Free Hide and Seek by Caryn Larrinaga

 
    Agatha didn’t take her stepfather’s last name when her mother got married. She might have—after all, Agatha Farraday sounded like the name of a movie star—but after one afternoon spent alone with Summer and Rain playing a game they called ‘Toad in a Box’ (the only rule of which, the older girls claimed, was that any eight-year-old girls in the house had to spend an hour locked inside a musty old steamer trunk), Agatha felt it might be better if strangers didn’t assume she was related to the twins.
    So she remained Agatha Mulchinski, and decided to distance herself as much as possible from her new stepsisters. It proved difficult, especially after she and her mother moved into the Farraday’s home. Her new stepfather generously offered to pay Agatha’s tuition to St. Rita’s Academy, the same private school that his daughters attended, and Agatha was forced to endure day after day of their idea of fun.
    The trouble was, if ever a teacher or some other authority figure caught a glimpse into the true nature of the twins, the word they used most often was ‘spirited.’ After all, how could such beautiful girls—with their long blonde hair and shining green eyes—be behind any type of real mischief?
    Summer and Rain were careful to keep their innocent masks in place whenever adults were around and preferred to torment and menace their underclassmen in the more secluded areas of the playground, out of sight of the recess matron. They had the schoolyard equivalent of radar detectors built into their brains, with a sixth sense for when Mrs. Pierce was about to round the corner of the gymnasium on her patrol. In an instant, the twins could go from holding a lighted candle beneath a second-grader’s hair to skipping rope with the same girl, singing “Hello operator, give me number nine…” as brightly as any well-adjusted eleven-year-olds might. But the moment that Mrs. Pierce had passed out of sight and around the front of the chapel to sneak a cigarette, the nightmare resumed and everyone playing Four Square caught a whiff of poor little Margo Simonsen’s right pigtail being singed off.
    Soon after an incident in which the twins managed to lock Agatha in the chapel closet overnight, she decided that perhaps private school wasn’t the best fit for her, after all. Following the example of one Bart Simpson, she purchased a can of spray paint and scrawled an offensive mural across the back wall of the school. That day, any children playing Wall Ball were able to aim for a stick figure version of the principal or at the four-letter word she’d written in the speech bubble next to his head.
    The twins had pulled a similar prank the previous spring, drawing a certain part of the male anatomy all over both of the second floor restrooms. Summer was even found trying to scrub blue paint (the exact same shade used for the Pee Pee Parade, as it came to be known) off her hands in the utility sink in the Farraday’s laundry room. In their usual manner, however, the twins were able to convince their father that an eighth grader had threatened to break Rain’s left arm if Summer didn’t deface the restrooms. Rather than getting into trouble, the girls were rewarded with banana splits (for “being such good sisters”), and Mikey O’Shea was expelled from the academy just two weeks before the end of the year.
    Agatha was not blessed with as much charisma as her stepsisters—her nickname at her last school had been “Mouse,” owing to her flat brown hair and round features—but she had a powerful sense of self-preservation, and she wanted to ensure that she shared Mikey’s fate and could be permanently separated from the twins during school hours. To that end, she attempted to wash the spray paint off her hands in the teacher’s lounge. Her plan was a success, and she was able to transfer to the noisy, overcrowded refuge that was the public elementary school near her house. Any attempts to bully her fell flat,