The Missing Girl by Norma Fox Mazer

“she’ll tell you that Grandma told her the most important thing she ever learned.”
    And then, at exactly the same moment, like a perfect chorus, the two of you say it together, just the way Mommy says it, in her hoarse voice: “Waste not, want not!”
    It’s bad to make fun of Mommy, you know you shouldn’t do it, but you squeal with laughter, and just then, when you’re all full of love for Stevie, and all perky and proud that you were so clever in helping her forget her nightmare, just then she says, “Go back to your own bed, you’re sweaty and stinky.”
    “I was going to sleep with you,” you say, and you try to snuggle in closer.
    She gives you a little shove. “I can’t sleep with you puff-ing in my ear like that.”
    “You didn’t even thank me for the nightmare—”
    “Thank you for the nightmare!” Stevie’s laughing again, but at you, this time. “Thank you, thank you, okay? Go .”
    77

    So you climb back down to your own bed, which is cold now, and you try to get comfortable, but you’re so awake you can’t sleep. Then you hear Stevie snoring away above you, and it’s not fair! You get all teary thinking how Stevie kicked you out of her bed after you were so nice to her, and you decide you’ll never help her with another nightmare, never, ever. And that’s the last thing you remember until morning comes.
    78

    SOMETHING DRASTIC
    THIS WAY COMES
    THAT DAY WHEN Beauty entered the woods was one of those rare early April days when the temperature suddenly shoots up twenty degrees, and winter briefly turns into spring. Beauty was stealing a couple of hours for herself, a chunk of time free of her job at the florist shop, free of her sisters and her mother’s endless needs. The sun had been in and out all day, and the ice on Newton’s Pond, where Beauty and her sisters skated every winter, was soft.
    In the coldest months Beauty could walk across the long frozen pond without a thought, but now she went around it and past the boulder that looked like a hunched-over giant. As a child, she had thought nothing in the world 79

    could be bigger than that boulder. She patted it and turned into the woods and onto the worn path that led to the top of Farley Mountain.
    Mountain? Not really. Just a hill, although a pretty big hill. A half hour’s climb, and you had a 360-degree view of the countryside. Bears lived here, and stories about them were rampant. A bear coming down into Mallory and knocking on someone’s plate-glass door, bears in pairs rampaging through garbage, bears chasing hikers and sometimes catching them. You could believe the stories or not, but last year, in late summer, a bear had happened upon Beauty—or she had happened upon the bear—
    when she’d been on this same trail. Maybe she’d cried out. She’d never been exactly sure of what happened, except that she’d barely had time to be scared when the bear turned around and lumbered off.
    “Huh,” her father had said when she came home and told the story, “old Mr. Bear was more scared of you than you was of him.” And he’d reassured her that black bears, the kind that inhabited their woods and hills, were not aggressive. “Pretty harmless,” he said. “Leave ’em alone, and they’ll leave you alone. They sure don’t want to eat you. They favor berries and things like that. Only thing is, 80

    you don’t want to meet up with a mama, that might be another story.”
    Beauty had all this in mind as she moved up the sodden path. The trees were still bare, the bark just beginning to show a reddish tint. All at once the wind came up, and glancing at the sky, she saw thick wads of gray clouds scudding from north to west. The weather was going to change. She wrapped her scarf more securely around her neck and kept moving.
    At the top the sun was shining again, but it was colder up here, windier, too. She stood on a rock and looked out at the immense and distant world. This moment was what she had come for: the radiant