Sarah was gone.
Sarah and Mr. Cromwell were both gone. They just up and disappeared. I went over to her apartment to see if she wanted to walk Naked with me. I didn’t trust myself to be alone after I almost let that dead-alive girl into the compound and I wanted to see if she would like to do another sleepover movie night. But she never answered the door. She said she’d be home when I texted her the day before, but she wasn’t there. I stayed at her door knocking and knocking, and then I realized that I could just call her. So I pulled out my phone, punched in her number, and waited for her to pick up. Instead of picking up, I heard her phone ring with that ringtone of hers that annoys me. It was some old cartoon theme that she said was a “comforting link to my past.” I understand comforting memories, but this ringtone was from a show called the Rugrats and it sounded like a drunk organ-grinding monkey.
It also sounded like it was coming from inside the apartment.
I put my ear to the door. That was the definitely the sound of her phone. If she and Mr. Cromwell went out, why would she leave it behind? I hung up and was just about to leave with Naked when I thought, “What the heck…” and tried to open her door. It totally worked; they didn’t lock it at all.
I stepped in and I could tell right away something was off. Not wrong, just different. If something were wrong then Naked would have been barking away at the danger. I called out, “Sarah! Mr. Cromwell!” several times as I walked through the apartment, but my voice just bounced around the place. Naked walked by my side, sniffing everything like she was trying to find something interesting. We looked at the living room. There were a few gaps in the bookcase where books might have been, but other than that everything looked normal. We looked at the kitchen. It was showroom clean, like it hadn’t been cooked in ever. We looked at the office and noticed Mr. Cromwell’s laptop was gone, but that was it. We looked at Mr. Cromwell’s room. It was too clean, with a bed made up with super-starched sheets that looked neat, but uncomfortable. There weren’t even pictures on the walls, just books and more books carefully stacked at the side of his bed.
Sarah’s room was nothing like Mr. Cromwell’s. It was bright and playful. Sarah is eleven and I’m ten, but you’d think it was the other way around, because her room was more kiddish and girly than mine. KC said that Sarah’s mind kind of froze at the age when she was last happy, so she wouldn’t have been at all surprised at how it looked. The walls were light pink and they had lots of hammocks filled with stuffed animals in them. She even had those glow-in-the-dark plastic stars on her ceiling. Maybe it wasn’t Sarah who decorated her room; maybe it was Mr. Cromwell. Mr. Cromwell’s wife and kids went missing when the poisoned rain started coming down, and Sarah’s parents died getting her to the refugee center, so Mr. Cromwell adopted Sarah and treated her like his own daughter. People could tell Sarah was adopted because Mr. Cromwell has lovely cocoa skin and Sarah is old Disney-Princess white, but it still seemed like she had always been his daughter. When I saw her room, I wondered if Mr. Cromwell was trying hard to make up for what he and Sarah lost.
I noticed two things missing from Sarah’s bedroom. The first thing that was missing was her favorite fuzzy blue monkey, the kind that had magnet hands so it could wrap its arms around you or hang off of stuff. It would have been cute if it weren’t so big. It was almost the size of Sarah’s schoolbag and it gave me the creeps because I felt like its eyes were always watching me.
The second thing missing was Linus’ blanket. Linus was the nickname of one of KC’s friends in the Mclean High School Refugee Center. She got it because she always carried this tatty and faded old blanket with her, just like the kid from the Peanuts comic. She handed it to Sarah right before she died from an RB bite, and Sarah kept it with her ever since.
Naked trotted over to the side of Sarah’s bed and started sniffing at something. It was a book I let Sarah borrow, Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends. Naked didn’t care about my book. Naked cared about the sandwich that was on top of the book. I was really surprised Mr. Cromwell allowed Sarah to eat in bed when the rest of their apartment was so tidy. Naked looked at me with her big brown eyes and asked, “Please?” with them, like she was starving or something. She was good at looking hungry despite the fact she had grown from fit chocolate lab to fat brown walrus since we moved to the dome. Houston even started calling her a “Flabrador Retriever.” I would have got in trouble for feeding her more scraps, but no one was watching and I didn’t think Sarah would have cared. “Okay!” I called out while throwing the sandwich high in the air. “Catch!” And despite her walrus-shape, she managed to jump up and do just that.
I picked up my book while she wolfed it down. I flipped through it before I left, and as I did, I noticed writing on the page that had the poem about the finger-eater that lives up your nose.
It was in big bubble letters so it had to be Sarah’s handwriting. She wrote just one line.
“It’s time to go home.”