"One that he's in charge of?"
"It could be a good thing. All right, I'll admit he's a little bit conceited, but his heart's in the right place."
Hearing that made me suddenly feel the chill of the ocean breeze.
"Does he know how much you stand up for him?"
"No," answered Cheryl, "but he knows how much I stand up for you."
That shut me up real quick. On the one hand it felt good to know that she would still stick up for me. On the other hand, Cheryl always knew the exact words to say to win a conversation with me. Lately reading her had been like looking into a one-way mirror. I could only tell what was behind her words in a certain rare light, which wasn't shining today.
I couldn't look her in the eye, so I turned and stepped over to the ledge, where the seawall rose from below and met the flat mesa of the Ghosties. It was an unguarded precipice, and I marveled at how stupid we all were to play here when we were little. I longed for that kind of stupidity again, when I didn't know enough to see danger around me. Far off I heard the fence rattle as Tyson made his way out of the Ghosties. The sound brought me back to the here and now.
"Maybe we'd better go," I told Cheryl.
Another wave sprayed up over the ledge, dousing us, as if the sea itself was trying to chase us away. I heard the fence rattle again, and figured it must have just been the wind. We turned away from the tugboat, and left together, but it was painfully obvious to both of us that we were very much apart.
The next afternoon, I went with Tyson down to the community pool. One of my many New Year's resolutions had been to teach Tyson to swim. I figured it was one small way to try and make up for the part I played in almost drowning him last fall.
At first I took him to the pool several times a week, but, like all New Year's resolutions, my resolve faded pretty quickly. I hadn't given him a lesson for more than three weeks. But now, with so many things squirming around in my brain, I welcomed the chance to focus my thoughts on something else. I dragged Tyson down to the pool, with him resisting all the way.
"It's cold." "I'm tired." "I got too much homework." "I think I got an earache."
Tyson was never an eager learner when it came to anything, but today I wasn't taking no for an answer.
Our local pool had a personality all its own. First of all it wasn't even called a pool, it was called a "natatorium," which I guess was a gymnasium for swimming. With a fancy name like that, they could charge two bucks to get in. The natatorium had an Olympic-sized pool, and huge windows that were always so fogged it defeated the purpose of having windows in the first place. As for the pool itself, well, it was about as clouded as the windows. I used to wear goggles when I swam, but stopped because I got tired of looking at all those unidentifiable bits of floating organic matter. There are just some things I'd rather not know about.
Tyson had managed to master the dog paddle pretty early on in our lessons, and now he proudly huffed and puffed his way through six laps like a Labrador, while I swam a fairly lame, but effective crawl.
"Listen, do you want to learn to swim or not?" I snapped us he tried to climb out of the pool.
"What do you call what I just did? That was six laps!"
I pulled him back into the water. "Six dog laps," I corrected. "That's not even one human lap, Fido."
In the lane beside us, which was reserved for the more serious swimmers, someone did a quick flip turn and splashed super-chlorinated water up my nose.
"Ughh!" I sneezed and tried to clear my burning sinuses.
"Serves you right," Tyson said.
When I looked up to see who had splashed me, I caught sight of Drew Landers, our school's number one swimmer, peering out at me from beneath his armpit for an instant, as he stroked forward, toward the deep end of the pool.
"He did that on purpose!" I said.
"What, is like everyone out to get you now?" Tyson said. "You're starting to sound like me. That's scary."
"Tell me about it."
Drew Landers, however, did have a reason to hold a grudge against me—after all, the Shadow Club had pranked him exceptionally well during that first round of pranks, when it all still felt like fun, before it started getting dangerous. We had paid Drew a midnight visit, and peeled back the grungy socks from his feet as he slept. Then we painted his toenails red and put the socks back on. He didn't take them off again until swim practice the next day, and, let me tell you, it made quite an impression on the swim team—not to mention the coach, who scheduled him an immediate visit to Mr. Greene for tender guidance. I had to admit, though, Drew did manage to turn the whole situation around. Rather than clean off his toes, he painted every other toenail white, so his feet proudly displayed our school colors of red and white. He said it was a sign of school spirit. Since he was the team captain, and one of the cool-defining personalities of our school, the entire swim team followed his lead and went the rest of the season with red-and-white-painted toenails. I think this is how really stupid traditions are born.
"C'mon," I told Tyson, trying to forget about Drew. "I'll teach you the crawl."
"Tyson McGaw never crawls."
"Then Tyson McGaw drowns."
"Have you ever known a dog that drowned?"
He had a point, but he wasn't getting out of it so fast. "Would you like it better if I called it 'freestyle'?"
"Yeah. I could get into freestyle."
I tried to work with him on the rhythm of his breathing, but then took another blast of water in the face. It gagged me, and I coughed up like half a lung. When my eyes cleared, I saw Drew Landers standing in the pool beside us, doing some sort of swimmer's stretch with his arm behind his head like a contortionist.
"Your stroke bites the biscuit," Drew told me. "If Tyson wants swimming lessons, he should have asked me."
"Yeah, right," said Tyson. "Like you'd care."
Drew only shrugged. "It's a community service," he said. "Community service always looks good on your permanent record."
"Thanks, but we're doing fine by ourselves," I told him, and tried to get back to the lesson. I hoped Drew would just push off and continue his laps, but he didn't.
"I hear you've been pranking on Alec Smartz."
I took a deep, slow breath, and tried not to let anger seep into my voice. "You heard wrong."
"That skunk was rank and righteous!" Drew said. "Was that the first time you ever skunked someone?"
"No!" I insisted. "I mean yes! I mean neither! I didn't do it!"
"Hey, you know what they say: He who denied it, supplied it."
"No," said Tyson, "that's for farts."
Drew shrugged. "Skunks, farts, not much of a difference, is there?" Drew reached up and did his contortionist stretch again. "Can't say Alec didn't deserve it, though—the way he's been strutting around like he's God's gift to whatever."
"If you hate him so much," I said, "then how do we know that you didn't do it?"
Drew slipped his goggles back on. "Because I lack the psycho-factor—but not you. In fact, put the two of you together and there's enough psycho to make national headlines."
I was going to say something back—something truly wise and profound, or at least just flip him off, but before I could, he slipped back under the water and pushed off, swimming away as silently as a shark.
"That really ticks me off," I grumbled.
Tyson nodded. "Wanna go on a rampage?"
I shivered, feeling cold with half of my body out of the water. "That's not even funny."
The Microscope
and the
Magnifying Glass
I HAD TO accept that, in the real world, there was no such thing as being innocent until proven guilty. Everyone was happy to assume I was guilty, and I was the only one who could prove my innocence. That would take some serious investigation.
I'm not much of a detective. I used to read all those three-minute mystery books, but I never had the patience to figure them out, so I'd just turn to the back to find the ans
wer. I always seemed to miss the details that were most important. While Tyson wasn't stupid, he was no great brain either, and so together the two of us felt less like Holmes and Watson, and more like Beavis and Butthead.
The hair ball trail was cold. There was no sense even trying to solve that one. So Tyson and I spent the next afternoon on a skunk-out. Cheryl had been right when she said that skunks weren't out this time of year, and even if they were, it would have taken quite a lot of effort to catch one. Seemed to me that the skunk had to come from the NatureCenter. It was a small building down a dirt road, famous for grammar school field trips, and an adopt-a-snake program that hadn't gone over very well. Tyson and I saw what we expected when we went in: metal cages filled with everything from guinea pigs to porcupines, and glass aquariums that housed iguanas and many an unadopted python. The ranger, or whoever it was who ran the place, wasn't there, but we did find one of our classmates, Jodi Lattimer, cleaning out a rabbit cage.
The half grin on Tyson's face as we approached testified to the crush he had on Jodi. She was one of those down-to- earth girls who never seemed to have a problem with being elbow deep in compost. She was pretty but found a variety of ways to hide it. Today it was a denim baseball cap turned backward to cover her long blond hair. She was the kind of girl I might have had a crush on if I hadn't known Tyson was already there.
"Hi, guys. What's up?" she said. I stepped forward, trying to figure the best way to say this without sounding too terribly stupid. "We were wondering if you, by any chance, had misplaced a skunk."
She grinned, knowing exactly why we were asking, and Tyson grinned back, probably thinking her smile was for him. "You mean had a skunk been stolen, don't you?" she said.
"Naah," said Tyson. "Can't steal a wild animal, they belong to everyone." I rolled my eyes.
"Well," said Jodi, "apparently somebody thought this skunk belonged to them." She went on to tell us that somebody had pried open a back window and had run off with it a few nights ago. "God knows how they got it out of here without it spraying all over them—unless, of course, they drugged it."
We went around the side of the building to the window that had been pried open, searching for footprints or some- thing, but the ground was hard, dry, and covered with dense pine needles. Nothing to give away who it might have been.
"We don't have much to go on," commented Tyson.
Jodi crossed her arms and smirked, "Come on, you guys, the way you're talking you'd think you were investigating a murder."
"Maybe we are," I said. "After all, the skunk hasn't been seen since it escaped from Alec's van."
She laughed at that, and then I noticed Tyson starting to get all fidgety, annoyed that I had made her laugh instead of him.
"If you want to do a real investigation, you ought to talk to my father," she said.
"Oh yeah!" said Tyson. "He interrogated me once." And then his face went slightly purple from that particular foot in his mouth. Jodi's father was a high-ranking police deputy, which was a pretty dull job in this town. Usually.
"Didn't he talk to the Smartzes already?"
"Probably, but I'm sure he'd like to know of your interest in the case."
As I was still the prime suspect, talking to the police was not currently high on my list of fun activities. At least not until I had my own suspects. "Let's just leave this a private investigation," I told her.
"Yeah," said Tyson, grinning dumbly at her. "Kind of like 'intimate.'"
I went through a list of interrogation questions I had scrawled on my note pad: Were there any suspicious characters in the area? Have animals been stolen before? Blah blah blah. Every question was answered with a simple "No." When there were no questions left we said our good-byes, but before we headed back down the dirt road, I couldn't stop myself from turning to her and saying, "You know that I didn't do it, don't you?"
Jodi just shrugged. "Whatever you say." She adjusted her cap and went inside to finish tending to the rabbits.
"I think she likes me," said Tyson as we walked off.
I was about to say "Dream on," but stopped myself. Instead I said, "Maybe so." Because in all truth I couldn't tell what anyone was thinking anymore.
On Monday the school was plastered, and I mean plastered with campaign banners, spread like wallpaper so you couldn't see the color of the walls. Vote for Tommy Nickols, some of them said, The thinking man's candidate (which obviously wasn't true, because by choosing "thinking man's" rather than "thinking person's" he had thoughtlessly alienated the entire female vote). Vote for Katrina Mendelson, other banners proclaimed. Isn't it time? Cheryl had her share as well. Hers had no clever slogan but a practical and attractive list of the changes she planned to make. She included things like economic sanctions against old man Solerno until he changed the recipe of his god-awful pizza, and raising the temperature of the gym from subarctic conditions.
But by far the most banners, posters, fliers, and signs were for candidate Alec Emery Smartz Jr. I couldn't help but overhear a conversation between Alec and Cheryl near her locker.
"What did you do," she said, "hire elves to paint them foryou?"
Alec laughed it off. "In a way," he said. "A lot of the seventh and eighth graders just volunteered."
"You know, that really shouldn't be allowed," said Cheryl. "I mean, they can't even vote in the ninth-grade election."
Alec sighed. "If it bothers you that much, I'll take them down."
But Cheryl, of course, backed off. "No, no," she said. "Anyway, it's quality not quantity, and after all, my banners say more than just my name." She smiled at him, he smiled back, and they toddled off to class together as if there were no tension between them. But I knew Cheryl better than that, and I was beginning to wonder which was more important to her now, their budding romance or the competition between them.
"I'm glad Alec has so much support," Cheryl told me the next day in science lab. "Especially being so new to town. He's made lots of friends very quickly."
"And lots of enemies."
She shrugged it off, but it clearly bothered her. "Kids that don't like him just don't know him." Then she quickly changed the subject. "Any more luck with the Shadow Club?" I put my eye to the microscope, where I caught several paramecia wandering around between the thin sheets of glass. "No," I answered. "I'm running my own investigation without them."
"Really," said Cheryl. "So is Alec. He still thinks you pulled the pranks and says he wants to prove to me what a sniveling waste of life you are. I told him I already knew that—but it doesn't mean you pulled those pranks." She gave me a smile that made her most biting comments go down smoothly. "Anyway," she said, "you don't have to worry, because I don't believe it was you."
"So convince him."
"I can't. Anytime we talk about you, we always start yelling at each other, so Alec and I have a rule that we are not allowed to discuss you anymore."
"Does that come before or after the rule that you're not allowed to be better than him in anything?"
Cheryl turned the microscope focus until the lens cracked the fragile glass slide.
"Oh, great." She reached to prepare another slide.
As I looked up I saw several kids around the lab quickly avert their eyes. They had been watching us, listening to us, and I got that feeling again. O. P. said it was just paranoia, but I don't know. One girl rolled her neck, as if she hadn't been looking at all. Another kid adjusted his baseball cap when I looked at him, as if he hadn't been motioning to his lab partner to look our way. Suddenly I began to feel like those paramecia beneath the microscope's eye, unable to squirm out of view.
I was late leaving school that day, and there weren't many people left in the halls. Usually those halls are so noisy, you can't hear your own thoughts, but with most of the school gone, even the slightest noises sounded as if they were blasted over the loudspeaker. The sound of tearing paper echoed down the locker-lined hallway, and I followed it to the first floor, where I found Austin Pace tearing down
one of Cheryl's big campaign banners.
"What are you doing?"
He turned to me, then went back to his task. "Isn't it obvious?" He crumpled the banner down, so it would fit in a trash can. It wasn't like he was doing this in secret—I mean, there were still some kids and teachers wandering the halls, but he didn't care. It was as if he wanted to be caught. He was daring people to make him stop.
"What's the point?"
"The point is, after what you and Cheryl did, she doesn't deserve to run for class president, or anything else. You might have been the mastermind, but she was the one who broke my ankle." By now he had crumpled the banner down to the size of a basketball. He tossed it toward the Hefty- lined trash can. It dropped in without even touching the rim. "Three pointer," he said. "Nothing but bag."
He crossed the hallway, to tear down another of Cheryl's banners. I grabbed his wrist to stop him, but he shook me off. Then he shoved me. I shoved him back, and we both stood there, waiting to see if it would escalate. Instead of going for me again, he reached over and tore down the banner.
"Y'know, my mom invited Cheryl over for dinner, too," Austin said. "She was smarter than you, though. She refused." He wadded up the banner. "Hey, why don't you help me? You once asked what would make me happy, and right now you helping me tear down her banners would warm the bottom of my heart."
He waited, but I didn't move.
"No, I didn't think so. I'm sure you'll even tell her that it was me who tore them down. Well, good. I want you to tell her."
But I had already decided not to tell Cheryl about it. Resentment had more faces and more sideways glances than a deck of cards, and if this was how Austin wanted to play out his hand, I wasn't going to stop him, and I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of tattling to Cheryl. Part of me even agreed with Austin. After what the Shadow Club had done, Cheryl should have stayed out of the election the way I resigned from the track team—but that was her decision to make, and I wasn't going to judge her for it. My judging days were over.
"Have fun with your anti-campaign," I told him, and left him alone to score whatever trash can baskets he felt he needed.