Here. You need these more than I do.” Jenner handed me a bag of jelly beans from her beach tote. It was Sunday morning, and I’d joined her at the surf shop to interview her for the paper and to fill her in on the disaster that was the Little Debbies’ social.
“Thanks.” I ripped the bag open and searched for the purple ones. “Any chance these are magic beans? With the power to erase people’s memories?”
She gave me a sympathetic look. “You can always change schools. That’s what Marcus did.”
I shook my head and crunched through the sugary shell of a purple bean. “I can’t let Ava have the newspaper. I mean, I feel bad for what happened, but if I give up, she wins.”
“Then let her!” Jenner groaned. “You have to stop this obsession. It isn’t healthy.”
Even though Jenner was my best friend, sometimes it felt like she didn’t know me at all. Competition was what I loved, and being the best was all I wanted.
“If I let Ava win,” I said, “she becomes the lead reporter, which means I’m stuck writing articles about Halloween safety and which lunch lady bought a new hairnet. Those kinds of stories don’t get Junior Global Journalist Awards.”
“Yes, but you avoid the embarrassment of kissing guys who don’t like you.”
I narrowed my eyes. “How many more times do you honestly think I’ll do that?”
“I don’t know.” She grinned. “I never thought you’d do it a first time.”
I shoved her. “Let’s just get started on your interview.”
We spent the next half hour talking about her surfing and her views on gender stereotypes, and then we wandered down to the beach so she could show me her new maneuvers. The longer she practiced, the warmer the sun felt, and after a while I fled toward the boardwalk for shade.
To my surprise, Katie Glenn was already there, resting against a large boulder and wearing a hooded sweater. When she saw me, she stiffened.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t come to bug you. I didn’t know anyone was even down here.”
Her shoulders relaxed into a bored shrug. “I don’t own the beach. You can go wherever you want.” She twisted her lips into a leer. “Just don’t try to steal my boyfriend.”
Thankfully, it was too dark under the boardwalk for her to see me blush. “Oh … ha! So, you heard about that?” At least she wasn’t making smooching sounds, like the kid down my street, or saying she’d accept payment in kisses, like the jerk at the hot dog stand.
“Who hasn’t?”
I actually wondered the same thing. “Well, in case you cared—”
“I don’t.” Katie leaned back against the rock, wiping her forehead on her sweater sleeve.
“You’re not going to get sunburned under here,” I said. “I think it’s safe to at least roll up your sleeves.”
For some reason, this earned me a sour look from Katie. “I’m fine. Mind your own business.”
Unfortunately, I couldn’t. Even if I hadn’t been pledging the Little Debbies, I still had an insane curiosity about this girl and her fire extinguisher and sweaters and obsession with sea turtles.
“Why do you like sea turtles so much?” I asked.
In my opinion, the question was harmless enough that Katie couldn’t say the answer would destroy her reputation … unless her father was a sea turtle or something.
Luckily, she seemed to agree. “The sea turtle is the mascot for my old school. I guess I just think they’re kind of cool.”
“Oh,” I said, but Katie’s words triggered a strange tingling sensation in my brain.
When I’d interviewed her before, she’d said her previous school was Fowler, home of Panther Pride. There were no sea turtle fans at Fowler.
But there were at Sheldon Academy.
“Well, bye. I hope you see some.” I hurried back to my towel, signaling Jenner, but she was too busy paddling out to another wave, so I pulled out my cell phone and called Paige.
“Yes, you’re still eligible to pledge the Debutantes,” she answered.
“Huh?” I’d been so focused on the whole embarrassment factor that the thought had never crossed my mind. “I mean, oh, right. Phew!” I wiped imaginary sweat off my brow, even though she couldn’t see it.
“I know you probably stayed up all night worrying,” said Paige, “which means you have hideous bags under your eyes. Cucumber slices can help with that. … And you can use the leftovers to make a really healthy salad.”
Before she could babble on with a list of ingredients, I interrupted. “Actually, I wanted to tell you that I caught Katie in another lie. This time, it’s about her old school.”
Paige was silent for a moment. “This girl gets stranger and stranger. Her secret must be stellar !”
“Listen, I have to call someone else. Do you have the school directory?”
“Somewhere.” I heard her rummaging around. “Who are you looking for?”
“Marcus Taylor.”
Paige made a cooing sound into the phone. “You already miss your new boyfriend?”
My cheeks warmed. “He’s not my boyfriend, but he did go to the same school as Katie last year.”
Paige gasped. “Brilliant!” She recited the number and I wrote it on my spiral notepad. “Now, when you call him, don’t act like you want to talk to him,” she advised.
I frowned. “But I do want to talk to him.”
“No, you don’t. Act like you dialed his number by mistake.”
She was rapidly slipping into the void of insanity. “But he knows I don’t know his number,” I said. “How could I accidentally call it by mistake?”
“Tell him you were dialing some other number and missed it by a digit. Let’s see. What place has a phone number almost like his? Let me get my other phone book.”
I flipped my phone shut while she was still talking and looked at Marcus’s number. Even though I had a legitimate reason to call him, my palms were damp with sweat. After one deep breath I took the plunge and punched in his digits.
“Hello?” Marcus answered.
At that moment, my throat chose to fill with phlegm, so that I gurgled “Hey” in a voice that sounded like I’d been gargling Jell-O.
“Who is this?” I could hear mild annoyance in his voice and tried to think of a clever explanation. I must have been quiet longer than I thought, because Marcus hung up.
“Argh!” I snapped the phone shut, and a minute later, it rang back with Marcus’s phone number. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Hey, Marcus.”
“Hey, Delilah.” This time he didn’t sound grossed out. I might have been imagining it, but he even sounded kind
of … pleased. “I thought it was you.”
“Oh, you speak Phlegm?”
“My caller ID does.” He laughed. “I was wondering how you were doing, but it sounds like you’re back to your old self.”
I dug my foot into the sand and blushed. “Is that a bad thing?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “Not always.”
I wanted to ask him what he meant by “not always,” but I had something else to take care of first. “I was actually calling about Katie Glenn.”
“Oookay. Why?”
“There’s something strange about her, and I know you went to her old school, so I have a feeling you know what it is. I want you to tell me.”
“Oh.” Marcus quieted for a beat. “In that case, no. Next subject.”
My jaw dropped, and I just sat there, stupefied.
“Hello?”
“Why … why won’t you tell me?” I managed.
“Because.”
I was getting really tired of everyone being so vague. “‘Because’ is not an answer. Why not, Marcus?”
“Because I know whatever I tell you, you’ll use it against her, and I also know what it feels like to have someone call you out and make you feel stupid, Delilah.”
Pleasant Marcus had apparently handed the phone over to Bitter Marcus. Still, he had made a good point, and I recovered nicely with a fail-proof argument of my own.
“So?”
Marcus seemed baffled by this. “So … I’m not going to help you hurt her.”
I flopped back on my towel. “Why do you care what happens to Katie, anyway? Was she your girlfriend or something?”
The thought hadn’t occurred to me before, but it made me sit up straight. “That’s it, isn’t it? She was your girlfriend. Your partner in some crime you both committed at Sheldon.”
“No!” Marcus groaned. “I’ve never had a girlfriend, and I’m starting to think I don’t really ever want one.”
“But you’re not saying the two of you didn’t commit a crime.”
“I didn’t commit any crime!” he practically yelled.
My heart started beating faster, and I shifted on my towel with nervous energy. “You’re still not saying she didn’t commit a crime, Marcus. She did, didn’t she? She committed a crime, and that’s why she changed schools!”
Marcus made a few grunting noises and said, “Just call me back when you’re done playing reporter.” And he hung up.
But he never denied that Katie had committed a crime.
I grinned.
And he wanted me to call him back.
I grinned a little wider.
Jenner plopped down beside me. “Those jelly beans did the trick, huh?”
An hour later, Jenner and I were wandering through the archives section of the public library.
“Why are we looking at old newspapers and not searching the Internet?” asked Jenner.
“Because whatever Katie did was big, but it wasn’t big enough to make front page news. If it wasn’t big news, it won’t pop up on the Internet, and the county daily doesn’t archive on their website beyond the current season.”
I opened one of the cabinets of microfilm and pulled out six canisters labeled “September–December” of the previous year. “Katie’s crime had to have happened during her fall semester of sixth grade, because she transferred to Brighton this past spring, so if we look through the local news on each of these, we should find something.”
I loaded the earliest-dated microfiche into the reader and advanced through the images until I reached the local news, giving each page a quick scan for mention of Sheldon Academy.
Jenner grabbed another reel and eyed it suspiciously. “How many newspapers are on each of these?”
“I think the librarian said twenty.”
“Which means we have to go through”—she noted the number of canisters on the table—“a hundred and twenty papers?”
“Um …” I looked up at her and smiled. “I love you? You’re pretty and smart and have nice hair?”
She sighed and sat at a microfiche reader beside me. “Save it for Paige.”
We skimmed through newspaper pages for two hours, our necks starting to cramp and our eyes blurring from watching the words whiz by. Finally, when I was beginning to feel as if my body had frozen into a hunched shell, Jenner bumped my arm.
“Check this out.”
I leaned over to her screen and smiled at what I saw:
investigators still baffled by sheldon fire
“Bingo.” I printed out the article and read it while Jenner went in search of a vending machine.
According to the article, the fire at Sheldon Academy had happened over the weekend of November 15 in the science lab. There were no signs of forced entry into the school and no indication as to what had caused the fire. The entire lab had been damaged except for a special tank containing a juvenile green sea turtle brought in by the local marine center for students to discuss that week. The tank had been found on the front lawn of the school with the turtle still safely housed inside.
I read the article several times until Jenner reappeared with a package of Skittles for both of us.
“So, does Katie have pyrokinetic powers like in Firestarter? Should I start wearing flame-retardant clothes to school?”
I shook my head and filled her in on the article. “I know who, what, when, and where. But I don’t know why.”
“As in, why would she torch her school?”
“Exactly. And how did she never get caught?”
I advanced through the microfiche in search of a follow-up article but found only a brief snippet saying that the police had decided to rule the fire an unsolved case, most likely the result of a prank gone wrong. Two months later, after the buzz had died down, Katie had transferred to Brighton.
She named her clique Hot Stuff, I assumed, in honor of her brief career as an arsonist, but that didn’t explain the fire extinguisher in her locker or her motives. But I knew the answers to these questions would be found at her old school.
I fished my cell phone out of my bag and dialed Marcus. Jenner didn’t know that I’d sort of started liking him, so I did my best to act professional.
“Delilah?” He made no effort to hide his surprise. “I didn’t think you’d ever call back.” His voice lowered a bit. “It’s cool that you did, though.”
I blushed and winced, already feeling guilty for what I was about to say. “I was … actually calling because I need a favor.”
His simple reply spoke volumes of disappointment. “Oh.”
“But later I can—”
“Don’t worry about it. What did you want?” His tone changed to the Marcus I’d run into last week, the one who couldn’t have cared less if Renee Mercer pummeled me into the ground. I tried not to seem flustered.
“I … uh … I … need to borrow part of your uniform from Sheldon. The sweater … if you still have it. Please.”
“Okay. Is that it? I have to go.”
My shoulders sagged and I bit my lip. He wasn’t even remotely curious why I wanted the sweater. He just wanted to stop talking to me. “Yeah. Thanks.” I snapped the phone shut and Jenner prodded my shoulder.
“What, may I ask, do you want Marcus’s old uniform for?”
I took a deep breath and swallowed any emotion before turning to look up at her.
“Tomorrow after lunch I’m going to be a Sheldon Sea Turtle.”