Lost in London Page 3

  My eyebrows shot up. I turned toward Sam and realized the potted plant was in front of a big mirror. He wasn’t hidden at all.

  “Nice try,” Sebastian added as I walked away.

  I pushed out a smile, my cheeks red from embarrassment. When I got back to Sam, I held up the box. “Success.”

  He took it.

  I added, “Oh, and Sebastian says hi.”

  “Blast it! He saw me?”

  “Afraid so.”

  He slid his butt onto the ground, blew the long pieces of blond hair out of his face, and rested his head against the pot. He held up the box. “Just take them away so I’m not tempted.”

  I took the box.

  He said, “Do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Throw it away.”

  “Really?” I scowled. I’m pretty sure I paid at least ten bucks for those things. “That’s such a waste.”

  “Rubbish! That’s what this is! We’ll come back later when he’s gone. But I can’t risk it . . . You know, the spit.” He kind of gagged like the thought of Sebastian’s saliva made him almost puke. I didn’t like the idea myself.

  I threw away the white box. Total bummer, since I was starving. Now I’d have to wait until seven o’clock for fish and chips.

  He asked, “Wanna go for a walk or something?”

  What I really wanted to do was find Caroline and get started on my new look before we toured the city.

  I was going to see and do absolutely everything in a new outfit! I didn’t care if I didn’t sleep for five days. . . . Oh, the thought of sleep reminded me how tired I was. I really needed to sleep. I also really needed a snack.

  “Bring! Bring!” Sam said, interrupting my thoughts. “Anybody home?”

  I snapped to attention. “A walk sounds good.” My stomach growled. “But I think I’m going to get a cookie.”

  “You’d better get it from over there. They don’t . . . you know.” He pretended like he was spitting.

  I went to the place with the cookie bouquets and got a big sugar cookie and ate it in three bites.

  “Wow,” Sam said. He held up his hand with a finger toward his mouth and another toward his ear like a pretend phone. “This is the Hungry Company. Is J.J. there?” He held his hand toward me. “It’s for you.”

  I giggled a little bit. I didn’t actually understand the phone thing, but it was funny. I wanted to get to know Sam better. He was goofy, but not in a dorky way. And even a dull American could see he was very good-looking.

  “British girls are all itsy-bitsy about their bites of tiny sandwiches. It’s so unrealistic. If you’re hungry, you’re hungry.” Then he added, “Let’s go. If you’ve never been here, there’s some cool stuff I can show you. Like the Hole.”

  6

  “There’s a hole?”

  “Well, that’s what they call it. It’s more like a lift shaft without the lift,” he said.

  Maybe “pram” wasn’t in my pre-trip homework, but I knew that “lift” was an elevator, so that gave me a decent picture.

  When we stood at the bottom of the Hole and looked up eighteen floors, I understood what he was trying to explain. It was like an elevator shaft, but instead of being surrounded by walls, it was surrounded by escalators that made a square frame. Some department must’ve been giving away balloons, because a few floated up.

  “This is all one store?”

  “Yup. One big store that takes up a city block.”

  Sam hopped on the up escalator.

  We rode up one story and stopped on the landing. A glass display case showed what was on that floor. This floor was Toys, so the windows on the landing were decorated with games, puzzles, stuffed animals, remote control planes, and electric cars. Music trickled out from inside the toy department, and a line of kids snaked out the door.

  “Every few floors there’s something for kids to do while their parents shop. My little sister loves to come with my mom to play dress-up in the Formal Wear Department.”

  The next floor was Cosmetics and Jewelry, where we could smell the faint scents of various perfumes. The mannequins in the windows were drenched in necklaces and bracelets.

  Hmmm . . . maybe my makeover can start on this floor?

  Eventually we passed Persian rugs, so I knew that was where we were having dinner. As we walked, I scanned the crowd. People of every color and nationality I could imagine were browsing the store: women with black shrouds over their heads that only allowed a crack for their eyes, men with long black beards and furry sideburns, people with pale white skin to very dark brown skin and black hair.

  “What do you think?” Sam asked as we went up another level.

  Daphne’s wasn’t the ginormous London Eye Ferris wheel that overlooked the Thames River (which was one of the things I really wanted to do this week), but I had to admit, it was pretty amazing. “It’s definitely bigger than I thought it would be. I don’t know of any place quite like it in the US. We have big department stores like Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue. It’s like this place ate those stores and a carnival. Is there anything it doesn’t have?”

  “A planetarium, a racetrack, and an ice rink. They’re working on a cinema and a bowling alley.”

  I thought he was kidding me, but he didn’t laugh. “Seriously,” he said. “And a helicopter pad on the roof for people traveling from really far. Later this year they’ll let people bungee from off the side of the building.”

  I narrowed my eyes.

  He grinned. “Okay, you got me. I made that one up. Don’t call the Exaggeration Patrol. But the others are true, and if I made a suggestion about the bungee, I bet they’d make that happen too.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Maybe I will,” he said, playfully pushing my shoulder.

  “We should find Caroline,” I suggested.

  “Good idea,” Sam said. “Let’s round up the gang and play a game of Slip Away.”

  7

  “What’s Slip Away?” I asked.

  “We use the whole store. One group flees and the other searches. Every fifteen minutes the flee-ers text the searchers a clue about where they’re hiding.”

  “It sounds like hide-and-seek.”

  “Hide-and-seek is for tots. This is way more.”

  Sam clicked at his phone, which he called a “mobile” (with a long i, so it rhymed with “pile”), as we approached the landing of Formal Wear and Kids’ Dress-Up Department on the tenth floor.

  “They’re on their way,” he said.

  A minute later the golden double doors of an elevator opened. Out walked Caroline, carrying multiple big white shopping bags with the Daphne’s logo. Ellie and Gordo came out behind her, each also carrying a bag or two.

  Did I miss the shopping?

  “Game on?” Gordo asked. His hair had been gelled up like a rock star’s, and I think he’d put on eyeliner. They’d gone to the salon! I had missed it.

  Sam nodded and gave his friend a fist bump.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Ellie, examining her cuticles. “I was hoping for a manicure.” Oh, me too! Maybe I could go home with long elegant nails.

  Gordo said, “You can get a mani any day. In fact, I’ll come back with you tomorrow if you want.”

  “Okay, then I’m in,” she said.

  Caroline sighed. “Fine. But I’ll need to find a locker.”

  Gordo took her bags from her hands. “I’ll take care of that for you. There’s some by the loo.” He disappeared down a hallway with a restroom sign.

  “What are the teams?” Ellie asked. “Last time I fleed and this time I want to search. I could be like the captain of the searchers.”

  “Let’s do the coin method,” Sam said. “It’s the most fair.”

  Gordo reappeared. “Good plan.”

  Sam reached into the pocket of his baggy jeans and handed a coin to everyone. “Odd years are searchers. Even years are flee-ers.”

  I took the coin Sam gave me and looked at the d
ate: 1970. “Even,” I said.

  “Odd,” said Gordo and Ellie. They moved next to each other.

  “Even,” Sam said.

  Caroline didn’t say anything but moved to our even team.

  “It’s three versus two.” Sam, Caroline, and I were going to hide.

  Gordo said, “You better run. You only have two minutes.”

  Sam took off.

  “I love to search. You guys better watch out,” Ellie called after us. “I’m coming after you!”

  Caroline tried to keep up with Sam and me, but with her high-heeled boots, running didn’t come easily. I almost crashed into a group of women wearing colorful belly dancing pants trimmed with small metal discs that jingled as they moved out of my way.

  “Sorry,” I said, not losing pace.

  We stopped near the tuxedos and huddled. Sam said, “Okay, Caroline go to Toys. J.J., you go to Linens.” Linens? I wasn’t going to be able to search for a new look in Linens.

  “J.J.?” Caroline asked, forgetting, or not noticing, that I’d changed my name earlier.

  “That’s what my friends call me.” I waited a beat for her approval. I didn’t get it. It felt like a sting.

  Caroline left without much of a run.

  Sam said, “I’m going to Garden.” He went to the escalator.

  “Wait,” I called. “Which way to Linens?”

  He pointed to the “lift” and held up six fingers.

  “And what do I do when I get there?”

  “You text a clue about where you are, like, ‘Cover me up, I’m cold.’ ” And Sam disappeared up the escalators.

  “Wait!”

  He started walking down the upward-moving stairs. “What?”

  “I don’t have anyone’s cell phone numbers.”

  He ran down faster and jumped the last few steps to return to the landing. “Gimme your digits. I’ll text everyone. Then you’ll have ’em all.”

  I told him my number, and he practically shoved me into the elevator.

  Downstairs I found Linens and looked for a place to hide. There were thousands of possibilities. Behind a pile of towels, under a display bed that was wrapped in pretty sheets and comforters, among stacks of blankets . . . But a fake tub caught my eye, mostly because I thought of a great clue: “Rub-a-dub-dub.”

  I opened my phone and saw a text from Sam. I guess he’d already found a hiding spot, because he’d sent everyone a note that said, “Rhymes with noses.” Since he was in Garden, I guessed he was hidden among roses, although it could’ve been hoses.

  I replied to everyone with my awesome clue and pulled back the display shower curtain that partially hid a claw-foot bathtub. When it seemed like no one was looking, I casually pulled the curtain aside and slipped behind it.

  The tub was filled with light pink plastic balls that looked like bubbles. I dug a foot in between the balls, and when I touched the bottom of the tub, I put the other foot in too. I carefully sunk into the bubbles until I was completely covered. I only left myself a little crack to watch the back side of the shower curtain so I’d know when someone pushed it aside.

  The tub was surprisingly comfortable. Cozy, actually. I wanted to shop rather than play this game, which wasn’t as dumb as I thought it would be, but now that I was lying here, it felt good.

  I yawned and waited.

  8

  No one came.

  After a long time—I’m not sure how long because I fell asleep—I woke up. I could tell something was different.

  Strange.

  Dark.

  Quiet.

  Even a little eerie.

  I crept out of my hiding place. The lights in the store were off. There were some dim security lights. I heard a strange slapping sound on the outside wall that was closest to me. It took a minute to get the sleepy fuzz from my eyes and focus on a window. When I did, I saw lots of rain and a flag hanging off the side of the building, flapping viciously in the wind.

  What is going on?

  I took my phone out of my back pocket and checked it. It was completely blank. Broken? I fiddled with the buttons, and the screen lit up. My butt turned it off! I dialed the last number that had texted me.

  Sam answered, “Where are you?”

  “Linens.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. That’s where you told me to go.”

  Sam said, “Like three hours ago.”

  Three hours? I’d slept in a department store bathtub for three stinkin’ hours?

  “Where are you? Did you get found?” I peeked around a display of purple towels in search of another human. No one was in the dark room. A chill went up the entire back of my boring body, telling me this was anything but dull; it was bad.

  “Found? No. J.J., are you off your trolley? The game is over. It’s been over. The store lost electricity in this storm. Everyone had to leave. Where have you been?”

  What storm? I had a dreadful feeling that I’d just woken up in the middle of a scene from a horror movie, and I was the main character. We had crossed exciting and gone to scary. I wondered if I’d rather be bored. “So no fish and chips?” I asked. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and besides worrying about being slashed by a department store killer, I had food on the brain, in a big way.

  “We had chips a while ago without you,” Sam said. “We thought maybe you found the Dress-Up Department or you got to demo an electric car or something better than dinner.” Well, dang. Now I was hungry, scared, sans a new outfit, and also bummed I didn’t demo an electric car. “We stayed in the store as long as we could looking for you. You didn’t answer your phone. What’s ‘Rub-a-dub-dub’?”

  “You know the poem ‘Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub’?”

  There was an odd pause. “None of us knew what that clue meant.”

  “What floor are you on?” I asked. “I’ll come find you.”

  “No floor,” Sam said. “I’m across the street. The store closed. As in the doors are locked.”

  My mouth went dry. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m trying to say that you’re locked in.”

  If this was a horror movie, really spooky music would’ve played right at that moment. A lump formed in my throat as I finally grasped the very dire situation.

  “I’m all alone.”

  “Not exactly,” Sam said. “There’s Ham.”

  “There’s a ham?” A sandwich sounded really good right about now.

  “A bloke named Hamlet. He’s the night security guard,” Sam said.

  “I’ll find him, and he can let me out.”

  “No!”

  “Why not?”

  “DO NOT let Hamlet see you,” he said. “He caught Caroline last time we played Slip Away. She got in a heap of trouble. He called her dad, who sent Hamlet a sack of money to let us out of the store’s security office. He said he wouldn’t do it again; next time he’d ban her from the store.”

  “Do I really have to stay in here all night?” I asked, panicked.

  “That’s an option, but we have a plan. We’re arranging to rescue you.”

  “What? How?” Then I heard footsteps coming from Linens. “Someone’s coming,” I whispered to Sam.

  “I know.”

  “Is it Hamlet? Is he going to take me to security and handcuff me to a chair?”

  An arm shoved the shower curtain aside. It was Caroline. She looked royally mad. “There you are.”

  “Thank God it’s you,” I said, sitting up. A few plastic bubbles fell out of the tub and rolled across the floor, disappearing underneath a nearby bed.

  “You’ve gotten us into quite a jam.”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose. I fell asleep. You know, jet lag and all.”

  “What I know is that my friends left the store before it closed, and I stayed in here looking for you, and now we’re snookered.”

  “You got locked in on purpose to look for me?” I guess she had started to like me. She was worried about me.

>   She continued, “There’s no way I could go home to my stepmum without you. If I lost our abroad student, she would make my life miserable. After all, that is her purpose in life.”

  Or maybe she wasn’t concerned about me at all.

  I followed Caroline to the escalators, which were turned off. We walked down in a crouched position, below the handrail so that we couldn’t be seen by anyone (well, Hamlet) who might be on one of the landings.

  “Where are you going?” I whispered.

  “To the door.”

  “If the store is closed, don’t you think the doors will be locked?”

  “Yes, Madam Obvious, I think the doors will be locked.” She clucked her tongue like I was a total idiot. She quickly sent a text message. A minute later we were on the ground floor at one of the many sets of big glass doors. We hid behind a tower of boxes wrapped like pretty presents for a party at Buckingham Palace.

  Sam appeared on the other side of the glass doors, on the sidewalk in the rain, and started knocking. He looked pretty wet, but it seemed like it had eased up since I’d looked out the window in Linens. When Hamlet didn’t come, Sam knocked louder.

  I heard a set of feet wearing wet shoes squeak through Purses to the door. Hamlet removed a clunky set of keys from a clip on his belt and turned several locks on the door.

  “What is it?” he asked Sam. “Store’s closed.”

  “Thank goodness you’re here, sir,” Sam said urgently. “I got home from shopping and realized I didn’t have my wallet.” He made a desperate face. “My mum is gonna kill me. I’m serious. She’s loony. If I come home without her credit card, she’ll bloody flip.” His eyes were surrounded by raindrops that could easily be mistaken for tears.

  Hamlet said, “Calm down. She’ll understand.”

  “You don’t know her. She’s off the north side of the cliffs, if you know what I mean.”

  Hamlet’s eyebrows shot up like he couldn’t believe this kid was so afraid of his mother.

  “I think I left it at Lively’s, which is another problem. If I tell her that, she’ll remind me of how fat I am. I’m not supposed to have sweets.”