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Note to Readers
“Emily’s tongue was bluer than mine,” Kelly Roberts blurted in the back seat of the police car, the stinky blanket scratching her bare shoulders.
Why she’d thought of the raspberry slushes they’d been slurping just before it happened, she wasn’t sure, just as she couldn’t figure out why the lady cop sitting next to her kept patting her arm like she was her mom or something. That itched, too. And made her want to jump out of the car and run.
“You sure you’re warm enough?”
“I’m fine.” But she couldn’t stop shaking, even if it was the hottest day in June so far. She would never be warm again.
She let the officer pull the awful blanket high enough on her shoulders to cover most of her freckles and pressed her cheek against the window to get a better look outside.
Past the yellow tape that had been strung between two trees, Emily’s new lime-green mountain bike lay abandoned across the sidewalk. It had crashed there when the scary man leaped from behind the bushes and yanked her off the seat. Her cup was on its side, the melted drink a blue puddle on the concrete.
Something was clogging Kelly’s throat, and her eyes burned, so she shifted her head. If only her own purple, hand-me-down bike didn’t have to be in the next spot she looked. On the grass farther down the sidewalk. The exact same place where she’d dropped it when she’d unfrozen enough to scream. Once she’d started, she couldn’t stop.
“Your parents will be here in a couple of minutes. Do you think you can give a description… I mean tell us what the man who took your friend looked like?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
As if she could ever forget anything about him. The closed-lipped smile. That raspy voice and his tight jaw while Emily had kicked and scratched to escape, her black ponytail whipping from side to side. A movie villain come to life, with wild eyes and hairy arms. And the only person who could have helped her friend had been too scared to do anything but watch.
That strange lightness she’d had inside her belly a few times in the past half hour floated up again. Was that relief? What kind of friend was she to take comfort in the fact that the bad man had grabbed Emily instead of her? Was that why her eyes were dry when she should have been sobbing by now? Why the officer kept patting her arm and sneaking peeks at her face? No one could ever know the truth. That she was a bad person. That she