getting into a really first-rate college are very good,” Josh said.

“Because you want to be a doctor, like your dad?”

“Well, that’s a long way off. But when I get there I want to specialize in CP and other things like it. You can specialize in neurology and study what shuts down in the brain and try to figure out why.”

I didn’t say anything but I was thinking how much I’d miss him.

“But we have the whole summer to hang out,” he said as we rolled through the cafeteria line, choosing chicken fingers and chili.

“I’m going to stay at Graver right through high school because I need to stay in a warm climate.”

Josh found the right thing to say. “There’re lots of top-notch colleges in the South.”

“Trippy is coming down for two weeks and right after we graduate. Mom is going to drive us all the way to the Georgia primate refuge where the tamarins are. She said we could spend a day there to watch how they’re being rehabilitated. I wish you could come, Josh.”

“I bet I could talk Mom into it.” He reached his plate out for a chicken finger. “You want one of these? They’re full of trans fat.”

“Oh, sweet. I mean about coming to Georgia. And yuck, no. I’ll take the chili.”

“And what about the bear cubs? Do you know what happened to them?” I hadn’t thought about Buddy and Blossom since the abduction what with everything else that was going on.

“Brianna is coming over for supper tonight and I’m sure she’ll have some news.”