The Girl Is Trouble by Kathryn Miller Haines Page B

backed up, took me by the hand, and pulled me in the opposite direction, across the waterlogged baseball field. The rain had stopped, but its damage was done. Thick mud threatened to swallow my saddle shoes with every step.
    Finally, we reached the edge of the school property where only a chain-link fence separated us from freedom. In the shade provided by the baseball bleachers, I turned to thank him. “That was swell of you. Thanks.”
    “Thanks aren’t necessary, but payback might be.”
    “I guess that’s fair. What’s your price?”
    “You can start by getting your friend Pearl Harbor to find a way to excuse my absence for the morning.”
    I cringed at his use of Pearl’s nickname, but I didn’t correct him. “All right.”
    He removed a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and tapped one out. He offered me the package and I declined with a shake of my head. “So where you got to be?”
    Why not tell him? It’s not like Benny would squeal. “Yorkville.”
    “Huh?”
    “It’s a German neighborhood on the Upper East Side.”
    He lit the cigarette one-handed like he’d been doing it all his life. “I know where Yorkville is, Nancy Drew. I’m just wondering why you want to go to someplace like that.”
    “Don’t call me Nancy Drew,” I said.
    “Relax. It’s just a joke.” He exhaled a circle of smoke. “So what’s with the destination?”
    “It’s where my mother died.”
    “Where she killed herself?” Had Suze told him that, or did everyone at school know my strange, sad story?
    “Maybe.”
    His eyebrow lifted. Did you lie about that, too? he seemed to ask.
    I shrugged. Who cared if anyone trusted me anymore? I certainly didn’t.
    “You look like you’ve got the weight of the world on you,” he said.
    I took the cigarette pack from him and pulled one out for myself. They were Lucky Strikes, the ones in the green package that signs on the subway declared had gone to war. I’d never smoked before, but at that moment I desperately wanted to, as though the warmth it provided could take away the chill that settled in my bones the night before. Benny lit it for me and I held it at an awkward angle close to my face so I could feel its heat without inhaling its smoke.
    “My pop has a safe,” I said. “He left it open a couple of days ago and I found some photographs. Of my mother.” The whole story spilled out. Benny listened in silence, all traces of skepticism wiped from his face. He didn’t move as I told my tale, not even taking time to ash the cigarette that dangled from his lips and threatened to drop to the ground. When I finished, he was silent for a beat, though you could see the gears in his head jumping into action.
    “You have to go to that hotel and talk to that maid.”
    I wished Pearl was there to hear his conviction. This was the kind of help I needed. “I know. That’s my plan.”
    “You can’t go alone,” he said.
    “Are you volunteering for the job?”
    “I might be. For a couple of hall passes.”
    “Okay,” I said. “It’s a deal.” I finally took a pull from my own cigarette and immediately regretted it. The acrid smoke filled my lungs and made me want to vomit.
    Benny took the butt from me and tossed it onto the damp grass. “Maybe stick to one violation a day,” he said. “Today, you skip school. Tomorrow, you can add cigs to the mix.”

 
     
    CHAPTER
     
    8
    “IS THIS WHERE YOU LIVED?” asked Benny. We were on the Upper East Side, my old stomping grounds. Up until the spring this had been my neighborhood, my home one of the large apartment buildings with a doorman who greeted you by name, my school the one where all the girls wore plaid skirts and crisp white blouses.
    “Near here,” I told Benny.
    He let out a low whistle that I could guess at the meaning of. To someone who had nothing, it had to seem much better to have once been rich and lost everything than to have never had anything to begin with.
    I hadn’t expected for us to lose all of