The Rule of Threes, Marcy Campbell [short novels to read .TXT] 📗

other. A pegboard hung on the wall with a bunch of paintbrushes and other tools hanging from it, and I wondered if it all belonged to the boyfriend who’d made Tony help with his business. Was that the same guy Tony had tried to get away from through the coal door? At least Tony had a real father now, one who not only shared his DNA but who acted like a dad.

Just then, the furnace let out a series of bumps and groans that scared me, and I sped right out of the creepy, dusty basement, sprinting up the stairs into a kitchen.

“Hello?” I called. “Mrs. Miller?” I didn’t know if that was Tony’s mom’s last name. Lots of kids at our school had last names that were different from their parents’.

The kitchen was tiny but clean, except for a few dishes in the sink. There was a little table in front of a window facing a square patch of backyard grass surrounded by a chain-link fence, and two chairs pulled up to the table. I could picture Tony and his mom there, having breakfast.

On the table was a white milk-glass vase, the kind that went for fifty cents at the Shoppe, and there were a couple dead wildflowers in it, their fallen petals crisp and fanning out around the base. I remembered Tony saying his mom used to try and make the place pretty even though they didn’t have much money for decorations and things.

I heard a pounding at the front door. Tony! I’d forgotten to let him in.

I walked out of the kitchen, through a little dining room filled with nothing except a half-dozen boxes, and into the living room, where . . . where I saw her.

“Mrs. Miller? Mrs. Miller!” Oh God, please, please don’t be . . . please.

I slapped her face like I’d seen in the movies. “Mrs. Miller!” I yelled into her ear. Her lips looked completely the wrong color. They were bluish.

“Wake up!” I yelled. I heard pounding, and I didn’t know where it was coming from, but I thought it was in my ears, my chest. My whole body was beating.

I took her hand, but it felt cold and clammy. I dropped it, put my ear to her chest, and I heard something, a heartbeat, but it was faint and not going da-dum da-dum da-dum like it was supposed to but more like da-dum . . . and then really fast: da-dumda-dumda-dum.

I shrugged off my backpack, unzipped the pocket, pulled out the Narcan box, and tore it open. I was always one to read directions first, but there was no time. It was a weird-looking little device, but it had a nozzle that looked just like my mom’s allergy spray.

I shoved the tip into Tony’s mom’s nose, pressed up on the plunger underneath it and heard a hissssss as the medicine sprayed out. The next sound I heard was glass breaking just a few feet away from me and the thud of a rock landing on the living room floor. Tony punched at the glass, making a hole big enough for him to get through, though his jacket snagged, tearing his sleeve.

“What are you doing?” he started shouting at me.

I threw him my phone. “Nine-one-one!” I said. “Now!” But Tony wasn’t listening to me. He knelt next to his mom and held her hand. “Mom! Can you hear me?”

I couldn’t believe it, but she answered, in this soft, scratchy voice. She answered.

“Tony?” she said, and my heart nearly exploded with relief. It was just like that girl, Claire, had said at the assembly, how her cousin had seen Narcan used on somebody, and it was like they’d come back from the dead.

“You’re bleeding,” Tony’s mom said to him, looking at his hands, his arm. “What did you do?” she asked in that tone that all parents get when their kids hurt themselves, apparently, no matter what.

I was wondering whether I should still call 911 when I heard slamming car doors outside and saw a swirl of red lights through the broken window.

“Why did you call?” Tony asked me. “She’s fine.”

“I didn’t!” I said, but then the door was pushed in, and two male cops were right up in Tony’s mom’s face, slipping on latex gloves while they asked her a million questions and shined lights into her eyes. Tony and I stood back against the wall until another cop came in, a woman with a long black braid under her cap, who ushered us into the kitchen. She said the upstairs neighbor had called the police when he’d seen us messing around with the windows.

There were cookies. There was a thermos full of hot chocolate. There was a blanket. Later, I wouldn’t remember where those items had come from, only that the police officer, Sharon she said to call her, had seemingly pulled them out of thin air. There were also questions, lots of them, about how we’d found Tony’s mom, and about the Narcan, which I had to admit to stealing from the nurse’s office. We were sitting at the little kitchen table and Sharon was standing, writing on a notepad. I did all the talking because Tony was crying, his head down on his arms, the blanket covering him.

At one point, Tony raised his head to ask if his mom was going to be okay, and Sharon said yes, but that she’d “have a long road ahead of her.”

“Are you taking her to jail?” Tony asked, his lip quivering.

I played with the dead flower petals. I didn’t know if I wanted to hear the answer. I could see how upset Tony was at the possibility and yet I couldn’t help thinking that if she went to jail at least she wouldn’t hurt herself, and Tony would be safe too, with us. I felt kind of bad thinking that, but then Sharon said she would be going to the hospital, not jail. Whew. That was a better option.

“I’m afraid she’s going to be in a world of hurt,” Sharon told us