When the bell rang for the fifteen minute noon break at the mill the next day, Katie trudged out of the enormous iron gates as if in a trance. She had only returned to working at the factory a short seven hours earlier, but already the monotony of the work was taking its toll. Shoving those lengths of material into the jaws of the waiting machine and waiting the required five seconds as the blades crushed together and split the required amount from the larger whole before pushing more material into the endlessly hungry maw of the great black monster put her into a sort of stupor. She remembered isolated moments from the days she had spent working in the lodging house, the way the sun had played on the bunks as she worked in her little chair, the sound of three dozen noisy boys on their way out for the day's work, the din made by their pounding feet on the floorboards was an entirely different racket from the metallic clang and belch of the mill.
Just breathing the fresh air, despite its frozen chill, made Katie feel more alive, although she knew that it only made going back into the building after the break all the more difficult. She scanned the street outside the factory, hoping to see a familiar face so she could let the newsies know she hadn't abandoned them. They had been so accepting of her ; she could only imagine what conclusions her sudden non-appearance at the lodging house had caused them to draw.
She didn't have to look for very long before spotting Jack Kelly loping towards her through the crowd of other mill girls.
"Oh Jack!" She ran to him and threw her arms around him, fairly jumping into the air to do it. "I would have told you, only my brother signed me up last night and I had no idea until I got home – "
Jack stepped back abruptly out of her embrace. The way he looked at her was similar to the way her brother had looked at her the night before, only with more hurt showing through the anger.
"Jack, what is - ?"
"You left something at Irving Hall last night."
"Did I? I didn't notice, I was in such a hurry to leave…"
"Your notebook. I found it. I read it."
"Oh. Well, you know it wasn't really something I meant for other people to – "
"How could you write those things? All those things about us, about the newsies, about Rat, Skittery, about me?"
"Jack, I – "
"Forget it. It's a good thing you've found a place for yourself here, because I don't want you around me and the boys no more. You'd just better – " he pointed at her as if he were about to say something but couldn't find the words. "You'd just better stay away. We don't want nothing to do with you and your spying and your lies!" He stopped for a moment to get himself under control and swiped his hand angrily across his face. "And if you're lookin' to buy a papah, I'd stay away from the World too. Why don't you try the Sun? I hear they're hard up for subscribers."
He turned to stalk away, and no amount of Katie's pleading would make him turn around. She wanted to run after him, to tell him that what she wrote in that notebook had been exactly what she'd felt at that moment, the impressions she'd formed day by day and minute by minute of the newsboys, their culture and their leader. And maybe if she had it back now, she would fill it with different thoughts, different impressions, show things in a better light, because that was what drew her to the newsboys' life: its vibrancy, its constant ability to change at the drop of a hat, the way it positively hummed with life and all of its messy details.
The whistle blew, and instead of following after Jack to explain to him how dear all of the boys had become to her, how dear he had so suddenly become to her, Katie turned and trudged again, head down, into the waiting dark of the mill and its endless hours of toil.
Katie's hours at the mill became days which quickly blended into weeks and months, each moment indistinguishable from the last, punctuated only by the regular crunch and thud of the machines. At first, she thought often and longingly of the newsies, of Blink and Race and Rat, revisiting every instant they had spent together and fervently lamenting their revised opinion of her. For she could only assume that was the reason they never came by the mill to see her or they never got word to her through Kevin or Pam, who she still visited on occasion to buy an apple when she wasn't working. She wondered for awhile whether Jack had shared her writings with the other boys and whether they looked on her with as much scorn as their "cowboy" did, but she soon realized that it didn't matter who Jack had shown her work to, the other boys would follow the example of their leader, because if they didn't have the reassuring structure of their miniature society to keep them together, how would they survive? The newsies were family to one another, and the boys would no sooner think to counteract Jack's decisions than Katie would think to disobey her brother and go running from the mill, turning her back on her responsibilities and obligations.
After awhile Katie's questions about the hows and the whys of her ostricisation from the newsies faded to a pleasant fantasy of doing just what she could not, of someday leaving the mill to never return and running to the lodging house where her friends would welcome her with open arms and explain that they had all suffered a terrible bout with the flu that winter and that's why they had been unable to visit her while she was working.
But with time even these fantasies faded, and she spent her hours at the mill in a sort of blankness, a sort of half sleep which only required her to move her arms briefly, every five seconds. She didn't chatter with the other workers, only stared unseeingly at the machine in front of her. The constant Thunk thunk of the metallic jaws lulled her into a stupor, and nothing woke her form this waking dream.
Even Kevin noticed Katie's change in attitude, although he appreciated her new "respectful" stance towards him rather than seeing anything amiss in her behavior. In his eyes he had saved his sister from a life of sin and iniquity, it was only right that she defer to him on all decisions, even if that meant she never spoke to him unless he required a direct answer, a simple yes or no was all he could hope for.
One day, like any other, heedless of the fact that leaves were budding on trees outside the heavily grated mill windows, Katie continued with her work, her eyes almost closed, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. But this time, she misjudged. This one time out of the countless others, she pushed a little too hard on the cloth gathered in front of her, or she held her arms out for a split second too long, allowing the massive metal jaws of the machine come down with a different sounding crunch. That was all she noticed, the change in the sound around her, before she fainted and saw only black.