Sara Lost and Found Read Online Free Page B

scared.” Anna rolls up into a ball and clutches her doll.
    â€œShhhh,” I whisper back, trying not to sound mean. “Close your eyes and don’t open them, no matter what. Okay?” I can feel Anna’s head nodding against the pillow.
    I pull my head out and wait. My eyes are squeezed so tight, I can see white stars. A flood of light suddenly turns the stars dark, putting a new scary thought into my head—someone is in our room! My heart pounds so hard, I can hear each beat against my pillow. I try to breathe slow and easy, pretending to be asleep, but my breath comes out fast.
    â€œMy two sleeping beauties,” a woman’s voice whispers. I relax. It’s only Rachel, checking to make sure that we are still in the room.
    I crack one eye open to check on Anna. She’s slid out from under the covers but still has a white-knuckled grip on Abby. The doll’s eyes are wide open. They are supposed to close when she’s laid flat, but sometimes they get stuck. One time one eye stuck open and the other stuck closed—just like when Anna came home from school once and couldn’t open a swollen eye; we ran to the neighbor’s house. The lady there put ice on it to make the swelling go down and asked a million questions. Anna never did tell anyone how her eye got so puffed up and dark.
    Rachel leans closer. She smells of garlic and onions, probably because she has a string of them draped around her neck. “It keeps away the germs,” she told me the last time we stayed here. I believed it too. That smell would keep anything away! My nose twitches, and for an awful moment I feel a sneeze coming on. I breathe through my mouth to chase away the feeling. Mrs. Silverman finally seems convinced we’re asleep, and leaves. As she shuffles down the hallway, her pajamas make a soft shoosh, shoosh, shoosh .
    I wait for a moment, listening to the shuffling get softer and softer. “You can open your eyes now. She’s gone,” I tell Anna, flicking on the flashlight. I aim it at my sister’s pale face.
    â€œHow do you know she’s not hiding outside?” Anna whispers back in a rare full sentence.
    I point to the thin streak of dim light under the door. “No feet.”
    Anna sits up and lets out a long sigh.
    â€œWe’d better go to sleep.” I settle back onto the bed. “Remember what Mrs. Craig said. We might be going to that new foster home soon. Until Daddy gets out of—” I stop, not wanting to say the J word to Anna. All at once I realize why Mrs. Craig calls jail “the special place”: to protect Anna from knowing her daddy’s locked up in a cage—something that would give her worse nightmares than she already has.
    â€œHow come so many places?”
    â€œYou mean how come we have to go to so many foster homes?”
    Anna nods.
    I think about it for a minute. I want to tell her that if she’d quit wetting the bed and biting everyone, we might stand a better chance of staying in just one home instead of bouncing around, but that would hurt her feelings.
    â€œHow come?” she repeats.
    Anna thinks in pictures, so I know I have to think of images she can see in her head. “Well, foster parents are kind of like spare tires,” I say, looking in her eyes for a sign of understanding. “Remember when Daddy had to put the spare tire on his truck because one in front went flat?”
    Anna nods.
    â€œWell, foster parents are like spare tires until we get our real tires back, Daddy or Mama. Or until we get a new set of tires,” I add. Just saying it gets me wondering what it would be like to get adopted. Not that that will ever happen. We have Daddy and all, but still, what would it be like to have parents who are there all the time and who don’t keep disappearing?
    Then I start thinking about Daddy locked up in some jail and how much he needs us and how hard he has tried to be good each time