Free Vend U. by Nancy Springer Page B

wasn’t like it mattered enough to scream about. This was Jocelyn.
    Maybe we should have tried to help. Like, we could have grabbed her by the legs and pulled her out. But we didn’t.
    The plate of glass went dark for a minute. And Jocelyn’s legs got shorter and shorter and the whole huge vending machine shuddered and shook. We all jumped back. But then the glass cleared up, and everything looked just like before, Mr. Goodbar, Rolos, Raisinets, M&M’s, Snickers—except Jocelyn was gone.
    The vending machine’s display was a serene green. It said <*URP*>.
    We all started talking at once and some of us flopped down to look under the machine—somebody found a nickel that was practically welded to the sticky linoleum, it had been there so long—and some of us ran to look behind the machine. The whole row of machines had a gray dusty space behind it, and we looked in there. But all we saw was cruddy electric cables and pipes and stuff. Jocelyn wasn’t there.
    Jocelyn was gone.
    “Well, good,” some kid said. “No more Jocelyn.”
    Of course that was what we all were thinking, but most of us didn’t want to say it because we were nice kids. But when somebody said it we all yelled, “Yeah!”
    “No more tapioca pudding!”
    “Or boogers!”
    “No more Jocelyn boogers!”
    “Jocelyn’s gone!”
    “Good!”
    We all yelled and laughed. But nobody took her KitKat bars or her money. There were four KitKat bars and a coin purse lying on the floor in front of the biggest vending machine. We all looked at them but nobody touched them. They lay there all day.
    * * *
    Everything would have been okay, in fact everything was spiffy diffy for a little while—until adults started wondering what had happened to Jocelyn.
    It took a few days. At first when the teachers noticed that Jocelyn was missing, which of course they noticed right away because things got so peaceful, they didn’t want to know where she was. They wanted to think she was somewhere else she was supposed to be, like she went home sick or she was absent or she was visiting somebody else’s class. And her parents—Jocelyn always said whenever her parents grounded her it only lasted one day before they couldn’t stand having her around. So even her parents wanted to think she was somewhere else, like staying with a friend. Yeah, right, like she had any friends. But that was what they wanted to think.
    So things were great for a couple of days. No Jocelyn. But then the cops came and started asking questions.
    Then it got really uncomfortable. Because, you know, what were we supposed to tell them? So we told them we didn’t know anything. Then we felt bad, which was stupid, because we hadn’t done anything to Jocelyn, but we felt bad anyway because we’d lied. Then because we felt bad we looked guilty and the teachers and cops and people saw us looking guilty and kept asking questions harder and getting more and more annoying until it almost would have been better having Jocelyn around again.
    When things reached that point, which was when Jocelyn had been gone a week, we knew we had to try to do something.
    * * *
    We hadn’t gone near the vending machines since it happened. If teachers and cops had a clue about kids at all they should have known where to look just because we were eating the cafeteria food and not going near the vending machines.
    But a week after the monster vending machine’s revenge on Jocelyn we all went over there after lunch. It wasn’t like we decided. We just did it. One of us went over to look, and then we all went over to look.
    We gathered at a safe distance from the machines, like ten or twelve feet, which was still nearer than we’d been since it happened. We stood there and jiggled our feet and stuff but nobody said anything. Nobody did anything. Nobody knew what to do.
    The biggest vending machine’s liquid crystal display started to glow a sunny color with black letters flashing across it, like there was a new kind of