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much longer. Soon I was going to start worrying.
    Resolutely, I forced myself to sit down at the kitchen table and pull out my history homework.
Name three causes of the American Civil War and
… War? Did I remember a war?
    I kept having to read the history questions over three or four times. It took me a full hour to write ten answers.
    And at the end of the hour Mom still hadn’t come back.
    This was really weird. Mom wasn’t the kind of person who always left a note whenever she went out. But she also wasn’t the kind of person who was ever gone long.
    I called the library. Mrs. Steele answered the phone.
    “My mom isn’t there, is she?” I asked. “You didn’t call her in to work at the last minute, did you?”
    “No.” Mrs. Steele sounded surprised. “Goodness knows we’re busy enough this afternoon—how many term papers are your classmates trying to do? But I couldn’t call her in to work during a leave of absence. The public employee code prevents it.”
    “Leave of absence?” I asked, certain I’d misunderstood.
    “Yes, yes. I still can’t believe the library board approved her request so quickly. She didn’t say—Are you two going to be out of town? Is she taking you out of school for that long?” Mrs. Steele was often frustrated with my mom’s closemouthedness and tried to get information out of me instead. Sometimes Iplayed along, sometimes I didn’t. Right now, I was even more baffled than Mrs. Steele. And, in her nosiness, she seemed to have forgotten I thought my mom was at the library. “No, it’s five cents a day for overdue books,” she added.
    “What?” I said.
    “Sorry, Kira,” Mrs. Steele said. “I was talking to somebody else. Wish I were taking a month off too. Oops—gotta go. No! Do not pull all those books off the—”
    I hung up, thoroughly confused. Why would my mother take a leave of absence? For a whole month? And why hadn’t she told me? Why wasn’t she home? Could she possibly have left town? Without me?
    I picked up the phone and automatically began dialing Lynne’s number. I didn’t even have to look, I’ve dialed it so many times. But this time, I stopped halfway through. What good would it do to tell Lynne what was going on? Mom would probably walk in, just as I was saying,
Yes, my mom is definitely weird
. That wouldn’t exactly set the right tone for Mom to reveal all.
    And I suddenly wasn’t sure I wanted Lynne to know the latest developments. Mom was weird, all right, but it was the kind of weird you could live with and not have to pay too much attention to. Ever since I’d been hypnotized, the weirdness had spread. Lynne was beginning to treat me like a particularly perplexing math problem, not a friend. I wasn’t going to encourage that.
    I did the rest of my homework with unusual attention to detail. I even did an English assignment that wasn’t due until Friday. When I finished, it was practically six o’clock, and Mom still wasn’t home.
    I stood up, stretched, walked around the table. I reallywished we had a TV. All my friends always had something to do, a way to kill time whenever they wanted. Turn on the tube, flip through all the channels a time or two, and, zap, there went that half hour you didn’t know what to do with. There went those thoughts you didn’t want to think, replaced by clever talking frogs, housewives delighted with their clean laundry, rock stars revealing their love lives, Oprah frowning empathetically over some sad tale.
    I picked up a book—Mom’s favored replacement for TV—but I couldn’t concentrate. I considered fixing dinner, because I was getting hungry. But I didn’t want Mom to think I was rewarding her for being away. No, let her fix dinner, for her and me both, as soon as she got back. Let her pay for scaring me.
    Just to do
something,
I settled for vacuuming, because I was getting sick of stepping on crumbs every time I walked around the table. I hauled out the sweeper and swiped it across the