Mrs. Hewitt had Madeleine and me sing through the song once before she critiqued our performance. It was about two kids walking to school, looking at bugs, learning the alphabet, making friends. The title came from the chorus, “I can tell that we are going to be friends.” We both held our limp sheet music and sang without enthusiasm.
I glared at Mrs. Hewitt when she wasn’t looking, my chest tight like a fist. No one in the fifth grade cared about the things in this song, especially not Madeleine Brown. I looked sideways at her as we sang about a new school year: “Back to school, ring the bell, brand-new shoes, walking blues…I can tell that we are going to be friends.”
Madeleine rolled her eyes.
We finished the song, and Mrs. Hewitt plunked her hands on the keys, the angry, discordant sound echoing in the music room. We faced the backside of the piano as she bent over the keyboard, shaking her head.
“Ladies.” She let out a long sigh. “That was pretty horrible.”
“She keeps messing me up,” Madeleine complained, nodding her head in my direction. “She sings really loud, and sometimes it’s not even the right—”
“I’m singing all the right words,” I cut her off before she could finish. “And she’s not singing loud enough.”
“You’re both singing like kids who just had fillings put in all their teeth.” Mrs. Hewitt walked around the piano to stand in front of us and mimicked, “‘We are going to be friends,’” only her mouth opened and shut like a puppet’s and each word hit the same note.
“When you sing, it must come from your heart.” She hit her chest with her fist, turned her head toward the ceiling, and closed her eyes. Madeleine and I exchanged glances.
“You should sing about friendship with joy and gratitude.” She circled us. “You should push the words from your stomach with such force that they ring from your lips. Just imagine. What would you do without friends?”
Well, I thought. Madeleine would have a tougher time bullying people, that’s for sure. I side-eyed her, and she mirrored my glare.
“You may not like each other very much,” Mrs. Hewitt said, returning to her place in front of the piano. “But you can think about all the friends you do like while singing this song. Let’s give it a try.”
We tried three more times, and Mrs. Hewitt became more dissatisfied with each attempt. When we’d finished the chorus for the last time, she closed the piano and walked out of the music room. She didn’t even bother to turn around when she said, “I’ll see you both again next week!”
I raked a neat pile of orange leaves in the corner of Mrs. White’s yard, which was across the street from our house. Every year she paid me to clear the leaves and then, when it snowed, shovel her drive. This year the leaves from her aspen had fallen early due to an extra-dry summer, and she had waved me over on my way home from school.
She sat on her porch, talking while she watched me work. “My husband, see,” she said, “never slowed down. He kept up on all the maintenance around here, and when he passed, I had to get help, being a bent old hag by then.” She chuckled, her voice gravelly. Mrs. White told me this same story every year.
She was a small old lady, not much taller than me, hunched at the waist and shuffling with a cane when she walked. Her husband died three years ago, when I was eight. I had done odd jobs for her ever since, like Allen, her handyman, who mowed her lawn, hung her Christmas lights, cleaned and oiled her shake roof, stained her wood fence, and even rolled out her trash can every Monday morning on garbage day.
I nodded as she talked and I raked, knowing that I got paid just as much for being polite as I did for finishing the job. But when I saw March jogging toward me, a manila folder clutched in one hand, I rushed to gather the leaves and push them deep into the garbage can she used for yard clippings. He got there in time to help me pick up stray leaves and then drag the can toward the garage.
“Well, hello there, March!” Mrs. White called, cupping her hands around her mouth. March smiled back stiffly and waved like a robot. “Whatcha got there?” She nodded at the folder, which he had set in the grass while he helped me finish.
“Nothing,” he said too quickly. And then, after a beat, “Homework.”
She smiled, her lips curled around big square teeth. “It’s good to see kids work. Yard work. Homework. It’s healthy. Turns you into good citizens.”
“Do you want me to put the can back in your garage?” I asked. Her code—1065—probably hadn’t changed since they first installed the garage door. As I asked, a DineWise van—a meal delivery service for old people—pulled into her driveway. They did good business in our neighborhood.
“I got it.” Mrs. White leaned on her cane with one hand and waved the garage-door opener at me with the other, pushing the button for emphasis. “Thanks, Kazuko! I’ll walk your money over later.”
The garage door creaked open, and the truck pulled in. March bounced next to me like he was going to pee himself.
“Let’s go,” he whispered, grabbing the folder from the grass and darting across the street ahead of me.
“Bye, Mrs. White,” I called over my shoulder, but she had already slipped into the garage and shut the door.
When we walked into my house, Genki jumped on March, nearly knocking him over. We both got a good sniff-down as we kicked off our shoes in the entryway. “Do you want a snack?” Mom called to us from the kitchen. Even though she worked at the museum part-time, she spent the rest of her time working from home so she could be here when I got back from school.
“We’re fine,” I called back as we ran up to my room, knowing she would throw something together for us, anyway.
March reeled back as soon as he opened the door, as if he’d stepped into a wind tunnel. Genki sat down behind him, cocking his head from side to side as he waited March out.
“Holy crap!” March said. His nose scrunched as he stood in my doorway.
I pushed him in, and he acted like I’d dropped him into a vat of Ebola virus.
“Disgusting! I can’t work here.” March hugged the manila folder to his chest, standing on the one clear spot of carpet in the middle of my bedroom, with piles of dirty clothes, used towels, books, and random junk around him. When we were younger, he would offer to clean my room for free because he said picking up such a huge mess made him all tingly inside. But once we started detecting together, he preferred solving mysteries to sanitizing my room.
“Come on,” I said, stepping over the obstacles and sitting on my unmade bed. Genki jumped up next to me and began digging around the blankets to make himself a nest. “It’s not going to kill you. I mean, look at me.”
“Your immune system is probably superhuman by now, building a tolerance to who knows what’s in here.”
I stood and swiped a fleece blanket from Genki, who was still digging, and shook it onto the top of my bed before smoothing the corners for March. “Sit down. My room is cluttered, not dirty. There are no biohazards here.”
He blew out an annoyed breath before sitting down next to me. Genki continued to paw at the bottom of my bed, fluffing up the perfect resting spot.
“So what is it?” I cut my eyes to the folder squared on March’s lap.
“Oh!” His eyes lit up like a pinball machine after a killer shot. “Mr. Crowley opened the attachment today, and I was able to hack his desktop.”