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hankie, looking into a broken vanity mirror that was attached by duct tape to the car’s visor.
    Fern was confused. Mary had overdone what? Why was she taking off her makeup?
    â€œJust at the end there. It was too much.” The Bone, behind the wheel, shook out his hair so that it fluffed up more on top.
    â€œWhat was too much?” Fern asked timidly.
    â€œWell, you were very compelling,” Mary told the Bone, ignoring Fern. “Honestly, I was a little scared of you.”
    â€œYou were?” The Bone was grinning, full of himself.
    â€œYes. And where did that tie come from?” Mary asked.
    â€œOh, it just popped into place. Inspiration, I guess!” the Bone said, clearly impressed with himself.
    â€œWhat do you mean, inspiration?” Fern asked, a little louder this time.
    But again the two up front chattered on. “Well, Howard is always reliable. He’s like clockwork. He’s dependable. A good kid, in the end.” Mary and the Bone seemed very happy, all charged up. They’d succeeded, that was clear. Fern wasn’t sure, though, if she wanted them to have succeeded. Were they fakes? Had they succeeded in fooling the Drudgers? Her? Fern’s heart started to tighten with fear. No, she told herself, they were nice. Howard, too. Howard wouldn’t have fooled her, would he?
    Fern sat in the backseat, slumped down low, trying to be invisible. Mary Curtain untied her flowered rain cap and tugged off a wig. And as if her high fluttery voicewere attached to the wig, it dropped, too. Mary Curtain was suddenly not Mary Curtain, but a man with close-cropped hair. “It went perfect. I was crying at the end because it was all so perfect. I got emotional.”
    Fern swiveled around to get a view of her house on Tamed Hedge Road disappearing in the back window. The white house with cream shutters looked like every other house in the row, and now there were more rows of white houses with cream shutters. Fern felt dizzy. She pressed her hand to the window. She thought she might cry. She suddenly missed Mrs. Drudger’s blah food, and Mr. Drudger’s weedless, blah lawn, which was always mown in perfect lines, which she wasn’t ever allowed to walk on. She missed the clean, scentless living room. She was suddenly afraid she’d never see the Drudgers or her house ever again.
    Fern didn’t start a little narration in her head. No, this time she shouted, “You’re liars! Are you stealing me? I’ll start screaming! You might think I can’t scream, but I can. Very loudly. And you might think that I’m weak, a scrawny little girl, but I know some karate and I know how to bite really hard. You might think that you’ve got me. But you would be wrong, very, very wrong. I can’t tell you how wrong!” And then Fern screamed. She screamed, high-pitched, loud and long. She screamed an enormous, almost perfect, scream.
    (Here you could possibly decide that this is an altogether bad book. If these two have abducted Fern in any way, shape or form, then this should be a story with a lesson to girls about always being on guard and never straying from home. If Fern were a boy, this thought probably wouldn’t cross your mind. What if Stuart Little had been a girl? We would have arrested her parents for allowing a young girl to set off alone in a motorcar, that’s what! What if Harry Potter had been a girl, spirited away by a giant of a man with a magical umbrella? We’d have said, “No, no,” and “Tsk, tsk.” You may think that girls are better suited to stay in little houses on prairies and within the confines of secret gardens. Or at least working within a buddy system. Wendy couldn’t have gone off with Peter alone, you know. Would you have put up with Violet Baudelaire being hunted, on her lonesome, by that man with the singular eyebrow? And there’s always that foursome traipsing around in