The Vanishing Girl by Josephine Ruby

Author:Josephine Ruby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

“YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY SURE THIS is okay?” I asked Shaggy.

“It’s okay,” Daphne said. “Just like it was okay the hundred other times you asked.”

“I mean, are you defining okay as in ‘totally legal and we’d get, like, a gold star for doing it’?” Shaggy asked. He stopped at the top of the steps, just before we got to the door of the police station. “Or, okay as in ‘probably we won’t get caught’?”

“I was kind of hoping for option A,” I admitted.

“In that case …”

“Not to resort to cliché, but they say you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs,” Daphne said, pretty obviously dying to go inside. “Which is a cliché for a reason. That reason being it’s true.”

“I don’t mind breaking eggs,” I told her. “I’m just not so sure about breaking my permanent record. Or the law, for that matter.”

“We’re not breaking anything,” Shaggy said quickly. “Just, like … bending. A little.”

“Look, you don’t have to come in with us if you don’t want to,” Daphne said, but the way she was looking at me … it reminded me of how she used to look when she begged me to come with her to her ballet lessons, or to ice cream with her arguing parents, or to visit her second cousin in San Francisco. Please, pretty please with a Dinkley on top, she would say, which made just little enough sense to make me laugh, and then I would always give in to whatever she wanted. Because back then I loved her, and I loved making her happy.

“We’re in this together,” I said, and together, we opened the door and went inside.

At this time of night, in this small of a town, there was only one guy in the front room, a young, uniformed officer with a blond mustache. His gaze was fixed on his computer.

“Hey, Manny,” Shaggy said, doing a good job of acting like a guy without a care in the world. In other words, acting exactly the way he always acted. I was starting to wonder how much of the Shaggy I knew was just for show. But why go to the trouble? “I’m just running in to grab my mom’s umbrella. She thinks she forgot it at the office again. Okay?”

“No problem,” the cop said, without ever turning away from the screen. He waved Shaggy by, without looking up long enough to notice the two girls and one dog who were following him.

“What happens tomorrow,” I whispered to Shaggy, “when he asks your mother about her umbrella?”

Shaggy let us into his mother’s office, which was unlocked. That made me feel an inch better—if there was no lock on the door, wasn’t that almost an invitation to go inside?

“Chill. Manny only works nights, and my mom only works days, so, like, never gonna happen. And even if it did? Manny’s so addicted to his gaming, he already, like, forgot we were here.” He flipped on the computer and typed in a password: 1 2 3 4.

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