Little Blog on the Prairie by Cathleen Davitt Bell

Author:Cathleen Davitt Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2006-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

18

Everybody absolutely panicked. It was hard to see anything in the suddenly dark room, but I could just make out Gavin running into a corner and Katie trying to climb behind the fridge. Matt crouched beneath the window like a cat ready to spring. I froze in the chair until Caleb took both my hands and pulled me down under the desk with him. In the moonlight coming through the windows I could see his grin. Nora quietly locked the door and leaned against it moments before Ron jiggled the handle, trying to get it to turn.

For a second, I don’t think any of us even breathed.

The handle rattled again and Ron shook the whole door as if he could break through the latch.

Then we heard his voice. “Who’s in here!” He tried the door again. “Betsy?”

The next time he tried the door it felt as if he was going to be able to break it down for sure. There was a collective rustling of bodies as we tried to make ourselves smaller, bracing for the moment when the door would swing open with a bang, the lights would snap on, and Ron would find us squeezed into corners and under tables and behind minifridges that were much too small. Large segments of our bodies were showing—whole arms, tops of heads, a shoe, a skirt. The idea that we could hide in such a small space was a joke. We might as well have stayed right where we were and just covered our own eyes.

“Betsy!” Ron said. We heard him mutter to himself, “I swear the light was on.”

It was all I could do not to let out a squeak.

Katie did, actually, squeal, but Matt clamped a hand over her mouth and I don’t think anyone who wasn’t in the room could have heard.

In the dark, Caleb squeezed my hand, which he was still holding. I squeezed his right back, and even knowing we were about to get busted, I felt a jolt of excitement. This was the second time he’d held my hand, the second time he’d picked me to hide with. Did hand-holding mean something different to him than it did to the rest of the world? He wouldn’t hold my hand if he didn’t actually like me, would he?

Ron tried the door one more time, and then said, “Hmmph.” We heard the crunching of leaves and sticks as he started to walk away.

Just then there was a crash about two inches from my head. Matt had lost his balance and accidentally knocked the keyboard off the desk. Nora leaped across the room, and grabbed the keyboard where it had fallen, as if by putting her hands on it she could somehow reverse time and prevent it from falling in the first place. The receding crunch of footsteps outside stopped, then started up again, this time heading quickly back our way.

Nora was frantically pointing at the window, and I thought she was trying to tell us to crawl out of it, but a) that would have been noisy, and b) I didn’t think we could fit.

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