“Beamer?” I said. I was in my room with the door bolted, calling on my forbidden phone.
“Franny?” He was, needless to say, surprised to hear from me. We hadn’t spoken since Thanksgiving.
“Yeah, it’s me, believe it or not. Beamer, I’m going to be home this weekend and I really need to see you.”
“Wow, Franny,” he said, “gold stars to you for being the first one to call. I was so mean to you. Then I was too embarrassed to apologize. Is it too late to say I’m really, really sorry?”
“Nope. Apology accepted—especially since you were right.”
“
“I was?”
“Yeah, unfortunately. Totally right. It’s a long, sad story, though. I’ll tell you all about it this weekend.”
“Wow.”
“Also, Beamer, I’m going to need your help with something. It has to do with what we argued about, and it’s really important.”
Beamer sucked air through his teeth. “I’m not going to have a whole lot of time this weekend, unfortunately. I’ve got to finish my project. The happiness film, remember? It’s due next week and it’s, like, my whole semester’s grade, so I’m up to my eyeballs in editing. But I definitely want to spend some time with you.”
“Well, let’s talk about it. I’m kind of under pressure myself. Can you come over Friday night? Have dinner with us? Then we can go into the den and talk.”
“Sure,” he said. “And Franny—I really missed you!”
Suddenly I had tears running down my cheeks. I sniffled, then squeaked out, “Me too. See you soon,” and hung up.
That Friday morning all four of us went into the office and signed up for the van to Baltimore. We had work to do.
Brooklyn was going to spend the weekend filling yet more plastic bags with ChokoDream brownie mix (we didn’t think my mom would buy our homeless-shelter story a second time). He had gone over to the kitchen the day after our visit to Dr. B’s office. Reuben told him that Dr. Gallow had arrived first thing that morning with a huge box of Recipe Variant I, and hauled away all our carefully filled bags of brownie mix. Unless we brought Reuben something to put in place of the Variant I, the whole school would change back to its original state of robotic perfection in about a week.
Prescott was going to check with the lab, to see if any progress had been made on the patent search. But his main job—and it would take all weekend and then some—was to read the entire contents of Dr. Bodempfedder’s hard drive.
How, you’re probably wondering, did he happen to have that material in his possession? Well, it had been alarmingly easy.
After Dr. Bodempfedder left and I let the others into the Allbright administration offices that night, Cal, Brooklyn, and I started going through the files with the aid of our mini flashlights. Meanwhile, Prescott made a beeline for the computer. Now Prescott, for all his faults, is your basic law-abiding person, and he did what he did for a law-abiding reason—to bring criminals to justice. All the same, it was pretty creepy to see what a mere eighth grader was capable of, spy-wise. And everything he used was perfectly legal and for sale on the Internet.
Here’s what Prescott did:
He turned off Dr. B’s computer, popped a CD into the drive (it contained a Linux program called Knoppix), and plugged a 4-gigabyte jump drive into a USB port. Then he started the computer back up again and, bypassing Windows and Dr. B’s password protection, went straight into the guts of her computer. He copied all her Word files—and anything else he thought looked promising—right onto his jump drive. Then he just slipped it into his pocket. Amazing!
Prescott had a lot of reading to do.
As for Cal and me, our job was to meet with Beamer and see if he could do something with the tape we’d made. The problem was the quality of the sound. It had been recorded on a cheap machine off my cell phone, and the phone hadn’t exactly been close to the people who were talking. Bottom line: It was barely audible. We hoped Beamer could use some of the equipment at his school to take out background noise and amplify the voices.
Beamer, being the wonderful friend he is, offered to do more than we asked of him. And being the creative soul he is, he saw possibilities we never considered.
“First of all, fixing the sound won’t be a problem,” he said. “It’s fussy work and it’ll take some time, but I can do it. Then I’ll copy it into a PowerPoint presentation, with voice-over and visuals. It’ll be much more compelling that way.”
“What visuals? All we have is that recording.”
“Well, you said you have the formulas for those compounds. That could be a visual.”
“Oh,” Cal said. “We didn’t bring the documents. We didn’t know you’d have a way to use them. But we have more than just the formulas. We found some really good stuff in Dr. B’s files.”
“Well, when you get back to school, why don’t you scan them and send them to me? Really, give me everything you’ve got. Pile on the evidence.”
“Scanning those documents in the Cyclamen computer room? I don’t know,” I said. “Pretty scary. What if somebody saw what I was doing?”
“All right, then take digital pictures of them in the privacy of your own room and send that to me as a JPEG.”
“We could,” Cal said, “but I don’t have a digital camera. Do you, Franny?”
“No.”
“I do,” Beamer said. “I’ll bring it over tomorrow. You can take it with you to school for the week.”
“That should work. Thanks, Beamer. We’ll need to be really careful, though. I mean, we don’t want a big picture of some document coming up on the screen in the computer lab, where everybody can see it.”
“No, you won’t need to. Just load the pictures onto the computer through a USB port, then send me all the JPEGS as e-mail attachments. Don’t even bother to open them. But be very careful to delete them afterward. I’ll show you how tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“And why don’t you take a picture of a bag of that brownie mix, too? Get some nice photos of the school. Maybe a picture of the people who are talking on the tape. Can you do that? You could probably get them out of a yearbook.”
“Yeah, that’s no problem. But I don’t understand what you’re going to do with all that stuff.”
“Well, when this bottom-feeder lady is talking…”
“Bodempfedder.”
“Yeah, her. When she’s talking, we’ll show her picture on the screen. When the other guy’s talking, we can show his. I can pan in on the still pictures too, which makes it more visually interesting. They do it with documentaries all the time.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
“I can make more of a story out of it, not just some tape you’re listening to. I’ll start with the pictures of the school—get more than one, nice pretty ones, and make sure you get at least one shot of the building where this conversation took place. I can do a short voice-over about the founding of the school and how it was intended to train leaders, then segue into the conversation. I can even add subtitles. In case you can’t understand every word they’re saying, it’ll be up on the screen so you can read it.”
“That would be great,” I said. “But it sounds complicated. Do you have time to do all that, with finishing your movie and all?”
“Sure.”
“You don’t either,” I said. “You’ve got your own stuff to do.”
“How about we just say I have the time and leave it at that? Okay, Franny?”
“Okay, Beamer. But you’re a saint.”
“I know. It’s true. And I’d stay and let you worship me, but I’d better go. I can get a head start on my editing over the weekend. That’ll free me up to work on the tape at school on Monday. Then as soon as you send me the documents and photos, I’ll put the whole thing together. I’ll see you tomorrow, though, when I come by with the camera.”
As Beamer talked, I noted that his hair had grown down over his ears—not hippie-long yet, but well on its way. I remembered how I’d been so worried about that hair, afraid my friends would think he looked scuzzy—and the memory made me sick.
“Thank you, Beamer,” I said, trying to keep from crying. “You really are the best friend ever.”
This was absolutely 100 percent true. As it turned out, Beamer’s working on our project meant his film wasn’t ready on time. Because it was late, the highest possible grade he could make was a C, when it should have been an A+. The teacher actually told him it was the best film any of his students had ever made.
I hadn’t realized what helping us would cost him. But Beamer had, and he never even thought twice about it.