Free In the Company of Crazies by Nora Raleigh Baskin Page B

at the hospital said I must have been leaning on the thermostat thingy. It’s a second-degree burn.”
    “Does it hurt?” I asked Billy. It looked like it hurt. “Ye-ah. It hurts like hell,” Billy said proudly.
    The only person who wasn’t interested in Billy’s disgusting burn was John. John seemed to have something else on his mind entirely. He kept walking into the kitchen and talking to Maggie and then coming back out, sitting down at the table and writing in his journal.
    “I’m probably going to have a scar,” Billy told everyone. He was starting to lose his audience. I decided to get up and see if I could help Maggie with anything.
    “If it starts to puss up,” Billy was saying, “I have this yellow, sticky medicine to put on it.”
    Until only Drew was still listening.
    “What are we having for dinner Thursday?” John was standing in the kitchen talking to Maggie when I walked in. “Pot roast and green beans,” she told him. “Oh, hello there, Mia.”
    John looked at me and then hurried away. He was guilty of something. I could recognize it.

    Mountain Laurel.
    Sam had dinner with us tonight and he talked about this doctor, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, who he said was really into death and dying, which sounds morbid but the way he talked about it, it wasn’t. She was trying to help people deal with stuff. Anyway, Dr. Ross said everyone went through these five stages whether they were dying or knew someone who was.
    Sam said Dr. Ross had the stages all mapped out and named. She said they were denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. So I starting thinking about that.
    Denial.
    Anger.
    Bargaining.
    Depression.
    Acceptance.
    And it’s funny. That’s just what happened to me. When I got caught shoplifting.
    Exactly.
    * * *
    The first thing I thought of when the woman in Kohl’s grabbed my arm was: This can’t be happening. This woman must think I’m someone else. Her daughter maybe. Or she thought I worked here and she was looking for the aisle where they sell throw rugs and bathroom scales.
    “You need to come to the back of the store with me,” she said. “So we can talk in private.” She had let go of my arm, and I was able to calm down enough to see who she was.
    She looked just like any woman who would be shopping that day.
    Why was this woman grabbing my arm?
    She didn’t have on a red apron with the name of the store printed across the front, like the other people who worked there. She had her coat on. She was even carrying a shopping bag from one of the other stores in the mall. And her pocketbook. If this woman worked here, she wouldn’t be carrying a pocketbook. She looked like a mom. I remembered her now; I had noticed she was looking through the bin of little-boy socks like she wanted to buy them.
    No, she couldn’t be a security woman and I couldn’t have just been caught shoplifting.
    This was my first thought— No way.
    Then I realized she must be undercover, looking like a regular shopper on purpose. Trying to blend in. That wasn’t fair. It was a setup. A trick.
    For a second that thought made me mad enough to say, “I didn’t do anything.”
    “Maybe you didn’t,” the woman said. “But we need to go in the back and work it out. You haven’t left the store yet. You can just come with me and no one will notice. We can talk there.”
    I turned around. There was a mom and her teenage daughter a couple of racks away, definitely looking my way. And there was a boy walking by with his head turned toward me.
    “What if I just put it back?” I said. I suddenly felt my heart, which had been beating so hard since I first put the gloves and belt into my bag. Now there was no stopping the pain of my heart working overtime. I couldn’t think straight. My fear was taking my breath away and I couldn’t breathe at all. I had to do something. I could fix this if I tried, couldn’t I?
    “What if I put it back right where I got it?” I tried again to bargain.
    “You