Under the Light - By Laura Whitcomb Page 0,71

both stumbled. Jenny caught herself and the woman dropped her bag.

“Sorry!” Jenny helped her pick up two books that had slid nearly to the curb.

“Where are you flying off to so fast?” asked the woman.

“I don’t know,” said Jenny, handing her the books.

“You don’t know?” The woman smiled at her. “Are you lost?”

“No.” Jenny thought for a moment. “I’m just running.”

“Do I know you?” asked the woman.

“I don’t think so,” said Jenny.

The woman shrugged. “Well, be safe.”

Jenny nodded and turned to go, but the urge to run had subsided, it seemed, because she walked slowly toward the next corner.

I didn’t know this woman, but she must have known Jenny after all, because she watched her back for a second and then called, “Hey!”

Jenny turned back.

“Are you my Runaway?”

CHAPTER 29

Jenny

THIS WOMAN WHO HAD ALMOST thrown me to the ground was staring at me, fascinated, but I’m sure I didn’t know her. She wore hippie clothes and had a henna flower stenciled on the back of her hand. She wasn’t from church, obviously. She’d been walking out of Reflections, a bookstore my parents wouldn’t be caught dead in. No way she was one of the teachers from school. For a moment I thought she might be someone’s mom—she made me think of a lullaby. But I would definitely have remembered seeing this woman in the school parking lot—she wore dreadlocks under her headband. I couldn’t think where in the world we could have met, but she started walking toward me.

“Do you remember me?” she asked.

She smiled at me in such an open way, I stood still and waited for her.

“No?” She planted herself in front of me, her eyes tearing up. “Are you okay now?”

I nodded.

“You found your way home, did you?”

The rasp in her voice and the way she wrinkled her nose when she smiled were familiar.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked again.

Like a forgotten dream opening up, I remembered watching her for hours from the top shelf of a bookcase. But that was crazy. “Did you sing to me?” I asked her.

Gayle’s arms flew open like wings and caught me up in her rough wool warmth. “My little bird,” she said.

Every second of my lost days came back as I clung to her. My first glance of my own soulless body, the cavernous museum rooms and running at the mirrors in ballet class and the view from a hundred-foot tree in the forest and the hiss of waves on the face of a midnight beach.

And finding myself in an empty field with a boy who could fly.

Gayle’s hug was a safe place to cry. “I remember,” I told her over and over. “I remember.”

She invited me to come in for tea, and I would have loved to sit in the back room of the shop with her and tell her my story, but I had to hurry.

I borrowed Gayle’s phone, but that same friend of the family answered.

“Billy’s not home,” said the man. “He’s at the hospital.”

My joy was ripped away at the idea that he might be hurt. “What happened?”

“An infection or a fever or something.”

I had the terrible feeling that I had remembered too late. “Which hospital?”

“St. Jude’s,” he said. “Who’s this?”

I was afraid this friend of the family would know that Billy had broken up with me, so I just hung up without answering. I returned the phone to Gayle and would’ve asked for a ride, but she only had a bicycle.

She did look up the address of the hospital and which bus to take. She even gave me enough quarters to get there and drove me to the stop on her handlebars. But when I arrived at the hospital, it didn’t look right. There was no emergency room entrance.

I ran to the front desk and said I had come to see Billy Blake. When the receptionist asked if I was a family member I lied. When she made me sign in, my hand was shaking as I wrote Jenny Blake. The line above it was scrawled with the words Mitch and Billy Blake.

I was pointed in the right direction and kept repeating the room number in my head as if I’d forget it and be lost in a maze of corridors.

But when I got to the right room, the door stood open and Billy was not lying in a bed hooked up to antibiotics—he was standing with Mitch.

Their eyes were red. Mitch had his arm draped around Billy’s neck as they listened to the