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“Of course they do,” the girl said, obviously surprised as well. Soon they heard the sound of water splashing in the sink. “Anyway, you can go now. I’ll catch her when she comes out.”
“No, how about you can go and I’ll catch her when she comes out,” Bug said. Not only was the cat rare, it was some sort of super-genius, toilet-flushing cat. Maybe she could fetch! Maybe she could balance pineapples on her nose! Maybe she could juggle chipmunks! He wasn’t going anywhere.
“She’s not yours!” the girl hissed. Suddenly, she got paler—if that was even possible—and her grey eyes went all silvery, like two nickels. Quickly, she pulled the sleeves of her red sweatshirt over her hands.
The girl was weirder than everyone said she was. “What’s wrong with you?” Bug said.
“What’s wrong with who?” said a voice. Mrs Terwiliger glided down the hallway. “Chicken! I’ve been looking for you. What are you two doing loitering near the girls’ dormitory?”
“Nothing,” Gurl and Bug said at once.
Mrs Terwiliger’s eyes narrowed, staring down at them both. “Gurl, you look pale,” she said, sounding more accusatory than compassionate. (And she enunciated the word “pale” with so much force that she spat.)
“I’m just tired,” croaked the girl. “I think I need a nap.” She tugged at the sleeve of her sweatshirt again. Was it Bug’s imagination or did the sweatshirt seem to be fading somehow? It had been red, but now it looked pink. And there was a faint pattern in it that he hadn’t noticed before, like the lines in a brick wall. Just like the painted brick of the hallway.
Mrs Terwiliger’s overwide lips turned down at the corners and Bug wondered if she had noticed the same strange things. But all she said was, “A nap is a wonderful idea. Go.” She waved her bony hand and Gurl practically ran into the girls’ dorm.
Then Mrs Terwiliger crooked a finger at Bug, the fluorescent lights shining off her tight, waxy skin. “Come, Chicken. Instead of punching the walls, I’d like you to help me move a filing cabinet. There’s a good boy!”
She turned and floated off. Bug started to follow, peeking inside the open door of the girls’ dormitory as he passed. And that’s when he saw her. Uh, didn’t see her. Because the girl wasn’t there. The room was empty.
Bug opened his mouth to shout—because what else do you do when a weird, weepy girl ups and totally disappears?—but then he thought better of it. Something extremely funky was going on with Pasty Gurl, but he’d keep his mouth shut.
That is, he would keep it shut in exchange for a certain toilet-flushing, rolling pin-playing, very rare, genius cat.
“Chicken!” said Mrs Terwiliger. “Move it along!”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, a sly grin on his buggy face. “I’m moving it as fast as I can.”
Chapter 5 Attack of the Umbrella Man (#ulink_82b7e9a7-326c-5a6e-992e-e7f17649d740)
GURL HURRIED ALONG THE CITY streets, the cat peeking out from an old backpack. She’d had to wait nearly an hour for the other orphans to fall asleep. (Digger kept untucking the sheets on Persnickety’s bed, just to make her cry, and stealing Tot’s doll, just to make her cry.) When Gurl finally slipped from the window and out of the front gate of Hope House, it was close to eleven.
The air outside was crisp and fresh, and Gurl welcomed it. Inside the orphanage everything seemed confused and difficult to figure out, so much so that she rarely tried. Outside the orphanage, however, her thoughts were clear. Something was happening to her, something weird and scary and important, and she needed to understand it, control it. For that, she’d go back to the place it first happened: the alley behind Luigi’s. She needed to see if it would happen again.
Plus, she needed a snack.
Luigi’s Dumpster yielded a feast. Tangy Italian meat loaf, delicate squash ravioli, fettucini with peas, prosciutto and cream sauce. Gurl offered the meat loaf to the cat, who ate a few bites before turning her attention to the fettucini. Gurl munched on the meat loaf as she watched the cat drag a long noodle from the packet and proceed to shorten it, bite by bite. “You know, I’ve been doing the same thing Mrs Terwiliger does,” Gurl said. “I’ve been calling you ‘cat’, the most obvious thing, even in my own head!” She smacked her forehead to demonstrate the foolishness of this. The cat stopped nibbling on the noodle to stare. “I could call you Laverna, like that flyer said. Hey, Laverna!” The cat blinked, bored. “Maybe not,” said Gurl. “So, instead of calling you what you are, which is easy, or calling you something that describes you, which is boring, why don’t I call you something that you like?” The cat blinked slowly in the way of cats, the way that said they were listening carefully and you had better say something interesting for a change. “Why don’t I call you Noodle?”
The newly named Noodle uttered a short mew, which Gurl took as an OK, before getting back to her fettucini. “Noodle it is, then,” Gurl said, feeling immensely pleased with herself. She had never named anything before. No wonder Mrs Terwiliger liked it so much, even though she was awful at it.
Gurl finished the meat loaf and polished off the ravioli in a couple of swift bites, eyeing her own hand as she did. She wondered what triggered it, what exactly made her fade. She could feel the tingling in her skin that afternoon, knew it was happening and was terrified that Mrs Terwiliger or that crazy boy—Bug or Chicken or whatever his name was—would notice. They didn’t seem to, or at least neither of them said anything. But she didn’t like the look on Bug Boy’s face as he turned to follow Mrs Terwiliger. It was a smug, self-satisfied look, the one everyone seemed to give her. A look that said Gurl was doomed, beaten before she even started.
“No, I’m not,” she said and her words echoed in the dark alley. Noodle’s whiskers twitched in disapproval. “Sorry,” she said, softer now. If she had to choose between being noticed and being ignored, she would take ignored any day. Bad things happened when she was noticed.
Noodle curled up in Gurl’s lap and Gurl leaned back against the brick, just as she did that first night, and stared up at the sky and the buildings that reached ecstatically towards it. A newspaper wafted on the wind, looking beautiful and fluttering and alive. Gurl felt a thousand things at once. Small and big. Safe and free. Invisible and yet exposed. In her mind, she rifled through her daydreams and found a favourite: a girl stands ankle-deep on a beach with the ocean roaring in front of her. Behind her, a boy shuffles out of a cozy cottage and calls out to the girl: “Mom and Dad say it’s time to come inside now.”
Noodle shifted in Gurl’s lap and mewled softly. “I know,” said Gurl. “We have to do what we came to do.” She held up her hands. “They look the same, Noodle. Just regular old hands.” With her nose, Noodle nudged her fingers. “Yes, concentrate. That’s a good idea.” Gurl focused all her attention on her hands, willing them to fade. She tried harder, squinting with the effort. After a while, her right wrist seemed to look a bit nubby like the pavement beneath her, but it hadn’t changed colour and nothing else seemed different at all. Her hands dropped to nestle in Noodle’s fur. “This is not going to work,” she said. “I didn’t even think about it both times it happened before. It just happened. Maybe it was because I was scared?”
Gurl sat in the alley until her butt and the cat fell asleep. Now what should she do? Would she just keep blinking on and off like a light bulb, never knowing when it was going to happen next? But she couldn’t sit here all night. Though it was only September, the temperature had dropped a few degrees and she was getting a little cold. She tapped the cat to wake her and helped her into the backpack. Gurl would have to try again on another night, maybe in another place.
Gurl slipped the pack on, careful not to jostle Noodle. At least the ravioli was good, she told herself. The trip was not a total waste. She paused at the entrance to the street and looked right and left. It was so late that the city seemed deserted and Gurl felt a flutter of nervousness in her stomach, a flutter that matched the trash dancing in the wind. Even Noodle seemed to sense Gurl’s anxiety and pulled her head inside the bag.
Nothing to worry about, Gurl thought. You’ll be fine. She straightened the straps of the pack before heading out on to the street. Walking briskly, Gurl glanced behind her every so often. Wan light pooled beneath the street lamps, giving the air a sickly, yellowish hue, while the bulbs themselves issued a low, eerie buzz.
Plink!
Gurl whirled around, scanning the street. The trash danced, slick puddles glistened, but no one followed her. This is the city and it never sleeps, she thought. Probably someone kicking a stone down the sidewalk blocks away. She told herself that she was being paranoid. And then she told herself to walk faster. For about the billionth time in her life, she wished she could fly.
Pssst!
Again, Gurl turned to face an empty street. But wait: there, in the darkened doorway of a shuttered shop, was someone lurking in the shadows? She stared, straining to see. On the opposite side of the street, a black dome rose from the subway entrance and Gurl’s stomach clenched. But the black dome turned out to be an umbrella, an overcoat-clad person beneath it. Gurl sighed with relief. Some businessman coming home late from the office. Well, if he thought it was OK to be out this late at night, then she was probably fine. She glanced back at the businessman, who held the umbrella so low that she couldn’t see his face. Like Gurl, he didn’t fly, but walked in a swaying lurch that favoured one leg. She felt a little sorry for him, not only unable to fly but also barely limping along. Imagine if the weather were bad. If it were stormy? It would take him for ever to walk a few blocks!
Gurl frowned. But if it wasn’t stormy, why was he carrying an umbrella?
She turned and started to walk again, a little faster than before. So the guy was a little strange; it didn’t mean he was dangerous. Maybe he just liked to be prepared.
From the backpack, a paw batted her ear. “Yeah,” Gurl whispered. Noodle tapped her again. “What is it?” The cat growled low in her throat, reared up from the backpack and nipped Gurl on the earlobe. “Ouch!” Gurl yelped.
Behind her, a gurgling voice said, “Ouch!”
Gurl whirled around so fast that Noodle almost fell from the pack. The man, who had been at least a block and a half away, now stood just a few feet from her. His overcoat, which had looked fine from a distance, was torn and stained with food and mud and things that Gurl didn’t want to think about. He wore two different shoes, one black, one brown, both slashed at the top to make room for long horny toenails. The umbrella, which he still held low over his face, was lacy with holes, as if someone had sprayed acid on it.
The man giggled, lifting the umbrella just a little, so that she could see the fine grey down that covered his cheeks, the teeth that he had filed to points. “Nice kitty,” he whispered. “Nice, nice kitty.”
And then he said: “Run.”
Gurl took off, running faster than she ever thought she could, Noodle bouncing in the pack on her back. But she could hear the man-thing panting and giggling, the slap-drag of his worn shoes on the sidewalk as he lurched after her. Frantic now, her heart pounding so hard that she thought it would pop out of her mouth, she feinted left but ran right. She could feel something tug at the backpack and heard Noodle’s hiss. “No!” she screamed and stumbled as the pack was wrenched from her shoulders. Reaching back to grab it, she fell to the ground, hitting her funny bone on the pavement and badly bruising her hip. She flipped to her back and squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for the giggling toothy thing to attack. She could smell his hot breath, stinking of trash and bones and rot.
“Nice?” said the thing. She opened her eyes to see him standing over her, cradling the backpack in one arm. He lifted the umbrella and sniffed the air with a nose that seemed unusually long and mobile, like the nose of a rat. And that’s when she felt the tingling in her hands, in her face, across her whole body, and knew that it had happened again. That the thing couldn’t see her any more.
Slowly and as quietly as she could, Gurl got to her feet. Noodle poked her face from the top of the pack and mewled. Burbling absently, the thing pulled the flap down, sniffing the air. Then he started to shamble back the way he came. Slapdrag, slap-drag. Gurl tiptoed behind him and gave his overcoat a rough tug. The thing grunted and twirled on its short leg, almost stumbling itself. “Bad,” he said. “Bad, bad, bad.”
He clutched the cat tighter and Gurl could hear Noodle’s plaintive mews through the canvas.
“Give me my cat!” said Gurl and she ripped the umbrella out of his hand.
The thing gasped and covered his red eyes with his forearm, as if against a strong light. Gurl dropped the umbrella and grabbed the backpack, which promptly disappeared in her grip. The thing gibbered and wailed, “Kitty! Kitty! Kitteeeee!” She could still hear him wailing two, three, five blocks away. And then she was standing at the gates of Hope House, chest heaving like a bellows, and she couldn’t hear him any more. But she could see herself again, her own arms and legs plainly visible in the dim light. She hugged Noodle close and the animal’s low purr filled her with joy.
“It was you,” she whispered in Noodle’s ear. “Every time I changed it was because I was afraid—not for me, but for you.”
Armed with this realisation, she opened the gate and crossed the yard. She had just slipped around the side of the dormitory when a hot white light blinded her. Someone snatched the backpack and then grabbed the lapel of her jacket.
“Hello, my dear,” Mrs Terwiliger said, reeling Gurl in close.
Chapter 6 Mrs Terwiliger’s Monkeys (#ulink_6434ba57-1316-539e-ae15-675b7468d002)
MRS TERWILIGER HAD ONE HAND on the strap of the backpack and one hand on Gurl’s arm in a death grip as she half flew, half dragged Gurl across the yard to the main building. “I don’t know what gets into you children. After all I do for you, to just run off like that! And you can stop struggling,” she said. “I might lose sight of you, but I won’t lose you altogether.” She lifted the backpack so that Gurl could see it. “I won’t lose your little friend either.”
More worried for Noodle than herself, Gurl stopped struggling. “Where are you taking us?” Gurl squeaked.
“Where do you think?” snapped Mrs Terwiliger.
Another orphanage? The animal shelter? Jail? Gurl couldn’t imagine. Because of her fear, she tingled all over. It seemed that her body was as confused as her head and flashed an alarming array of colours and textures. One arm was striped like Mrs Terwiliger’s coat, the other arm seemed to be made of red brick. Both her legs somehow mimicked the shadows behind them, so that it appeared she had four instead of two. She kept silent until they reached the front door of the main building.
“Open the door and be quiet about it,” Mrs Terwiliger said. “We don’t want to wake anyone else now, do we? Children need their rest.”
Gurl clutched the brass door handle, noticing that her hand immediately turned the same bright yellow colour. Mrs Terwiliger noticed too. “That’s quite a talent. Better than flying, that talent is,” she said, not talking as much as muttering to herself as she led Gurl down a long dark hallway. At the end of it was a black door, upon which were five separate locks and the words Matron Geraldine Terwiliger in looping golden script.
“Reach into my right pocket,” said Mrs Terwiliger, “and remove the keyring.” Gurl did as she was told, the keys making a faint jingling noise as she pulled them from Mrs Terwiliger’s jacket.
“The silver key opens the top lock,” Mrs Terwiliger told her. “The red key opens the second, the blue key unlocks the third, the gold key opens the fourth and the tiny little key you use on the doorknob.”
Gurl fumbled with the keys, not because it was too dark to see, but because sometimes her hand would turn the colour of the key or the key would turn the colour of her hand.
“I’m waiting,” said Mrs Terwiliger, tapping her high-heeled shoe impatiently. Noodle mewled and Gurl’s hands shook.
Gurl finally managed to unlock the five locks and open the door. “Now,” said Mrs Terwiliger as they stepped inside, “close the door and return the keys to my pocket. Good. Use the chain to turn on the lamp. Ahhh, that’s better, isn’t it?”
The small lamp cast an eerie glow around the office and Gurl gasped when she saw a hundred pairs of eyes gaping at her from all around the room. “What are they?” Gurl asked. Mrs Terwiliger’s overlarge teeth flashed in a wicked smile, but she didn’t answer the question. “Have a seat,” she said, pushing Gurl into a chair next to a huge marble desk. She set the backpack on the desk and produced a set of handcuffs from her left pocket. As soon as she saw them, Gurl tried to rip her arm from Mrs Terwiliger’s grasp, but because of the bruised hip and elbow, she couldn’t move fast enough. One click and Gurl was cuffed to the chair, unable to get away. Mrs Terwiliger sighed, walked around to the other side of the desk, and sat in her own chair, a red velvet one the size and shape of a throne.
“Well,” she said. “Here we are. At least, here I am. If I didn’t know what you were capable of, I might think I was the only one here. I saw that you were starting to…er…fade this afternoon in the hallway. I got curious, so I kept an eye on you. I saw you sneaking in and out of the dorm to bring this animal”—she gestured to the backpack on the desk—“some of your dinner. And then I watched you sneak out this evening, and I waited for you to come back. Did you know that you simply appeared out of nowhere, right in front of the orphanage gate? Astonishing! And you’re nearly invisible right now. You blend right in with that chair. You’re like a chameleon. Or a stick insect. Have you ever heard of a stick insect?”
Gurl didn’t respond to this speech. Her eyes had adjusted to the light, so now she could see that every shelf, every filing cabinet and every surface was covered with monkeys. Hundreds of mechanical monkeys. Some of them were no bigger than a fist; others were as high as a foot. On the end of the marble desk, facing her, sat a monkey wearing a little gold fez and holding tiny gold cymbals. Gurl wondered if its fur was real, and worried all the more for the fate of Noodle.
“A stick insect is a type of insect that appears to be a stick, yet is not a stick but an insect,” Mrs Terwiliger was saying. “Isn’t that fascinating, dear? Gurl? Are you admiring my monkeys? They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”
Beautiful was not the word that Gurl had been thinking of. Creepy, bizarre, freakish—those were the words that she had been thinking of. And now that she was thinking of it, those words sort of summed up the whole night. What was that thing that chased her down the street? And here, all these ugly monkeys, some with hats and waistcoats, some with bugles or drums, some grinning very unmonkeylike grins—no, they were not beautiful. Noodle was beautiful, but how would Gurl ever get her back? How could she get them out of here? And then, even if she could get them out of here, where would they go?
Mrs Terwiliger reached across the desk, plucked up the fezwearing monkey and wound a key in its back. She set it down on the desk and it promptly began clapping its cymbals, its mouth opening and closing. Noodle, still in the backpack on the desk, peered out at the clanging thing with her ears flat to her head.
The monkey kept banging away, and the sound went right up Gurl’s spine and into her brain, ringing there like a fire alarm. She wanted to shut it up somehow, to tell it something to make it quiet. A secret. She felt something inside her opening up, yearning to spill her innermost thoughts. Yes, it wanted her secrets: her secrets would make it happy. Monkeys loved to hear secrets.
But she didn’t know any secrets. It was obvious she was as changeable as a chameleon. That was no secret, at least not to Mrs Terwiliger. And Noodle was sitting right there, peeking her head out of the backpack, so she wasn’t a secret either. Wasn’t there anything she could give to this noisy, banging monkey to shut it up? There’s the umbrella man that came out of the subway, a little voice in the back of her head whispered. You could tell that secret. Why don’t you? If you do, it will be quiet and then you can relax, maybe even take a nap…
Noodle howled, snapping Gurl out of her reverie, and the monkey stopped clanging. Feeling slightly dazed, Gurl looked at Mrs Terwiliger. She could have sworn that the matron was disappointed, but about what she had no idea.
The monkey seemed to have another effect on Gurl; she was visible. “Ha, there you are,” said Mrs Terwiliger. She pulled another monkey from the shelf behind her, this one with a purple waistcoat and a pair of maracas. “This monkey is one of my favourites,” said Mrs Terwiliger, her rubbery lips twisting like licorice. “They talk too, you know.”
“They talk?” said Gurl, too startled to keep her mouth shut.
“If you give them a penny they do. Do you have a penny? Oh, silly me! Orphans don’t have extra pennies, do they, dear? I’ll lend you one, how about that?” Mrs Terwiliger opened the top drawer of her desk and pulled out a penny. She tucked the penny into the purple waistcoat. Then she sat down and set the monkey in front of Gurl.
The monkey’s eyes rolled until they focused in on Gurl. It opened its mouth and yelled: “MONKEY CHOW!”
Gurl was so surprised that she jumped. The chair fell over backwards and she went with it.
“Oops!” said Mrs Terwiliger, rushing out from behind the desk to help Gurl right herself. “I should have warned you that they can be a bit…er…vehement about what they have to say.” And then she added, “Although I do wish that when they talked, they would have something of substance to offer.” She glared at the monkey. The monkey shook its maracas over its head before going completely still.
Gurl rubbed the back of her head where it had connected with the floor. The umbrella man, the talking monkey—she was having some kind of nightmare, but she was too tired to wake herself up.
On the wall next to the desk, the only space not taken up with shelves of monkeys, there was a full-length mirror. Gurl imagined Mrs Terwiliger spent many hours twirling around in her chair, gazing at herself. “What do you want?” Gurl asked wearily.
Mrs Terwiliger leaned her liposuctioned posterior on the desk. “What do you think! What’s best for you, of course. What’s best for Hope House. And I think that there’s a way for you to help me to do what’s best.”
“There is?” said Gurl.
“Absolutely!” said Mrs Terwiliger. “We’re going to have to start small, I think. With some shoes.”
“Shoes?”
Mrs Terwiliger frowned (as much as a woman who’d had weekly Botox shots to paralyse the muscles in her forehead could frown). “Gurl, I’m surprised I have to explain this to you. I am the matron of Hope House, yes?”
“Yes.”
“And as the matron, I represent the children wherever I go, correct?”
“Uh. I guess.”
“So I can’t walk around looking like last season, can I? I have a certain responsibility, a certain image to maintain. For the sake of Hope House. And your sake. So I’d like you to pick me up a few things.”
“Besides the shoes?”
“I did see some gorgeous new scarves at Harvey’s.”
Gurl was more dazed than ever. “You want me to go shopping?”
“Tomorrow afternoon you’ll go to Harvey’s an hour before closing,” said Mrs Terwiliger. “Then you’ll hide in one of the changing rooms until you hear the workers lock up. Then you can turn on the stick insect act and fetch me some of those scarves. You can’t miss them. Silk scarves in the display case at the back of the store. Oh, I wouldn’t mind some new gloves. Shoes, the highest heels you can find. Size six. And a coat. Make it a fur coat. Fox, if they have it.”
Go to Harvey’s? Hide in the dressing room? Make like a stick insect? “Wait a minute. You want me to steal for you?”
“Steal? Who said anything about stealing? It sounds so harsh.”
“But that’s what it is!” Gurl said. “I can’t do that! What if someone sees me?”
Mrs Terwiliger looked at her as if she were as dumb as one of the mechanical monkeys. “You’re invisible. Who’s going to see you, silly?”
“But it just happens!” Gurl said. “I can’t control it!”
“Oh, you’ll learn,” said Mrs Terwiliger.
“I don’t want to learn. I don’t want to become a thief.”
“What does it matter what you want?” Mrs Terwiliger said sharply, then caught herself. “You’re an orphan, Gurl. I’m offering you an opportunity. You act as if I’m asking you to commit a crime!”
“You are asking me to commit a crime,” said Gurl.
“Just a little one. It barely even counts. It’s not like robbing a bank.”
