Anyway, on the days she “rides” it, she keeps her board in Mr. Tiller’s classroom, because she has him for homeroom and he’s one of those cool teachers who doesn’t mind. And since I had Mr. Tiller for math last year, and since his classroom is pretty close to the Vincenator’s, that’s usually where I park mine, too.
So anyway, we’re heading for Mr. Tiller’s classroom and I’m catching Marissa up on what happened in the office when I notice Cisco. His arms are out like he’s pushing his cart of cleaning stuff, only his body’s leaned waaaay back and his head is twisted to the side so he can look around the corner behind him.
I stop talking, and I stop walking. And when Marissa notices that I’m checking out Cisco, she laughs and says, “It looks like he’s waterskiing with his cleaning cart.”
Now I’m wondering if maybe something new happened in ol’ Scratch ’n’ Spit’s classroom, because it’s right around the corner. So we tiptoe up to where Cisco is, and I whisper, “What’s going on?”
He jerks forward with a “Huh?”
“Sorry! I didn’t mean to spook you.”
He puts a finger in front of his lips and waves for us to have a peek around the corner. So Marissa goes high, and I go low. And when I’ve got my eyeball wrapped around the corner, what do I see?
Mr. Vince arguing with Mr. Foxmore.
“I can’t quite hear,” Cisco whispers. “Can you?”
So I hold my breath, but I can only barely make out Vince’s half of it. “… how do you expect me to teach? How do you expect me not to freak out? … I am not overreacting! Don’t you watch the news? There are crazy people in this world! … No, I don’t think it’s them! … How am I supposed to know who it is? This is an open campus. It doesn’t have to be a student—it could be anybody! … No, the best thing is for you to do your job! You’re supposed to make this a safe school, and if you can’t do your job, how do you expect me to do mine?”
Mr. Foxmore says something, then starts to move away. So Marissa and I duck back, and when Cisco asks us, “Could you hear?” Marissa nods and gives him a quick run down of what she’d heard—which pretty much matched what I’d heard. Then she whispers to me, “It sounded like Mr. Vince doesn’t think it was you and Billy, did you get that?”
I nod. “Miracle of miracles.”
“That is good!” Cisco says. Then he pushes forward, saying, “I’d better get moving before someone wonders what we’re doing.”
So he goes one way, and we go back to Mr. Tiller’s room to grab our skateboards, only Mr. Tiller kinda corners me and says, “Please tell me it wasn’t you.”
“It absolutely positively wasn’t me!”
He half sits on the edge of a student desk. “So what is going on? The rumors have been really flying this afternoon.”
“About Heather’s phone? Or about Billy and me getting grilled in the office?”
“Both!”
So we wind up hanging out in Mr. Tiller’s classroom for a good twenty minutes while I tell him my side of things, leaving out the stuff about Billy writing on the board and Sasha picking up Heather’s phone and Cisco helping us get inside information. And when I’m all done, he shakes his head and says, “It’s been a very strange day. From the fire alarm to all this phone business.…” He stands up and laughs. “It’s way too early in the year for this! Usually, we have meltdowns and crises at the end of the year.” He starts toward his desk, saying, “Let’s just hope they figure it out soon.”
So we finally get out of there, and since we’re not allowed to ride skateboards on the walkways at school, we shortcut over to the alleyway that delivery trucks use to bring in food or pipes or whatever, and ride out of school that way. And I’m almost to the alleyway gate when Marissa calls, “Hey, wait up!”
I look over my shoulder as I cruise along and see her jumping off her board, running to catch it. So I stop at the gate and wait while she grabs her skateboard and runs toward me crying, “I hate being so bad at this!”
“Look,” I tell her, “you need to decide on a foot. Just push with your right foot, okay?”
“But it feels weird.”
“So push with your left foot.”
“But that feels weird, too!”
“Well, you can’t push with both.”
“I could if it was a bike!”
I frown at her a minute. “Okay. How about this—close your eyes and pretend it’s a scooter. What would you do?”
So she actually closes her eyes and puts her hands up like she’s holding the handle of a scooter. “I’d push with my right.”
“Yay!”
There’s a big gap between the doors of the gate, so I squeeze through it, backpack and all. And after Marissa has done the same, I take her board from her and put it down at her feet. “Okay. You’re gonna push with your right, and you’re gonna commit. No more of this scaredy-cat stuff. You can always jump off, right? So quit worrying about falling off or crashing. Just push like you mean it and enjoy the ride!”
So she gives it a shot. And even though she’s pumping more than she’s riding, she’s actually leaning into it, pushing like she means it. It probably helps that it’s not a real public spot, so she doesn’t have to feel self-conscious about people watching her. Plus, we’re on cement, not asphalt, and there are no dips or curbs or typical sidewalk hazards like, you know, bulging tree roots or dogs or evidence of dogs.
The trouble is, this kinda unpublic place happens to be the teachers’ parking lot, and all of a sudden I notice taillights.
“Marissa!” I call, because she’s ahead of me, riding straight for an SUV that’s backing up. And it’s backing up fast. “Marissa! Car! MARISSA! CAR!”
When she finally looks up, she panics and jumps off her board, sending it flying forward as she staggers and stumbles and then falls to the side. And before I can even finish blinking, the SUV goes MUNCH, CRUNCH, THWUMP right over the skateboard.
The brake lights come on, the driver’s door flies open, and then who comes scrambling out?
The Kid Detester himself.
“What the hell are you doing back here?” Mr. Vince shouts after he sees the demolished skateboard.
I blink at him a minute, then help Marissa off the ground as I tell him, “Thanks so much for your concern, but I think she’ll be fine.”
He snarls at me, then walks around the back bumper, which is chalky-looking and already dinged in at least two places, and has three faded oval stickers on it that say STURGIS.
Whatever that is.
And when he finally decides that we haven’t done any suable damage to his awesome ride, he kicks what’s left of Marissa’s skateboard out from under his car and says, “This is the teachers’ parking lot, not your little skate park. You’re lucky nobody got hurt.”
Then he gets in his car, slams his dirty blue door, and leaves us in a cloud of burning rubber.
SEVENTEEN
So much for riding skateboards home. After we threw away the scraps of Marissa’s board, we wound up hoofing it out of there some back way that Marissa wanted to go. It was an odd route, too, and finally I ask her, “Why are we going this way?”
She just shrugs and says, “Nobody from school goes this way.”
I snort. “Well, yeah! Why would they?” But then something hits me. “Are you avoiding someone?”
“No!” She laughs. “I just like the trees, don’t you?”
Well, the trees don’t look like anything special to me, but I don’t tell her that. I just walk along wondering what’s really behind our going this way, ’cause I’m getting the feeling it has nothing to do with trees.
She lets out a sigh. “First my dad runs over my bike, then Mr. Vince runs over my skateboard. What’s next?”
I eye her. “Got Rollerblades?”
She laughs. “No, but if I did, I’d leave them in the closet!”
Now, while she’s talking, she’s kinda glancing away from me, looking to the right. And she keeps glancing to the right as w
e walk along, so I do, too. And I’m sorry, but I don’t see what’s so doggone interesting about a one-story tract house with a sort of patchy lawn.
And then we pass by the mailbox.
“Urbanski?” I ask, my eyes bugging out as I read the faded letters on the side of the mailbox. “This is Danny’s house?”
“Shhh!” she says frantically. “Be cool! And keep walking!”
I grab her arm. “Marissa, how can you not be over him? After everything he’s done to you? He’s a liar and a sneak … and you hated him! Remember during the summer when you saw him kissing Heather?”
“I know,” she cries, her face crinkling up.
“Oh, good grief.” I pull her by the wrist. “I can’t believe you’re stalking him!”
“I’m not stalking him! He’s not even out of school yet!”
Which was true. The high school lets out forty minutes after we do.
So I stop and look at her and ask, “Okaaaaaay … so what are we doing? Stalking his house?”
“No!”
“Then … ?”
“I don’t know!” she wails. “I just can’t help it. He lives there. He walks here. He … he breathes this air!”
I shake my head and yank her along. “You’re obsessed, you know that?” I look at her. “How often do you do this?”
She shrugs.
“Like, every time I don’t walk home with you?”
She shrugs again, but there’s something more to it than just a Yeah.
“Wait … you come this way in the morning, too?”
She cringes. “Sometimes.”
I stop and turn to face her. “This is crazy, you know that.”
She nods.
“You have to stop it!”
“I know.”
“Is that why you took me this way? Because you wanted me to catch you stalking his house?”
“I’m not stalking his house! And no!” She marches on, muttering, “I can’t believe you even noticed.”
“Are you kidding me? An avalanche would have been more subtle!” I frown at her. “And if you weren’t trying to tell me, then I can’t believe you’ve been keeping this from me.”
“Me?” she says, her eyes popping. “What about you? I can’t believe you didn’t tell me Billy was the one who wrote on the whiteboard. Billy couldn’t believe you didn’t tell me!”
So, yeah, I totally bite at her subject-switching bait. I get all defensive and try to explain again why I didn’t tell her about Billy, but still, no matter what I say, she keeps coming back to how Billy is her friend, too, and how she had the right to know. And before we’ve even settled that argument, she gives me a defiant look and says, “So what other secrets are you keeping from me?”
“I’m not!” I snap, but then I remember.
Sasha.
Sasha and the phone.
“What?” Marissa asks, zooming in on my expression.
I blink. “Uh …”
She gives me a little shove. “Tell me!”
“Oh, maaaaan.”
“Tell me!”
“I promised I wouldn’t!” But this suddenly seems like a really lame excuse. I mean, it’s not like Sasha was my friend—she was actually kind of strange. And she’d been all huffy to me. Forget that—she didn’t even seem to be talking to me. Why should I keep the secret of some strange, huffy girl from my best friend?
Seeing the look on Marissa’s face did me in. “All right, all right!” But I’m hot and tired and just don’t feel like walking while I’m talking about it. So I diagonal over to the shade of a tree, plop down on the curb, dump my back pack and skateboard, and heave a sigh. “It’s about Sasha.”
Marissa dumps her backpack, too. “Sasha? That homeschooled girl who lives out in some farmhouse in Sisquane with six brothers and twelve cats?”
“What? How do you know all that?”
Marissa shrugs. “I have her in math. Preston Davis is always quizzing her about random things before class starts. She’s really smart.” She eyes me. “And a little … different.”
“Yeah, well, that can be a good thing, right?”
Marissa nods. “So what secret are you keeping for her?”
“I don’t know if I’m keeping it for her or about her. I just pinky swore that I’d keep it, and—”
“You pinky swore? With Sasha?”
“I know. Weird, huh?”
“How did that happen?”
So I tell her the whole thing. From the top. About Sasha sitting in front of me, about me trying to clue her in to the ways of public schooling, about her thinking I was a wimp for not standing up to Heather, and then finally about Heather falling on the ramp and losing her phone. “Heather swore someone tripped her, and of course she thought it was me … but it wasn’t.”
Marissa gasps. “Sasha did it?”
So I tell her how it took me a while to figure that out because she’d been so smooth, and I just didn’t expect that sort of thing from her.
Marissa thinks about this a minute, then says, “If I was surrounded by six brothers in a farmhouse out in Sisquane, I’d probably know some tricky moves, too. Just for survival.”
I nod. “True.” And for the first time, Sasha being a stealth tripper totally makes sense.
Then Marissa asks, “So when did she admit it? And how come a pinky swear?”
So I tell her about PE and how it had felt like performing some sort of delicate surgery to get anything out of Sasha.
“But she did admit it?”
“Well, sort of. That was weird, too. She didn’t actually come out and say she did it, but she did this demented laugh and a little nod and then made me pinky swear not to tell.”
“Good enough for me!” Marissa laughs. “And anyone who takes Heather on like that is a friend of mine.”
“Yeah, well, don’t be so sure.”
“What do you mean?”
So then I tell her about the whole you-do-the-downs-and-I’ll-do-across thing and how Sasha’s attitude totally changed after I wouldn’t go along with it, and how she’s basically not talking to me now.
Marissa thinks about this a minute, then says, “You’d think she’d be worried that you’d tell people she’s the one who put Heather’s phone in the Porta-Potty.”
“You’d think,” I snort. “But she can just deny it because it’s my word against hers. And what if she decides to turn it around on me and say that I admitted to her that I did it?”
“Wow …,” Marissa says, blinking at me. “And who would believe you over her, right?”
“Exactly. So I’m just gonna leave it alone and appreciate that she tossed Heather’s precious phone in the turd tank.” I grin at her and snicker, “Target practice!” and we both totally crack up.
Now, I guess we were kinda comfy sitting on the curb in the shade because we wound up staying parked there while we talked about everything from our teachers to our parents to what Billy had said about his dad to Danny to Casey—a subject I immediately shut down—to softball. “I don’t even think I’m going to play this year,” I tell her, re-tying the laces of my high-top. “Ms. Rothhammer says she’s not coaching, and ol’ Scratch ’n’ Spit is. It’s just not worth it.”
“I can’t believe how much things have changed,” Marissa says with a sigh. “Softball used to be so important to me, and I barely even care about it anymore.”
“That’s because of everything that’s going on with your family and living in limbo at Hudson’s and—”
She reaches for my wrist. “What time is it?” And when she sees, she bolts off the curb. “Quarter to five? How did it get to be quarter to five? Mikey’s going to be worried!”
I stand up, too. “Mikey is?”
“Oh, you have no idea,” she says, dusting off.
So we grab our stuff, and off we go to Hudson’s, where I figure I’ll call Grams and tell her why I’m late.
It turns out Marissa’s right—Mikey is waiting for us. He’s doing it by sitting smack-d
ab in the middle of the sidewalk in front of Hudson’s porch, and when he sees us coming, he jumps up and starts running toward us.
Running.
I just stop dead in my tracks, because the idea that Mikey would jump up and run was outside the scope of, you know, Mike-ability.
Only it’s not Marissa he’s charging toward.
It’s me.
“Guess what?”
I blink at him a minute, ’cause his eyes are shining and his cheeks are glowing, and he’s … well, he’s just not the same old Mikey.
Or even the same new Mikey.
“What?” I finally ask.
“I spied on Captain Evil today!”
I blink at him some more.
“You know!” he says, jumping up and down a little. “Your teacher?”
“Of course I know who Captain Evil is.” I look over both shoulders and whisper, “Where’d you see him?”
“On my power walk!”
I raise an eyebrow at him. “Your power walk, huh?”
“Yeah. And he dropped this!”
He hands over a flimsy piece of paper.
It’s a receipt, crinkled and smudged.
Hudson has joined us now, and he says, “The power walking was Mikey’s idea. We started on Monday.” He winks at me. “But today we were apparently on a mission.”
“So what was”—I look both ways—“Captain Evil doing?” I ask Mikey as I hand him the receipt.
Mikey looks up at me, shocked. “Don’t you want that?”
Hudson gives me a look and a bouncy nod, which means YES! You want it!
“Are you sure I can have it?” I ask Mikey.
His head bobs up and down. “I can’t figure out what it’s for! Neither can Hudson.”
So I look at it more closely and try to decipher the faded type. There’s the SKU number and then “12×18mgntsn,” with a price of $19.95 next to it.
It’s the only item on the receipt, and the receipt is from a place called Jiffy Print.
Probably something the Vincenator had to get printed for school.
So, yeah, what I’m holding is garbage. But what I say to Mikey is, “Hmm. I’m going to have to try to crack this code,” and then I slip the receipt in my pocket.