CHAPTER 16
Ever since Denny and I spotted the beautiful miserable girl in Sears, I couldn’t stop thinking about unsearched geography. I couldn’t stop thinking that unsearched geography was the key to solving the mystery of the missing flag. It was still out there. I was sure of it. Why not. Did you know that people were still finding debris from the tragic Columbia space shuttle disaster? Back in 2003, that shuttle broke up over East Texas, too. The debris field stretched over hundreds of square miles. Investigators and searchers found about eighty-four thousand pieces of debris (only 39 percent of the shuttle’s total weight) early in the investigation. But people are still finding debris. Someone found one of the doomed shuttle’s tanks on a lake bed eight years after the disaster. So my hypothesis was that people in East Texas were still looking for debris. And maybe they’d stumble upon our flag. Do you know how hopeful that made me?
The inside of my closet door was fast becoming covered with maps. I had just shown them to Denny, and he was the only other person on the planet who knew about them. A map of all the areas the NTSB had searched. Red pins denoted searched areas, and yellow pins indicated sites where East Texas residents had reported debris near their barns. The maximum distance an object was located from the crash site was still within a seventeen-mile radius. What was beyond that radius?
As I considered this theory, my phone buzzed.
Was it a message from Liz Delaney?
No.
It was Sandy.
Mom won’t let me break up with W!!!! Says it wud b cruel 2 do right now, which is true??
Then she wrote back to me in a hurry:
Wayne, my kid sister was playing with my phone. Ha ha! How r u?
How was I? Well, I was in the know.
What I wanted to reply: Please listen to your mom!
What I did reply:
Hi. 
I know. I know. No one would ever accuse Wayne Kovok of being Shakespeare.
“Hey, open up, soldier. New muffins have arrived via Sandy’s mother,” Grandpa said through my closed door. “I’ve been alerted that I need to check with you if I want to consume them.”
I shot a look at Denny.
I closed the closet door before Grandpa could see. He was in the hallway, already consuming a muffin.
I gave him a quick thumbs-up.
“Why are you wearing sunglasses indoors?” he asked. This was sort of a stupid question considering he was wearing his sunglasses indoors at that exact moment. I could see my reflection in them.
I shrugged. When you don’t have a voice, you appreciate the economy of the shrug. It communicates I don’t care, I don’t know, or maybe in one convenient gesture, and those were all the feelings I had about sunglasses and muffins. I squeezed past Grandpa and went to the kitchen.
A white basket of blueberry muffins mocked my feelings for the most beautiful girl in the world. They were a baked reminder of plane wreckage and Wayne-and-Sandy wreckage.
I might have destroyed a blueberry muffin.
Okay, I destroyed a blueberry muffin.
I squeezed it into pieces. Mr. Darcy ran over to gobble it up off the floor.
Denny tried to whisper to me, “It’s okay.”
Then I went into the living room. Being equidistant from my room, which held my cell phone, and the kitchen, which had pity muffins, it seemed like the only safe place in the house.
“Sergeant, just go ahead and give the man his coup de grâce!” Grandpa shouted at the TV. Muffin crumbs dribbled from his hand.
What? I wrote and pushed the note in front of his face.
“What? A coup de grâce? That’s a death blow intended to end the suffering of a wounded man. Now, stop talking over this movie, W!”
I tried hard to concentrate on the military movie. I’d noticed lately that if I sat very quietly with Grandpa while he was watching a show, he would talk to me. More accurately, he would point things out and I would nod. It was the closest thing we had to normal conversation. And to tell you the truth, I was starting to get used to it. To enjoy it a little. Grandpa had a ton of cool facts in his brain.
“Hey, Wayne, if you get a chance, tell your girlfriend you want bran muffins next. Keeps your morning constitutional regular. You know what I’m saying, right?”
Grandpa had mentioned his morning constitutional once before. I thought it had to do with something patriotic. It doesn’t. It means your first visit to the bathroom.
I looked it up.
I nodded to him about the muffins and pretended to watch the TV. But my brain kept saying, Wayne, you’re not stupid. You know who Sandy’s other friend with a W is. They’ve been friends since the fourth grade.
Wendy.
Wayne.
W.
The wrong W in a list of phone contacts.
Was it just me, or was the accidental text the likely deathblow of many a relationship?
Denny whispered to me, “You need unbiased girl confirmation. Maybe it doesn’t mean what you think it means.”
Where could I get unbiased girl confirmation?
I ran down the hall, grabbed my phone, and sent a text message of my own. I texted my old friends Mysti and Rama and told them the whole story in three spare sentences.
After thirty minutes, they texted back. (I figured they used that space of thirty minutes to call each other and discuss my coup de grâce.)
So sorry, Wayne.
That was their studied answer.
“So sorry, Wayne on a plane,” Denny sang.
In my brain, I filed a new scientific method report. I pictured the report morphing into a science-fair display board with bright, bold lettering on a table in the Beatty Middle School library.
Question: What happens to a boy with a beat-up face and no voice when he gets an accidental breakup message from the girl of his dreams?
Hypothesis: The boy will do nothing about it.
Procedure: Epic denial of misfired text.
Probable conclusion: When Wayne Kovok regains his voice, he will lose his sort-of-boyfriend status.
New topic.
Denny, did you know that Minecraft was originally called the Cave Game and that the Creeper started out as a coding error?
“You were like this before the crash, right?” Denny asked.
Pretty much.
“Except you could eat french fries and tacos.”
Yeah. Except I had an uncle and a sort-of girlfriend, went to a normal school, and didn’t share a bathroom with my grandpa. Except for those things, I was mostly the same.
DATA
Items still missing in the world:
Possible treasure buried beneath the Alamo, known as the San Saba treasure believed to have been buried by the Texas defenders.
The fortune of 1930s mobster Dutch Schultz, which vanished without a trace
Part of Montezuma’s treasure rumored to have been stored in Utah.
The Amber Room: An entire room that went missing. Made with elaborate amber panels and gold-leaf mirrors in the eighteenth century, given to Russia’s Peter the Great. Later disassembled by the Nazis and taken to Königsberg Castle, never to be seen again.
Spartacus, whose body was never found
Amelia Earhart, aviator who disappeared in 1937 while trying to fly solo around the world