On our trip to New York, we had changed planes at Detroit Metro, but when we went home, we made the stopover in O'Hare. Dad said that was good, because, in the religion of air travel, it was sacrilegious to fly anywhere without stopping in O'Hare at least once. (I think he was kidding.)
Of course, once we got to O'Hare, it turned out to be raining at a rate of about five tons of water per minute, so the hundred or so of us in the airplane had to sprint across the runway with our arms over our heads (all except Mom, who said she had paid six times more for her jacket than for her hairdo, and she intended to keep her priorities straight), stagger into the airport lobby, plop down on the most absorbent chair we could find, and wait for the monsoon to let up enough for our next plane to take off.
I had been sitting for about ten minutes, with my eyes closed, my head thrown back, and the water rolling off my body and forming ever-enlarging damp spots on the chair and the lobby carpet, when it occurred to me to glance down at my backpack and see how Jessie was holding up. Only then did I realize that Beth hadn't zipped the flap back up after she told Jessie good-bye, and that waterproof Teflon doesn't really protect stuff that much when you leave it open in the middle of a Chicago flood.
Hastily, I grabbed the backpack, told Mom and Dad I needed to use the restroom, and walked briskly out of the lobby before either of them could ask me why I needed my backpack to fill the reservoir.
"This is no way to treat a valuable collector's item, you know," Jessie grumbled as I ran her back and forth under the air dryer. "There are probably museums that would pay top dollar for me, and here you are just leaving me to mildew."
"Look, Jessie," I said, rolling my eyes, "I said I'm sorry, all right?"
Jessie didn't respond.
"All right?" I repeated, only to glance down and realize that she had snapped into the lifeless-toy mode that she had had when we had first met, and again when Aunt Louise had come into Beth's bedroom. As near as I could figure out, she did it every time a human being (except, now, me or Beth) was around, although why she was doing it now…
Then I realized that I was standing in a public restroom, and that it was not unheard of for human beings to enter public restrooms. I turned around, and sure enough, some idiot in a University of Michigan cap was standing behind me, staring at me with a look that said quite clearly, A cowgirl doll? Dude, I've seen some pathetic stuff in my time, but that takes the cake.
Over the course of the next few days, I came up with about fifteen nonchalant but extremely cutting remarks that would have met this situation beautifully. At the time, what I did was grin weakly and raise my hand slightly, as though holding Jessie up for this nincompoop's inspection. The galoot shook his head wonderingly, then shuffled over to the far wall and disappeared into one of the stalls.
As soon as he locked the door, I felt the lump of cloth in my hand tremble slightly, and heard Jessie's voice say sarcastically, "Nicely handled, Jake. I'm so glad you're my new owner."
I glared down at her. "You could have been a little more help yourself," I said. "You were free to say something to that guy, you know."
"No, I wasn't," said Jessie.
"Why not?" I demanded. "What's the deal with this I-can't-be-real-around-people thing? Where is it written that when a company figures out how to make toys that can talk, it has to hide the fact from everyone in the world who might conceivably care?"
I was talking to an inanimate lump of fabric. With a sigh, I looked up again, and the elderly man who was drying his hands next to me shook his head in a manner reminiscent of Polonius ("'A is far gone, far gone"), tossed his paper towel into the trash, and walked out the restroom door towards the lobby.
I sighed, and looked back down into Jessie's once-again-bright eyes. "Okay, listen, cowgirl," I whispered. "If we keep doing this much longer, the entire city of Chicago's going to think that my elevator doesn't go all the way to the top floor. We need to work out a different system."
"What did you have in mind?" said Jessie.
"I'm not sure," I said. "Maybe I could sneak you into the girls' restroom, and you could dry yourself off there. I'm pretty sure you'd look more natural in that context."
"Well, but someone might…" Jessie began, then froze as our friend in the Michigan cap flushed his toilet and came out of his stall. I'm not sure, but I think he deliberately lingered over the cleaning-up process so he could smirk at me a little longer; then he sauntered out of the restroom, and Jessie said, as though she had never been interrupted, "…come in and see me lying on the floor, and walk off with me – and what would Beth say then?"
"Oh, come on, Jessie," I said. "You've got to start being less suspicious of people. Maybe one out of a hundred people would walk off with a doll that didn't belong to her; the other ninety-nine would remember what their mothers taught them about honesty and take it to the Lost and Found – and that's where I'll look for you, if you're not waiting for me when I get done in here."
Jessie hesitated – hesitated a little longer than she had to, in fact, since she had to wait for the middle-aged black man who entered the restroom at this point to get out of hearing distance – then whispered, "Okay, let's do it."
That was easier said than done, of course. The women's restroom had even more people coming in and out of it than the men's, and it took me nearly three minutes of lying in wait in the little vestibule between the doors to find a moment when I could dart in, drop Jessie on the floor, turn on the blow dryer, and dart back out again.
Eventually, though, I managed, and went back into the men's room to finish drying off the rest of the stuff in my backpack. The couple of books I'd had in there were the worst; it took me nearly a quarter of an hour to make sure that none of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban's pages would wind up stuck together, and Think iFruity I gave up on altogether and pitched into the trash can with the paper towels. It had only cost me nine bucks, and I could always get another copy out of the library.
Everything else turned out to be more or less waterproof, although the portable CD player caused me that irrational concern that I think most people feel when they see water get on electrical equipment – as though a hair dryer dropped in a bathtub could electrocute you even if it wasn't plugged in, just because it was a hair dryer. Apart from that, the only things in the backpack were a few copper models of New York landmarks that Beth had given me (so I wouldn't "forget my sojourn in the citadel of the West"), a couple pairs of socks I had been planning to throw into the laundry as soon as we got home anyway, and the inside of the backpack itself, which didn't require blow-drying so much as turning upside down and dumping the water out of it. After I was done with that, I packed everything back up (except Harry Potter, which it seemed wiser to carry manually), zipped the pack shut, and went out to wait for Jessie.
When I got out to the vestibule, a little girl with kinky brown hair was coming out of the ladies' room. Evidently she was aspiring to a career in vandalism when she grew up, because the three or four Barbie dolls that were squished together inside the netting on the back of her backpack all had their faces colored over with Magic-Marker drawings of hearts, flowers, and rainbows. I dearly hoped Jessie had managed to avoid getting snagged by her; I could just imagine what Beth would say if she heard that I had gotten her surrogate daughter turned into the Oklahoma Beatnik.
It turned out that I didn't need to worry. No sooner had Little Miss Visigoth skipped out into the lobby than I felt a tug on my jean leg, and I looked down to see Jessie staring up at me urgently. The yarn in her ponytail still looked a little damp, but evidently she had more important things on her mind.
"Jake!" she hissed. "Did you see the girl that just left?"
"The one with Lydia the Tattooed Barbie, you mean?" I said. "Yeah, I saw her. Why?"
"Where did she go?" Jessie demanded.
I blinked. "Um… into the lobby somewhere, I assume. Probably she's waiting for a plane, the same as the…"
"No!" said Jessie, her plastic eyes blazing. "She can't get on board a plane yet! You have to find her!"
I held up a hand. "Jessie, I think you need to calm down," I said. "Just relax for a minute, and then tell me what's wrong."
"We might not have a minute!" Jessie insisted.
"Take one anyway."
She glared at me, but folded her arms and obediently took a deep breath. "Okay," she said. "Did you see what she was carrying?"
"Um… no," I said. "All I saw was her backside – and those maltreated stick figures, of course. Why, what was she carrying?"
"The Prospector!" said Jessie. "She's got the Prospector!"
I stared. She couldn't mean… no, it was impossible…
"Um… Jess…" I said, "when you say 'the Prospector', you mean…"
"I mean the Prospector!" said Jessie, annoyed. "That little dudette's gotten hold of Stinky Pete!"
