Free Ruby on the Outside by Nora Raleigh Baskin Page A

It threatens to take it all away. I don’t want to find out what I know I will find out if I keep searching. But I click link after link.
    I keep searching.
    There are newspaper articles. Police reports. Court documents, all online. There are follow-up stories on everything from gun control to spousal abuse. It seems to be significant that the defendant, Janis Sands, had no knowledge of the gun prior to the incident; however, she was an accessory to an armed robbery and an accomplice to murder. The boy behind the counter died on this way to the hospital. He was seventeen years old.
    His name was Joshua Alan Tipps.

Chapter Sixteen
    Even after I figured out that my mother wasn’t coming home with us, I still wanted to be able to at least call my mom whenever something bad happened to me. Not even something that bad, just a little bad. Like someone at school hurt my feelings or I was scared that I would never learn my times table or I had a stomachache, which usually came from one of those two other things, and I wanted to tell my mommy.
    I could always tell Matoo, but it wasn’t the same. For one thing, Matoo usually told me to let it go, and for another, she wasn’t my mom.
    â€œBut there’s the phone, right there.” I stood in the kitchen in my pajamas and bare feet.
    â€œYes, I see the phone is right there,” Matoo told me, sitting at the breakfast table, eating her cottage cheese and berries. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.
    I was probably in second or third grade. No, what am I saying? It was second grade, I remember exactly, because my supposed best friend in the neighborhood, Kristin, hadn’t invited me to her after school birthday party. I only found out because one girl in my class made the mistake of asking me if I was going. Of course, back then, I hadn’t yet perfected the skill of how to hide important things from the outside world, and I just started crying. Right then and there, in the middle of free reading time.
    Mrs. Chompsky sent me to the guidance office. The guidance lady wanted to know if my emotional state had anything to do with my “situation at home,” and I had no idea what she was talking about since I didn’t yet understand that I had a situation at home. I just had a home. With Matoo. And a mom at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.
    I didn’t really understand yet that that wasn’t normal.
    I was still upset when I got back home that day, and there was the phone. And I just wanted to call my mother and tell her about it. I wanted to ask her why my only friend hadn’t invited me to her birthday party and why I got sent to the office for crying in class when Lucille Ramirez does that practically every day. And Jody Bronson has not said one word out loud all year. And Donald Hancock kicks everyone under the table and everyone knows it’s him. So why me?
    Why? Why? Why?
    There are some things only a mommy can fix.
    I knew just hearing her voice would fix it. I knew she would say just the right thing and tell me I was okay, or that I was going to be okay, and I would believe her. And everything would start to be okay.
    â€œRuby, you know you can’t call your mother,” Matoo told me. “You know it doesn’t work that way. She has to call us.”
    Us?
    I didn’t want her to call us .
    I wanted her to call me . Me. Right now. I needed my mother, right now.
    But also, I knew Matoo was right. And not only that, but my mother had to call collect, which meant someone had to be home to pick up the phone and hear the mechanical, recorded message on the other end:
    â€œYou are receiving a collect call from the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women. Do you want to accept the charges?”
    Matoo tells me it is very expensive, but the worst part is how they cut you off. It doesn’t matter if you are right in the middle of talking or singing or telling story. The recording comes back on,