“You have to go to cheerleading practice?!” Leah repeated in a shrill whine. I could see she didn’t believe me. We were standing in front of the library after school, and I was trying to explain to her why I couldn’t go to the movies with her that afternoon.
“I know it sounds weird—” I began.
“Weird?” Leah exclaimed. “No joke!” She started blinking and batting her eyelashes really fast like she does when she’s upset. I always worry that her eyelashes are going to get stuck together because Leah wears more mascara than anybody I know. The way she globs it on, it’s gotta be pretty sticky. Actually, it looks like tar.
“It’ll only be for a couple of hours,” I promised. “There’s really no way I can get out of it. We could always go after practice.”
“Some of us,” Leah informed me with another few flutters, “actually do homework.”
I was going to point out to her that going to the movies takes the same amount of time no matter what time of the day you do it, but I got sort of hypnotized watching her eyelash action. Probably just as well that I didn’t say anything. She was already about to have a stroke right there at the top of the stairs.
“Just because you found that stupid shoe!” Leah yelled. “Mr. Talbert explained all about that on TV. It was just a stupid prank! You don’t have to stalk the cheerleaders!”
I rolled my eyes. “I am not,” I said, “stalking the cheerleaders. You never listen, Leah. I told you, Tina asked me to be a cheerleader. But maybe my voice was drowned out by your eyelashes fluttering.”
“Tina wants you to be a cheerleader?” Leah repeated.
I nodded and then added, “Well, actually, the mascot. She figures that since I found the shoe and all, I can probably help her find out who was behind the whole thing. And she said the mascot costume would be a good disguise for me.” Tina had never said anything even remotely like that, but it sounded like a good idea to me, and I could see that Leah needed an explanation.
Apparently, though, my explanation wasn’t good enough. Leah cocked an eyebrow at me. “What happened to the old mascot?” she asked.
Actually, that was a pretty good question. I had never thought about it myself. But suddenly I wanted to know that, too. With a sigh I tried to sound annoyed as I said quickly, “She moved to Finland.”
I tried to look offended. “Oh, come on, Leah. Don’t you think I could come up with a better lie than that? She moved to Finland. Does that sound like a typical lie to you?” She was right, of course. I was lying. But if I would have told her the truth, that I had absolutely no clue what happened to the other mascot, she would have jumped on that and thrown an even bigger fit.
“Jendra MacKenzie, this is completely ridiculous,” Leah informed me. She was far from calm. “This is the most ridiculous thing you’ve done in at least three weeks. And I just want you to know, for the record, that I think you’re being ridiculous. You ought to know that you can’t trust Tina Sheperd.”
“Why not?” I demanded.
“Because,” Leah said, batting her eyelashes at me, “she’s Tina Sheperd. And in middle school you can’t trust anybody who the entire student body knows by reputation.” Leah comes up with these little pearls of wisdom all the time. It’s really very annoying. “Besides,” she added, “you know all the stuff Matt’s said about her. She’s selfish and shallow and self-absorbed, and she’s used to getting her own way. She doesn’t care about other people at all. She’s completely insensitive.”
I groaned. “Leah, she didn’t ask me to marry her,” I said with a sigh. “She just wants me to come to cheerleading practice a couple times and be the stupid mascot. Besides, you can’t go by what Matt says. He’s her cousin. I mean, you always say that your cousin in high school is a spoiled brat, too.”
“She is,” Leah said seriously. “And Tina is, too.” She sighed heavily and turned her back on me. “Call me when you get home and tell me how practice went,” she said, like she had given up on me. “But I can’t promise I’ll have time to talk to you. I might be too busy doing my homework.”
I rolled my eyes as Leah disappeared down the stairs.
On the way back to the locker room, I ran into Tina, who I guess was coming to get me. She had already changed into her cheerleading uniform and was now lugging around a science display board. It looked like the same one Mr. Talbert had used on TV.
“Hey, Jendra,” she said with a slight toss of her hair. “You are coming to practice—right?”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling almost guilty. Like she had caught me in a lie. That was weird because I really had been on my way to practice. But Tina made me kind of nervous.
“Great,” she said with a smile. “I was just running down to the science room to return this display board to Dr. Murphy. Why don’t you come with me?”
“Okay,” I said, falling into step behind her.
Dr. Murphy is the physical science teacher at our school. He teaches over at the high school in the mornings because not very many people get to take physical science in eighth grade—only the really smart ones. Like Tina. Not only is she taking physical science, she also helps Dr. Murphy tutor people after school. Matt told me about it. He told me Tina’s really smart, and that she really knows it, too.
He also told me some really weird stuff about Dr. Murphy. Not that I believe it, or anything. I mean, the way Matt tells it, Columbus sailed on the Niña, the Pinta, and the Piña Colada, so Matt’s not exactly the most reliable source in the world.
Still, his stories make interesting enough lunch fare.
Like the one about how even though Dr. Murphy is a double Ph.D., he has to teach junior high kids now because he got fired from some big deal, high-profile research laboratory out in San Francisco. Evidently he was doing unauthorized experiments after hours.
Ever since I heard that, I’ve sort of wondered what kind of experiments you would have to do to get fired from a research laboratory. I mean, eat one amoeba and you lose lab privileges in our class, but at an actual research laboratory, you’d think they’d be a little more open-minded. (And, in my opinion, if you’ve gone to all the trouble of getting a double Ph.D., you should be allowed to eat as many amoebas as you want—for whatever that’s worth.)
Matt’s best guess was that the whole scandal centered around human cloning. He and I spent many a dreary history slide show passing cloning notes back and forth—until Leah spoiled all our fun by informing us that some labs are actually doing that. Then, for a long time I toyed with the idea that Dr. Murphy had been filling up the Erlenmeyer flasks with multicolored sand and making a little extra cash on the side. Seemed funny at the time. Oh, man! If I had ever once suspected what kind of freaky stuff Dr. Murphy did in that laboratory, I . . .
Well, it’s too soon to get into all of that now. But I sure wouldn’t have been following Tina down the hall to the science room! As it was I was a little anxious. Leah had scared me just a bit.
“Tina,” I asked slowly—I wasn’t sure if I should ask her or not, it made me kind of nervous—“what happened to the girl who used to be the mascot?”
“Chrystal?” Tina said lightly. She lowered her voice and told me in a whisper, “Don’t talk about it, okay? But she told me yesterday that she wanted to quit. I was trying to talk her out of it, but then Mr. Talbert and I found that note.” She shuddered.
“The note that was pinned to the mascot?” I said. I didn’t understand.
“I know you don’t understand,” Tina told me calmly. It was absolutely creepy the way she did that! “But it’s not something I want to talk about right here in the hall. I’ll explain later if I get the chance. Don’t mention it to the girls at practice,” she added with a secretive look in her gray eyes. “They’re scared enough as it is.”
Now I was really curious. I was still thinking about it when we got to Dr. Murphy’s room. Of course, that wasn’t such a big surprise since it took us about two minutes to get there. But for me, keeping my mind on the same subject for two minutes is quite an accomplishment.
The light in the physical science room was on, but nobody answered when we knocked on the door. The room wasn’t locked, though.
“Dr. Murphy?” Tina called, poking her head inside. “Dr. Murphy? Stephen?”
“Stephen?” I repeated.
“He’s a friend of the family,” Tina explained, peering inside the room and calling his name again. There was no answer.
“He must have gone out for a minute,” Tina decided. She opened the door and stepped into the classroom.
I wasn’t sure if I should follow her. “Can we go into a classroom when the teacher’s not there?” I asked.
Tina laughed a little and said, “I can.”
So I followed her in.
“He’ll probably be back in a minute or two,” Tina told me, glancing down at her watch, “but we have to get to practice. We don’t have time to wait. I’ll just drop off the board. Wait here a minute, Jendra.”
I didn’t have much choice. She took the board and disappeared into the storage room in the back. After a few seconds of twiddling my thumbs, I tiptoed toward the back of the room, too. Like I said, I have a short attention span, and I couldn’t help being curious.
Peering through the storage-room window, I noticed an awful lot of boxes back there. (Multicolored sand maybe? Human clones perhaps?) One of the boxes stood out from the others. It was black, and labeled “Forbidden Box—Evil Chemical Solution Inside.” Well, actually, I may be making that up from later memories, but it said something like that. The box was open, and Tina was leaning over it, but before I could see what was inside, she whirled around and stared straight into my eyes.
“Jendra,” she said. I jumped. “I told you to wait.” She flung open the door imperiously and shut it quickly behind her. “Now get back to the front of the classroom.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I just . . . uhm . . . I . . .”
Just then Dr. Murphy came into the room holding a stack of Scantron forms. “Hello, Tina,” he said when he saw us there.
She smiled at him. “This is Jendra MacKenzie, Dr. Murphy,” she said. “She’s going to be our new mascot.”
Dr. Murphy frowned and said, “Has she heard about the—”
Tina quickly waved a hand in the air, which shut him up almost immediately. “There are a few things I still have to tell her,” she said quietly. Then, turning to me, she said, “Come on, Jendra, we should get to the gym.”