Free Subway Love by Nora Raleigh Baskin Page A

the platform, sensing he was right behind her, and then sensing he wasn’t.
    She moved forward, away from the gap, out of the way of the crowd waiting to board, and he was gone. She turned around and no one was there.
    “I told you, I just got off at the wrong stop,” Laura told her mother Sunday night. Her mother was reading the paper under a single floor lamp. Laura was lying on the floor sharing the light, trying to read a book.
    As it turned out, her mom was at work when the phone call from New York came, and it was Bruce who spoke with Laura’s dad, and it was Bruce who had to walk into town to deliver the news to Laura’s mom. By the time they got back to the house and called her dad, Laura had been found.
    Bruce was working in the next room, at the dining-room table, where he had a large industrial sewing machine set up. He and Mitchell were planning on building a tepee as soon as the weather got a little warmer, somewhere up in the woods behind their house. Bruce had brought in heavy white canvas and special thick thread. For some reason, anything American Indian was groovy cool.
    “No, next time Mitchell will go with you. That was ridiculous. Your father was furious.”
    “No,” Laura blurted out.
    She didn’t want her brother to go. If Laura was ever to find Jonas again, she had to be alone. If she was ever going to figure out what had happened when they stepped off that train, Mitchell couldn’t be there. She knew that.
    Bruce looked up from his work. “I’m not going to walk all the way into town again because you don’t know which subway to take.” He put down his stitching.
    “I mean, I just made a mistake. I was fine.” Laura felt something rising up her spine, like an involuntary surge of electricity. Her muscles tightened.
    Mitchell would ruin everything. “I don’t want Mitchell to go.”
    Bruce stood up.
    Laura understood, as she had for a while, that it wasn’t pain she was afraid of. She had experienced much worse, a fall from her bike onto gravel, a nail that went right through the bottom of her Keds, that sliver of wood that wedged directly underneath her fingernail when she ran her hand down the railing.
    No, it wasn’t pain. It was the anticipation.
    It was fear, and it was fear that made her angry.
    Mitchell would pretend to be concentrating on his sewing, and their mother would keep her eyes focused on her newspaper. Bruce was walking closer.
    “If your mother wants Mitchell to go, he’ll go.” Bruce took his knee and thrust it against Laura’s thigh. It would leave a bruise for certain, but the impact didn’t make a sound.
    Finally, Laura had to tell someone. Not about Bruce. Not that. But about Jonas. She had to tell someone, and that someone was her best friend, Zan.
    Zan had moved to town right smack in the middle of the school year, seventh grade, the year after Jamie Stein moved away. The teacher introduced the new girl to the class as Alexandra Benoit.
    “It’s Zan,” the girl answered. “Not Alexandra.”
    “It says Alexandra.”
    “I prefer to be called Zan.”
    Laura sat back and watched, in awe of this skinny, orange-haired newcomer who was brave enough to correct the teacher.
    “I think Alex is a more appropriate nickname for Alexandra.”
    “Zan. I’ll stick with Zan.”
    At once Laura knew she had to become friends with this girl. She wasn’t a rebel in the way Jamie had been, embracing the counterculture by wearing long skirts and headbands and no underwear. No, this girl was the real thing, a rebel with a cause. Besides, Laura was in the market for a new best friend.
    “That’s so crazy,” Zan said.
    “I know.”
    The girls were walking back to Zan’s house from the grocery store. The sun was teasing the world, hinting at an early spring. Easter was still two weeks away, but Laura took off her hat and shook out her hair.
    “No, I mean really crazy,” Zan said. “He just disappeared?”
    “I know.”
    “Well, you know, a love that isn’t