Mo
We were halfway up Fairfield Road (you can see our route on Exhibit F, which is a map) when I heard a tinkly tune playing quietly in the distance. I turned to see Mr Gideon’s ice cream van crawling up the road behind us.
‘There he is!’ Lottie said.
‘Do you have any money? I’ll pay you back?’ I said.
‘My money’s at home!’ she wailed, throwing half the contents of her bag out onto the pavement and feeling around in the corners anyway.
‘Do you have any money, Jax?’ I said.
‘No. We should just go.’
Mr Gideon’s van stopped about twenty metres away, the ice cream man staring ahead with the engine still running. A couple of kids knocked eagerly on the side.
‘They’re going to get all the ice cream!’ I said, feeling devastated.
‘Let’s run home and get our money boxes.’ Lottie jumped over her belongings that were in a heap on the ground, and broke into a jog.
‘What about your stuff, though?’ I said.
‘It doesn’t matter – just leave it!’
It went against everything I believed in, but I needed ice cream, so I turned away and we started to run, thinking we’d get home in time to get some cash and make it back to the van. The sound of the engine grew louder. I looked over my shoulder to see the van behind us again.
‘Take the shortcut!’ I said, veering off down a side-road with Lottie while Jax trailed behind. There were no front doors on the road we were cutting down, so Mr Gideon would definitely go the long way around.
But the jangly music got closer again, and I could see the ice cream van turning into the road we were racing down. It was almost as if it was following us.
‘We’ll never make it!’ Lottie yelled, as we flew onto our street.
‘We have to make it!’ I yelled back.
‘I have cramp – you go ahead,’ Jax said, stopping to sit on a garden wall.
We made it to Morello Road, ran up the steps to our house and tore into the kitchen.
‘Goodness!’ Mum said. ‘Were you racing?’
‘Money,’ I panted. ‘Ice cream.’
‘Quick,’ Lottie wheezed.
‘Please,’ I added.
‘OK, but you’d better eat your dinner,’ Mum said, handing us money out of her purse.
‘You’re the best, Mum!’ I shouted, as we ran back out of the door, with Sadie right behind us.
Mr Gideon was parked right outside our house.
‘Hello, Mr Gideon,’ I said, still out of breath. ‘Vanilla cone, please. Two flakes. Strawberry sauce.’
As Mr Gideon turned, I saw a small movement over the road at my old house. The curtains were all closed again, but one of them was moving, as though somebody had just been peeping through a gap. It kind of gave me the creeps.
Mr Gideon thrust the cone at me with a grunt and turned to Lottie.
‘I’ll have the same as him, please,’ she said.
‘You can’t have the same as me,’ I said, feeling very annoyed.
‘Because that’s what I have.’
‘So you own the top secret recipe of a vanilla cone with two flakes and strawberry sauce, do you?’
I gave her a dirty look and licked a drip of sauce that was dribbling down my cone.
‘Meowl,’ Sadie said.
‘Sadie will have the same, too, please, Mr Gideon.’
I huffed.
As Mr Gideon turned with the two cones in his hand, a drop of sweat flicked off his forehead and landed on one of them.
‘Yuck,’ I said.
‘Erm, Mr Gideon,’ Lottie said, ‘Would you mind exchanging this one, please? I don’t think it meets health and safety requirements.’
She took the non-sweaty cone and gave it to Sadie, waiting for Mr Gideon to make her another one. There was an awkward moment when everyone was perfectly still: Sadie and me with our cones, Lottie looking hopefully up at the hatch, and Mr Gideon still holding out the contaminated ice cream with that weird patchwork arm of his. Then he put his left hand out for the money.
‘Oh, right,’ Lottie said quietly.
I almost felt sorry for her.
She gave him the money and took the ice cream, which was starting to melt. Mr Gideon drove off.
‘I’m still eating it,’ she said. ‘Don’t judge me.’
I should have taken the opportunity to insult her over it, but I actually couldn’t blame her. The ice cream was so damn good. I would have eaten it if it had been dropped on the floor.
Mum seemed really happy when I brought Jax home. She tried to be cool about it, but I could tell she was relieved that I finally had a friend. She fussed about, asking Jax what snacks he liked and giving us a massive tray of biscuits to eat up in my room.
Lottie and me had been getting on better since the Schrodinger incident, but she was still being a bit rude to Jax. I didn’t mind that much, because Jax was apparently the only person at school who liked me more than her, but it made working on the Discovery Competition difficult.
We sat on my bedroom floor with some pens and paper, eating Jammie Dodgers.
‘So if your dad is with Mo’s mum,’ Jax said to Lottie, ‘what happened to your mum?’
‘She’s leading an expedition in the South American rainforest, actually. She’s looking for a rare flower which contains an ingredient that can cure leprosy.’
It was a bit strange, because I was sure she’d said her mum was digging up a fossil.
‘She’ll come back for Sadie and me once she’s finished her work. She’s very important, you know.’
I was about to say something, but I stopped myself. I always found it difficult to tell people about my dad, so maybe Lottie felt the same way about her mum. If she wanted to make things up to avoid telling people the truth, it was her business. As much as I liked Jax, I didn’t want to embarrass Lottie in front of him.
I held my breath, thinking Jax was going to ask me what happened to my dad. It was the obvious question to ask, seeing as he was so interested in our family situation. But instead he started looking around my room.
‘So where’s your collection, then, Mo?’ he said. ‘You know, all the junk you’ve found.’
‘Mostly in the garage,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ Jax said, frowning. Probably he realised how hard it was for me to be separated from my collection.
‘There’s, like, a million boxes of the stuff,’ said Lottie. ‘He’s only allowed to keep one box of it in the house.’
‘And where’s that?’ he stood up, as though he was going to start ransacking my room like he did with the lost property.
‘It’s away,’ I said. I didn’t want to be mean, but my box was private and the thought of Jax rummaging through my things made me feel very anxious.
‘It’s a secret box,’ Lottie explained. ‘We all have one. Nobody is allowed to look in them.’
‘So, what’s in your box, then?’ Jax raised an eyebrow.
‘A magical golden egg,’ Lottie said. ‘I won it in a battle of wits against a sword swallower from Tibet.’
‘If you don’t want to tell me, you should just say so,’ Jax said.
‘I just did tell you,’ Lottie said.
‘Shall we write down some new ideas for the competition?’ I pulled the paper towards me and took the lid off a pen.
‘Finally,’ Lottie said. ‘I think we’re all agreed that the forensic lost-property testing hasn’t been a success.’
‘It was a good idea, though,’ I said.
‘It was a great idea, but not practical, and also not that invention-y.’ Lottie bit her lip. ‘We need something new and exciting. We need the wow factor. We need to kill it. We need to blow everyone’s minds. We need something hashtaggable…’
‘You guys really want to win, don’t you?’ Jax said.
‘Yes!’ we answered at the same time.
‘The thing with the lost property,’ Lottie said, ‘is that some of it is so old, the people who lost it probably don’t even remember it existed. It’s like, if I lost a sock, I’d probably be annoyed about it for a day, and then I’d forget about it and get some new ones.’
‘But losing stuff is awful,’ I said. ‘Sometimes, when you lose something, there’s just a hole in your life that you can never fill.’
Jax and Lottie both looked at me.
‘That’s true sometimes, Mo,’ said Lottie. ‘But most of the time when things go missing, people move on. What would be better than trying to get a bunch of junk back to its owners, is inventing a way to stop you from losing the things that really are important to you.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jax. ‘Sounds a bit lame.’
‘Actually, I think that’s quite a good idea.’ Perhaps I’d been looking at it the wrong way. Imagine if I could invent something that could stop my most important things from ever getting lost again. ‘Like Schrodinger,’ I said.
‘Exactly!’ Lottie jumped up. ‘Schrodinger can’t be replaced. Let’s think up something that means we can always get him back if he runs off.’
‘I’m not saying no,’ Jax said. ‘But can we just go over some other ideas, first?’
‘But this is a great idea!’ Lottie said.
‘We’re supposed to be working in a team,’ said Jax.
‘He’s right, Lottie, we are,’ I said.
‘Fine. You two go over a load of pointless, boring ideas. I’m going to get started on an invention to stop Schrody from getting lost again.’
She did this dramatic, exaggerated walk out of the room and kind of angrily pranced down the stairs.
‘Not much of a team player, is she?’ Jax said. ‘Not like you, Mo.’ He walked over to the window. ‘So which house did you used to live in?’
‘That one,’ I pointed, ‘With the crumbly wall at the front and the sky-blue door. A lady called Laura, or Laurel, or something, lives there now.’
‘How long did you live there?’
‘All my life, until a few weeks ago.’ I looked over at the covered windows. ‘I miss that house.’
‘Who lived there before you?’
‘I don’t know. My mum moved in when she was pregnant with me. You could ask her? She might know.’
I saw Jax give me a side-eye.
‘So you don’t know what was there when your mum moved in? She never mentioned anything?’
It seemed like a weird question. For the first time, I wondered if Lottie was right to be suspicious of him.
‘We should get back to work,’ I said. ‘Then we’ll go downstairs in a bit and see how Lottie’s getting on.’