Though no one in the class knew it right then and there, it was no accident that Mr. Roth had assigned them this project. Someone had been talking to Mr. Roth, and that person had been filling his head with ideas.
Someone had stumbled across the forgotten fact that the jewels existed. That same someone wanted very badly to find them.
Thirteen million dollars can motivate some people to do all sorts of dreadful things.
Therefore, it was neither serendipity nor zemblanity that caused Mr. Roth to give the class such a terrible project.
The word “serendipity” means “fortunate good chance.” It’s sort of like being lucky times a billion. It’s lucky to have a substitute show up instead of the regular, cranky teacher. It’s serendipity if that means you get an extra day to finish the project you forgot was due that day, saving you from a zero and giving you enough time to get a respectable B minus. (Which was exactly how Amelia had managed to save her social studies grade earlier in the year.)
The opposite of serendipity is called zemblanity. It’s not an official word yet, but rather one that was recently made up by the author William Boyd to describe Tyrannosaurus rex–sized bad luck.
Regular bad luck is forgetting that you had a project due. Zemblanity isn’t just forgetting that project. Instead, zemblanity is losing your backpack with all of the notes that might have helped you throw something together at the last minute. Losing it because it fell out of the school bus window. All because you stood up to make room for the kid next to you to sit down. Just as the bus lurched forward before you expected it. Knocking you to the side. And tipping your backpack out the window, onto the road.
Where it bounced into a drainage ditch. That was full because it had been pouring all week long.
That’s zemblanity.
(And that example had happened to Sloane in third grade.)
Most people have more experience with zemblanity than serendipity.
Sloane’s problems with Amelia had started with a zemblanitatious encounter a month ago in April. Right before spring break, Sloane ran into Amelia by the checkout desk of the Wauseon Public Library on a snowy day.
(The fact that it was snowing in April was bad luck. Pretty much everything else that happened afterward was definitely beyond bad luck.)
On that almost-spring-break day, Sloane had a copy of a Doctor Who retrospective in her hands and was desperately hoping no one saw Slayer Sloane with something so nerdy. Seventh grade had been so much better than sixth grade. She’d spent that year in a gray haze of misery, which had descended after her mother’s death from cancer. That was the year she’d been the Girl Whose Mom Just Died, a name that kids and teachers whispered behind their hands while throwing her pitying looks.
Now in seventh grade, she was Slayer Sloane, the Volleyball Queen. And even if she wasn’t entirely certain who exactly that was, Sloane was positive that someone called a slayer didn’t geek out on British science fiction.
But Sloane’s mom had, and it had been their Saturday-night routine for as long as Sloane could remember: pizza and Doritos and the show her mom had loved as a child. They’d eat their junk food together on the couch while her dad jokingly protested that he’d like to watch something—anything—better. Yet he’d always end up watching it with them, even if he pretended like he didn’t want to.
These days, it was just Sloane and her dad sitting on that couch. And he didn’t make jokes anymore.
Who’d have thought you could miss corny dad jokes?
When Sloane saw the Doctor Who book on the library shelf, her heart warmed with the memory of those long-ago nights when they’d all sat together, eating greasy, salty food and getting lost in a world where it felt like anything could happen. Sloane’s fingers reached out and snagged the book before she even knew what they were doing.
Then she heard Mackenzie’s snide laughter on the other side of the library and panicked, stuffing the book under her hoodie like a thief.
That was still bad luck.
Mackenzie “Mac Attack” Snyder was with Mylie and Kylee. They hadn’t spotted Sloane, but she had to get out of the library before they did. With her back turned to them and the book still hidden, she hurried toward the exit.
She wasn’t really going to steal a library book. Just hide it until she got to the checkout desk.
Except that as Sloane rounded the corner, she smacked into Amelia Miller-Poe.
Literally.
Amelia had been turning the corner too, only from the opposite direction. Springy red hair haloed a stack of books so tall that they completely covered Amelia’s face. Anyone else would have had the sense to put half of them down, but not Amelia.
WHOMP! Sloane barely had time to register what was happening, let alone react. They hit each other, and books went flying onto the floor. Along with both girls.
That was more than bad luck but not quite zemblanity.
The zemblanity kicked in when Sloane looked up to see Mackenzie, Mylie, and Kylee staring down at her.
And she realized the Doctor Who book had slid out of her hoodie to join the others on the floor.
Click went Mackenzie’s phone, possibly taking a shot of Amelia surrounded by a mass of hair and books.
Or possibly taking a picture of Sloane with her nerd guide.
Amelia got up first, while Sloane closed her eyes and just lay there, thinking, Yup. That’s it. My social life is over. Well, it was nice while it lasted.
Maybe if she lay here long enough with her eyes closed, something would distract everyone. Like—possibly—hopefully, a tornado. Or an earthquake. Or an alien invasion.
Any of those could happen. If she just lay there long enough.
“You look like a dead person,” Amelia whispered in that breathy, dramatic voice of hers. “You aren’t dead, are you, Sloane? I haven’t murdered you, have I?”
There was something in Amelia’s voice that implied that, while she’d be very sorry to have killed Sloane, she’d find it pretty interesting too.
Mackenzie’s giggle yanked Sloane’s eyes open.
“No, I’m not dead!” Sloane snapped. A shiver rippled all through her body, chasing away the happy memory she’d been holding on to of her mom, replacing it instead with a far less happy one of a casket and too many flowers and an aching emptiness that was so big and gray that Sloane had thought she’d never find her way to the other side of it. “Why would you even say that?”
“Oh.” Amelia blinked several times. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think about your mom dying. But, I mean, at least she wasn’t murdered.”
Sloane gaped at the other girl, her stomach knotting with so many emotions that she didn’t think she’d ever be able to untangle it again.
Behind Amelia, Mackenzie at least stopped giggling. Instead, she and the other girls looked awkwardly away as Sloane transformed from Slayer Sloane back into the Girl Whose Mom Just Died.
Like Amelia was a thief who had snatched away Sloane’s new identity, leaving her with the old, sad one instead.
In that moment, Sloane hated the other girl for it.
“We went to the funeral home,” Amelia babbled, scrabbling around to pick up her books. Getting to her knees, Sloane frantically helped her, wanting Amelia gone as quickly as possible. “I’d never seen a dead person before.”
Sloane dropped the book she had picked up like someone had set it on fire. “Would you please just stop talking?”
“I—I—I…” Amelia stammered, blushing so furiously that between her hair and freckles, she became a solid mass of embarrassment.
“Gawd,” Mackenzie drawled, rolling her eyes. “Don’t you know how to act around, like, other human beings?”
Rather than replying, Amelia hugged as many of her books as she could. She looked from girl to girl, mouth opening and shutting like a fish.
But rather than saying anything, she turned and fled.
Sloane sort of wished she’d thought to do that herself.
Kylee picked up the Doctor Who book from the floor and called after Amelia, “Hey, you forgot one of your books!”
But if Amelia had heard, she wasn’t returning for anything.
“It’s so weird,” Mackenzie said with a laugh, taking the book from Kylee and flipping it open like she’d discovered Amelia’s secret diary. “I mean, who’s even into stuff like this?”
Of course, the answer was: lots of people. One of Sloane’s cousins who lived down in Columbus was even in a Doctor Who club at his middle school. But this was Wauseon, Ohio. Population 6,500, deep in the farmlands in the northwest corner of Ohio.
People here were nice enough, but they didn’t do different hobbies and interests very well. They did sports and farming and that was about it. If anyone else in her class liked nerdy British science fiction, they had enough sense to keep it a deep, dark secret and join the basketball team or the 4-H club instead.
“I mean,” Mackenzie said again, laughing harder as she pointed at a furry beast, “what even is that?”
“A yeti.” The words slipped out before Sloane even realized she’d said them. That creeping gray gloom had wrapped itself around her heart, squeezing it tight. And it was all Amelia’s fault. Annoying, annoying Amelia who just had to talk about death and funerals. Sloane hated her all the more. “That’s a yeti. Which must be why she was checking out that book. She’s looking at her family members.”
The other girls looked at Sloane in confusion.
“Because she’s so hairy.” To her horror, Sloane could feel tears forming in her eyes. “She’s like a yeti herself. A hairy, weird, dramatic yeti. Amelia the Yeti.”
Mackenzie pulled up the picture she’d taken of Amelia on her phone. “That’s hilarious! I’ve got to text that to the other girls on the team.”
Mylie and Kylee laughed dutifully. Whether they really thought it was funny too, who knew? It was enough that the Mac Attack did. Off went their messages too.
Amelia the Yeti was born.
Maybe she should have felt bad. But for a moment, Sloane felt like she’d finally gotten a little bit even with all of the hurt the universe had sent her way.
By that evening, however, Sloane did feel bad. Her phone kept pinging with yeti jokes as the other girls on the volleyball team turned the picture of Amelia into a meme with all sorts of dumb comments around it. Then a kid named Schroeder joined in, and that set off the kids on the track team. Curled up in a fleece blanket with a pint of ice cream in her hands, Sloane finally turned her phone off.
She wished she’d never opened her mouth. Yeah, Amelia had really upset her with all of her talk about dead bodies and dead moms, but Sloane bet the other girl had just been nervous. No doubt, she had felt as embarrassed as Sloane had at making a fool of herself in front of Mackenzie, Kylee, and Mylie. Still, at least everyone would forget all about it in a day or two.
Except, they didn’t.
Instead, the Yeti went viral. Or at least it did among the seventh graders at Wauseon Middle School. By the second day, no one even remembered that Sloane was the one who had come up with the name.
It was as if Amelia had always been the Yeti.