Stranger Danger
Molly
THE WORST PART about a dream is that it ends.
But the ending is the best part of a nightmare.
It’s a—what’s the word? Paradox? No, that’s not right. An oxymoron, maybe?
We learnt about it in English last year. It’s two things, like two ideas or words or something, that don’t seem like they’d go together. But when you shove them together, they make sense. Like bittersweet. Jumbo shrimp.
Deafening silence.
When I wake up in a cold sweat, I panic. I’m frightened by the unfamiliar shadows on the unfamiliar wall before the wave of reality crashes back over me. The same one that has come every morning for the past two weeks.
Right. I’m in Ireland.
I snuggle back under the stupid pastel-colored duvet, trying not to shiver. Not just because of the nightmare about being back at camp with him, but because it is freezing as shit in this house. House is really a soft word. I’ve been calling it a Manor—because it basically is.
Mom comes from money, so the house itself is no surprise.
I guess neither is the fact that she tried to be “nice” and decorate our rooms for us.
Since she hasn’t really known me properly since grade school, my lavender-walled bedroom reflects as such.
It has cream-colored furniture, and the only things on the shelves are stuffed animals and this little snowglobe with a penguin inside of it.
Lucky him. Trapped in a perfect world. I, however, didn’t get so lucky.
The only thing that hasn’t changed about me since I was a kid is soccer. Back at Barretts High, I had just been promised the captain’s armband for my upcoming junior year—which is now obviously void thanks to my mother moving us here.
To me, soccer isn’t just a game or a hobby—it’s my life, and it’s my future. I’d do anything to play. Anything.
My coach at Barretts—Coach Rourke—said he’ll be telling all the scouts to hold their letters for me and is explaining the Ireland situation to them. He said it might give me a leg-up, you know, people are suckers for hardships and underdogs.
I saw him a few days before I left, and his instructions for me were clear: Find a team while I’m living in Ireland, keep my training up, and play like he knows I can. I have his email, so I can send him game highlights and stuff.
I’ve done plenty of research about Irish sports. They call it football here, but the mechanics seem the same. I can pick up right where I left off at home. I don’t even care about keeping my number—ten—or my school colors or even if I have to play some position other than center midfield.
I’m getting on that soccer—football—team if it’s the last thing I do.
??ˋ ?? ?ˊ?
“WHERE ARE THE Pop-Tarts?”
My little sister is clutching her pink-and-white stuffed rabbit, with its flared ballet skirt and whom she creatively named Bunny at three years old. Mom took her to get a haircut the other day, so now she has a Dakota Fanning (circa 2003) esque bob that she made me put ribbons in this morning.
Lorraine’s been taking this move with a whole lot more stride than I have.
I don’t like all the bribing my mom seems to have been doing—between the haircut, and ballet lessons, and even giving her 8-year-old her own Blackberry for “emergencies”—but I am glad that it seems to be helping Rainey settle in.
She’s tried getting me stuff too—a new phone, shopping trips, etc—but I haven’t taken the bait.
I feel like an alien who’s just been dropped on earth, pushing the cart through the aisles of this supermarket (“TESCO”), staring at the unfamiliar brands of food. None of them include Pop-Tarts, or Toaster Tarts, or anything that looks remotely similar.
We came here with the intention of getting a couple of things (my driver’s license holds no merit here, and you apparently can’t get one till seventeen) that we can carry back home.
It’s about a ten-minute walk (with a nice view of the Irish Sea) from Mom’s Manor to town.
Which isn’t terrible, but I’m going to have to make the walk on Monday morning to get to my bus stop.
“Uh...” I scan the shelves of Digestives and Kimberly Biscuits. “I’m not sure if they have them here, Rainey. Though maybe they’re just called something else... like “Morning Tartlets” or something equally stupid.”
She laughs, but her face is crestfallen. Lorraine’s eight; she isn’t exactly hard to read. It’s such a stupid, simple thing—an artificially flavored pastry—but its absence feels like a gaping hole in the fabric of the universe, its tear spelling out HOMESICK.
We turn down the next aisle, my eyes darting around for something, anything familiar to fix her mood. They’ve got to have Lucky Charms, right? Or at the very least—
CRASH.
Lorraine practically jumps out of her skin and latches onto my side like a mud turtle after something—or rather someone—rams into the front of our cart as I round the endcap.
“JJ! I WILL BLEEDING WRING YOUR NECK! How many times have I told ya not to mess, you feckin’ gobshite!” A male (Irish, in case you’ve forgotten) voice yells. I’m no detective, but something tells me this isn’t an isolated incident.
Something else tells me I ought to cover Lorraine’s ears. Those words, however foreign, don’t sound very G-rated.
I glare at my assailants. The threat consists of two teenage boys and a grocery cart filled entirely to the brim with milk cartons and... cat food? A truly exorbitant amount of cat food.
The driver of the rogue cart seems to have been riding the back axle like a scooter.
He stumbles off, sheepishly untangling his foot from the wheels.
He has fair blonde hair, bluish-green eyes, and is wearing practically every color of the rainbow, including rubber wrist-bands up both forearms, and the look topped off with a backwards-turned red baseball cap.
“I had it under control!” The colorful guy insists, looking over his shoulder at his friend. The other guy is a bit shorter and less colorful, but he wears his hat in the same way (except his is blue, not red).
Blue Hat looks ready to commit murder in the grocery store.
“Where’s Bunny?” I hear Lorraine gasp, her death grip on my arm loosened as she searches around our feet. Before I can reach down, Colorful Guy— “JJ” —swoops in and scoops the rabbit up from where it has somehow landed between the tangled wheels of our carts.
“Here ya are m’lady,” He says as he performs a deep, overly theatrical bow while presenting it to my sister.
“Thank you!” Lorraine giggles, clutching the rabbit tightly to her chest.
When I was a young child, I was taught to never, ever talk to strangers. And apparently I need to pass that lesson onto my sister.
“Do you have kittens?” She asks, peering over at their cart.
I mentally face-palm but literally sigh.
“We do, yeah! We just got a wee litter of ‘em from our mate,” JJ says brightly, beaming as if he has personally birthed the cats himself or something. “We have them out in the boot of the car. Wanna come see?”
Blue Hat lets out a strangled, horrified noise and promptly smacks JJ upside the back of the head with an open palm. The contact of skin on the red cap makes a sharp thwack.
“Don’t be a bleeding eejit! You can’t be asking a little kid to look in the boot of a car! Are you thick?”
I grab Lorraine’s hand, yanking her securely to my side. It seems like a better time than ever to evacuate. “Sorry. We have to go. Have a good day, good luck with your... pets.”
I don’t wait for a response. I just yank our half-empty cart free and wheel my sister away, my speed increasing exponentially as I round the corner toward the safety of the checkout lanes.
“But I wanted to see the kittens,” Lorraine whines once we’re safely in line, her bottom lip trembling. God, my sister has the survival skills of a labrador puppy. We definitely need to have the Stranger Danger talk sooner than later.
“Listen. It’s rule number one of being a kid, and even just being a girl,” I say quietly, depositing a weird, dense loaf of brown bread onto the conveyor belt.
“If a stranger ever offers you candy, or kittens, or puppies, and asks you to go anywhere with them, you need to grab the nearest adult and run like hell.”
“What if the nearest adult is a stranger?”
“Just pick someone who looks... normal,” I say. I’ve never thought about that, never having been kidnapped myself.
“But those guys looked normal!” she huffs, shaking her head and smoothing out Bunny’s skirt. “You can be so confusing sometimes, Molly.”