Chapter 1

Everything was new. New shirt. New shoes. New school.

I don’t like new.

“Hurry up, Myron!” Mom shouted from the edge of the schoolyard. She was not new. The screaming baby in her arms? Totally new. Sofia, my baby sister. She’s eight months old. When a baby is eight months old, it is still new. So I guess I should say she’s eight months new. When it’s a baby, it cries a lot. And that gets old really fast.

I stood at the school gates. I crossed my arms.

“Stop digging your heels into the sidewalk,” Mom said. “Let’s go!”

I wasn’t really digging my heels into the sidewalk. That would be impossible. The sidewalk is made of concrete. My heels are made of skin, bone, muscles, and blood. And I only had running shoes on. It was an expression. I don’t like expressions, either.

Expressions are when someone says one thing and means another thing. For example, when people say, “I’m feeling blue today,” they don’t mean their skin has turned blue. They mean they’re sad. Why don’t they just say, “I’m sad”? Expressions are confusing. They are not the truth. The truth is very important to detectives like me.

“Mom, can I go, please? I see Tianna from camp.”

That was my sister Alicia. She’s in eighth grade and is always happy to have something new. New shoes, new backpack, new hairdo. She waved to a group of girls near the bike racks. They waved back. The first day of school and she already had a new group of friends.

“Go ahead,” Mom said. “But remember to check in on Myron at lunch.”

Alicia scrunched up her face at me. That was a scowl. It meant she wasn’t happy.

“He’s in third grade! He’s not a baby anymore, Mom,” she said.

Mom dropped her own scowl on Alicia. I’m not too good at picking up on people’s expressions, but I had seen that scowl from Mom since I was Sofia’s age. So had Alicia. It meant: Don’t mess with me.

“Fine,” Alicia said. She stomped into the schoolyard.

Which just left me.

Mom stuck a pink plastic soother into Sofia’s mouth. My sister stopped screaming and started sucking on the thing.

“Myron, I’m sorry we had to move away from your old school and your friends,” Mom said. “But we’re still in Whispering Meadows. You can visit them on the weekends. Your new school is going to be fun.”

West Meadows Elementary did not look like fun. It had a big field with soccer nets, a basketball court, and a red-and-yellow climbing frame. Sure, all that stuff sounds fun, but the playground was crawling with kids I didn’t know. That made my brain itch.

“Mr. Harpel said we could go straight in and see him,” Mom said. She held out her pinkie finger. “You met him last week, remember?”

Mr. Harpel was my new teacher, and he seemed nice. And room 15 was unlike any classroom I’d had before. The itch in my brain faded.

I took a deep breath, wrapped my pinkie around Mom’s, and took my first steps into my new school.