The Gingerbread Boy Read Online Free

as she knew that her starchy old friend from back home, Hazel VanHoofstryver, had a kind heart beneath all her crabbiness. Catherine had been wrong about Calvin, that was for certain, but she was much wiser now. So she pressed on, blindly dodging shoulders and rib cages and clumsy hands holding white cups of beer. A haze of cigarette smoke in the atmosphere stung her eyes and made it even harder to see. But soon she was most of the way across the room, and caught a glimpse of the banister before her. Breathing a sigh of relief, she scurried around one last drunken clod to find that Daniel was nowhere in sight.
    “Oh, no,” she groaned, kicking the bottom step. An obviously intoxicated man arched his eyebrows and winked at her from the edge of the crowd. He raised a glass of beer. “Get your s-sparty on!” he blubbered drunkenly. She rolled her eyes, ignoring the slang term for college parties at MSU, and turned away. Now what should she do? What if Daniel got sidetracked and forgot she was with him? Worse, what if he didn’t plan to come join her at this stairway at all? She felt a sudden sense of dislocation, and turned around helplessly, trying to ignore the bleary-eyed people making her so uneasy. Did they realize she didn’t belong here, that she was totally out of place? Her throat constricted. What if it was another of Daniel’s jokes, like the hurt kneecap, and she was left alone with all these drunken strangers?
    A wretched memory came to mind. She’d been in her high school gym class, and Doreen Black had asked her if she would do a coordination test. Catherine was to stand with arms outstretched at her side, then close her eyes, bring her arms in front of her, and try to connect her index fingertips together ten times without missing. Catherine tried the test, and was quite pleased to find that her fingertips met, all ten times. However when she opened her eyes, instead of receiving a round of cheers from the girls, she discovered she was standing in the middle of he gym floor totally alone just as the boy’s gym class paraded through the doors.
    Think, girl, think!
    The voice snapped suddenly into Catherine’s mind, startling her with its crispness. Hazel’s voice. Good old Hazel VanHoofstryver‘s common admonishment for Catherine to gather her wits and think through seemingly impossible circumstances. Too bad she was so far away, back in Maryland.
    “You made it!” said a voice in her ear, startling her.
    Catherine wheeled around, relieved to see Daniel. She snatched him by the arm and tugged him up the steps. “Let’s get out of this madhouse!”
    Daniel nodded. Ignoring a rude whistle from a man with rheumy eyes and a scraggly reddish beard, Catherine wondered if Daniel’s face was turning as red as hers beneath his hat and scarf. But let all these guys think what they wanted. Pigs, every one of them.
    Soon she and Daniel topped the first flight of stairs where the steps curved behind a wall, blocking the mob from view. Catherine sighed in relief when they reached the next floor, and the music and noise had dulled, the acrid smells dissipated. She found herself standing before a maze of rooms. Some doorways were open, and she heard voices and saw shadowy movement from the light spilling into hallways.
    Daniel gestured toward the next flight of stairs. “We keep going up.”
    It grew increasingly dark. The sound below evaporated into a dull hum as they climbed higher, and higher yet. The top of this flight looked much the same as the hallway below, except there were fewer open doorways and less light. The smell of old woodwork and musty wallpaper became nearly suffocating, and Catherine felt glad not to be alone. The place would be even spookier without anyone else around. Yet for the first time since meeting Daniel, an actual nervousness crept through her. If Tony could see her now, he’d probably warn that Daniel’s scarf hid a ghastly deformity and it was time to run back downstairs,