The way they removed it was worse than the burn itself, though. With tweezers. I used to pass out every time. Then, to cheer me up, my dad would take me to Wendy's for a Frosty. So, you can see that this gesture of his was deeply moving, even though it may not sound like much to you guys. It was all about sharing this bonding moment from our past. Mr. Goodhart would have eaten it up.

Anyway, on the way home, my dad agreed to break the news to Mom, but not tell anybody else—I made him swear—and I agreed not to keep any more secrets from him. I still didn't tell him about Rob, though, because that was a secret I strongly suspected the FBI didn't have a lead on, so I probably wasn't going to almost get arrested for it.

Plus I was way more worried about my mom's reaction to finding out about Rob than the story of me and the milk-carton kids.



C H A P T E R

11

In the end, of course, it turned out that my dad wasn't the one I ought to have sworn to secrecy.

It was Mr. Feeney.

I don't know if he thought he could get his hands on that reward money somehow, or if he'd decided that spilling the beans would make his school district stand out from all the others in Indiana—like, since it was his school's bleachers I'd gotten electrocuted under, that somehow made Ernest Pyle High School special—or what.

But anyway, when the town paper hit our front porch that afternoon—the town paper came out at three in the afternoon every day, instead of seven in the morning, so the reporters and everybody don't have to get up too early—there was this giant picture of me on the front of it: my very flattering sophomore yearbook picture, in fact, the one in which my mom had made me wear one of her hideous homemade dresses, under a headline that read, TOUCHED BY THE FINGER OF GOD.

Have I pointed out that there are more churches in our town than there are fast-food restaurants? Southern Indiana is way religious.

Anyway, the article went on to describe how I had saved all these kids after being touched by the finger of God, or lightning, as it is called by the secular community. It went on to say that I was just an average student who played third-chair flute in the school orchestra, and that on weekends I helped my dad out in his restaurants, which they listed. I knew all this stuff couldn't have come from Mr. Feeney, since he didn't know me all that well. I figured Mr. Goodhart must have had something to do with it.

And let me tell you, that kind of hurt, you know? I mean, even though he hadn't mentioned anything about the trouble with Douglas, or my detentions, he sure had mentioned everything else he knew. Isn't there some sort of confidentiality thing with school counselors? I mean, can't they get in trouble for that?

But when my dad called Mr. Abramowitz and asked him, he was like, "You can't prove the information came from the counselor. It came from someone at the school, most definitely. But you can't prove it was the counselor."

Still, Ruth's dad started putting together a lawsuit, aimed at hitting Ernest Pyle High School for slipping the town paper my school photo. That, Mr. Abramowitz said, was an invasion of privacy. He sounded really happy about it. Ruth's dad doesn't get that many interesting cases. Mostly, he just does divorces.

My mother was happy about it, too. Don't ask me why, but the whole story totally delighted her. She was in hog heaven. She wanted me to have a press conference in the main dining room at Mastriani's. She kept going on about how much money it would bring in to the restaurant, feeding all those out-of-town reporters. She even started picking out dress patterns, right then and there, for what she wanted me to wear at this press conference. I'm telling you, she went mental. I had kind of thought she'd be all weird about it, you know? I mean, considering her I just want us to be a normal family mentality. But that went right out the window when she heard about the rewards.

"How much?" she wanted to know. "How much per child?"

We were eating dinner at that point—fettucine with a mushroom cream sauce. My dad went, "Toni, the rewards are not the point. The point is, Jessica is a young girl, and I do not want her exposed to the media at such a young—"

"But is it ten thousand dollars per child?" my mother wanted to know. "Or just for that one child?"

"Toni—"

"Joe, I'm just saying, ten thousand dollars is nothing to sneeze at. It could buy a new steam table and then some over at Joe Junior's—"

"We will raise the money for a new steam table over at Joe Junior's the old-fashioned way," my father said. "We will take out a loan for it."

"Not when we're already going to have to take out a loan for Michael's tuition." Michael—whose sole reaction to the news about my newfound psychic ability had been to ask me if I knew where the man in the blue turban, whom Nostradamus had predicted would start World War III, was hanging out these days—rolled his eyes.

"Don't you roll your eyes at me, young man," my mother said. "Harvard was very generous with the scholarship money, but it's still not enough—"

"Especially not," my dad said, dipping his semolina into the cream sauce left on his plate, "if Dougie's going back to State."

That did it. My mom dropped her fork with a clatter. "Douglas," she said, "is not going back to that school. Not ever."

My dad looked tired. "Toni," he said. "The boy's going to have to get an education. He can't sit in that room up there and read comic books for the rest of his life. People are already starting to call him Boo Radley."

Boo Radley, I remembered from freshman English, was the guy in To Kill a Mockingbird who never left his house, just sat around cutting up newspapers all day, which is what people did before there was TV. It was a good thing Douglas had refused to come downstairs for dinner, or he might have heard that and been offended. For a guy who tried to kill himself, Douglas is very sensitive about being called strange.

"Why not?" my mother demanded. "Why can't he sit in his room for the rest of his life? If that's what he wants to do, why can't you just let him?"

"Because nobody gets to do what they want to do, Toni. I want to lie in the backyard in a hammock all day," my dad said, jerking a thumb at his chest. "Jess over there wants to cruise the countryside on the back of a hog. And Mikey—" He looked at Michael, who was busy chewing. "Well, I don't know what the hell Mikey wants to do—"

"Screw Claire Lippman," I suggested, causing Michael to kick me very hard beneath the table.

My dad shot me a warning look, and continued. "But whatever it is, Toni, he doesn't get to do it. Nobody gets to do what they want to do, Toni. What they get to do is what they should do, and what Dougie should do is go back to college."

Relieved to have some of the heat off me, I excused myself and cleared my place at the table. I hadn't talked to Ruth all day. I was eager to see what she thought of this whole thing. I mean, it isn't every day your best friend ends up on the front page of the local rag.

But I never got to find out what Ruth thought of the whole thing. Because when I stepped outside onto the porch, preparing to jump over the hedge that separated our two houses, I was confronted by what looked like an army of reporters, all of them parked in front of our house and waving cameras and microphones.

"There she is!" One of them, a newscaster I recognized from Channel Four, came stumbling across my lawn, her high heels sinking into the grass. "Jessica! Jessica! How does it feel to be a national heroine?"

I stared down at the fuzzy microphone blankly. Then about a million other microphones appeared in my face. Everyone started asking questions at once. It was my mother's press conference, only all I had on was jeans and a T-shirt. I hadn't even thought to comb my hair.

"Um," I said into the microphones.

Then my dad was there, yanking me back into the house, and yelling at all the reporters to get off his property. No one listened—at least, not until the cops came. Then we got to see how all those free lunches my dad had given the guys on the force paid off. You never saw people as mad as those cops were when they turned down Lumley Lane and couldn't even find a place to park, there were so many news vans blocking the way. There are so few crimes in our neck of the woods that when one did happen, our boys in blue go to town on the offender.

When they saw all the reporters on our lawn, they went mental, only in a different way than my mom had. They called back to the station, and, next thing you knew, they had brought out all their fanciest equipment, riot gear and drug-sniffing dogs and flash grenades. You name it, they brought it over, and looked pretty intent on using it on the reporters, some of whom were from pretty big networks.

I have to say, I was way impressed. Mike and I watched the whole thing from my dormer window. Mike even went on the Internet and ran a search for my name, and said there were already two hundred and seventy sites that mentioned Jessica Mastriani. Nobody had taken my face and superimposed it over a Playboy bunny's naked body, but Mike said it was only a matter of time.

Then the phone started ringing.

The first few calls were from reporters standing outside, using their cell phones. They wanted me to come out and make a statement, just one. Then they promised to leave. My dad hung up on them.

Then people who weren't reporters, but whom we still didn't know, started calling, asking if I was available to help them find a missing relative, a child, a husband, a father. At first my dad was nice to them, and told them that it didn't work that way, that I had to see a picture of the missing person. Then they started saying they'd fax a picture, or e-mail it. Some of them said they were coming right on over with one, they'd be there in a few hours.