Janie Face to Face - By Caroline B. Cooney Page 0,2

it isn’t. People do not leave it or me alone. It is not that distant crime they keep alive. It is my agony as I try to be loyal. “Honor thy father and mother” is a Bible commandment I have tried to live by. But if I honor one mother and father, I dishonor the other.

If I am accepted at a college in New York City, I can easily visit both sets of parents—taking a train out of Penn Station to visit my Spring family in New Jersey or a train out of Grand Central to visit my Johnson family in Connecticut. I need my families, but I don’t want to live at home, because then I would have to choose one over the other.

New York City is full of strangers. I don’t want to be afraid of strangers anymore. I want to be surrounded by strangers and enjoy them. It is tempting to go to school in Massachusetts, because I have relatives and a boyfriend there. But I would lean on them, and I want to stand alone. I’ve never done that. It sounds scary. But it is time to try.

I know my grades are not high enough. My situation meant that I went back and forth between two high schools. At my high school in Connecticut, where I grew up and knew everybody, people were riveted by what was happening to me. They were kind, but they wanted to be part of it, as if I were a celebrity instead of somebody in a terrible position trying to find the way out. At my high school in New Jersey, my classmates had all grown up with my New Jersey brothers and sister, and they knew about the crime in a very different way, and sometimes acted as if I meant to damage my real family. As a result, I didn’t study hard enough. I promise that I will study hard enough at college.

I am asking you to accept me as a freshman, but I have something even more important to ask. Whether you accept me or not, will you please not talk about me with your faculty, your student body, or your city? Thank you.

She was accepted.

The Spring parents (the real ones) and the Johnson parents (the other ones) argued with Janie about her decision to attend college in Manhattan. “It’s too much for you,” they said. “You can’t deal with the pressure. You’ll drop out. You need to be with people who know your whole history.”

No, thought Janie Johnson. I need to be with people who do not know one single thing.

The New York City dormitory to which she had been assigned held six hundred kids. She would be nobody. It was a lovely thought. She did worry that she might introduce herself (“Hi. My name is Janie Johnson”) and they would say, “Oh, you’re the one who went and found your birth family and then refused to live with them. You’re the one the court had to order to go home again. You’re the one who abandoned your birth family a second time and went back and lived with your kidnap parents after all.”

Outsiders made it sound easy. As if she could have said to the only mother and father she had ever known, “Hey—it’s been fun. Whatever. I’m out of here,” and then trotted away. As if she could have become a person named Jennie Spring over a weekend.

One reason the kidnap story was so often in the news was that Janie was photogenic. She had masses of bright auburn curls, and a smile that made people love her when she hadn’t said a word.

For college, she wanted to look different.

Her sister, Jodie (the one Janie hadn’t met until they were both teenagers), had identical hair, but Jodie trimmed hers into tight low curls. Janie had enough problems with this sister; imitating her hairstyle did not seem wise. So for college, Janie yanked her hair back, catching it in a thick round bun because it was too curly to fall into a ponytail.

Back when she’d first arrived at her birth family’s house, Janie had shared a bedroom with the new sister, Jodie, and a bathroom with all the rest of the Springs. There were so many of them—a new mother, a new father, an older brother Stephen, an older sister Jodie, and younger twin brothers Brian and Brendan. If there was a way to say or do the wrong things with any of these people,