Not-Just-Anybody Family by Betsy Byars

Author:Betsy Byars [Byars, Betsy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-0267-6
Publisher: Holiday House
Published: 2013-01-02T21:09:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

Maggie Alone

Maggie was still waiting on the sidewalk, looking up at the lighted vent with her mouth open.

If she lived to be a hundred, she would never forget Vern’s desperate leap for the building. He had flung himself through the air, his arms and legs churning like an Olympic jumper’s. Then he slammed into the wall, and his thin hands gripped the ledge. He had hung there for what seemed to Vern and Maggie to be the longest minute and a half in the history of recorded time.

Maggie kept waiting for him to fall to the ground. Vern kept hanging there.

Maggie glanced around. She wished she had something to put under him to break his fall.

When Maggie saw the board, she got a brainstorm, the first of her life. “Hold on,” she yelled.

She took the fallen board, upended it, shoved it up against the wall, and gave Vern’s dangling feet a boost. It was all Vern needed.

One foot found a toehold. His other knee pushed his body out from the wall. He worked the toe of his shoe between the bricks, and he pulled himself up six inches. His toe moved up a brick.

Vern inched his way up the rest of the wall, moving as carefully as a mountain climber, his tennis shoes digging into the wall, his hands reaching into the vent. It was a slow, superhuman, agonizing effort that Maggie watched from directly below.

She watched Vern wiggle eel-like through the vent. He had to turn his head sideways, the vent was so small, and she turned her head sideways too. She had sucked in her breath as he, too, had done to get his chest through the vent. She pulled in her stomach as he went over the sill.

For a few seconds there had been just his thin legs sticking out of the vent. Then they disappeared in a scissors kick, and Vern was in the city jail.

The leap had been so exciting, and her part in it so spectacular, that Maggie had wanted to jump up and down and cheer. It had been like something out of the circus, the most exciting, successful moment of her entire life.

Now, however, with the realization that Vern was inside with Pap and that she was outside with nobody, all she felt was lonely.

“Vern!” she called softly.

It had been ten minutes since Vern’s legs had disappeared.

“Vern?”

Tears came to her eyes and spilled onto her cheeks. Usually when Maggie cried, she wiped her tears away with the ends of her braids. It was the best part of having braids. That and crossing them under her nose and making a mustache. Those were the only two reasons she went to all the trouble of making the braids. Now she was too miserable to care.

“Vern?”

Far above her, in the light of the vent, Vern’s small, round face appeared. Maggie lifted her arms like a mother urging her child to jump.

Vern said just one sentence before he slipped back into the jail and out of sight.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.