TWO HOURS LATER and Mom still hadn’t come down. I’d wanted to go check on her but Grandma Dotty had stopped me. “Let her get it out of her system. She’s more angry about being fooled than anything else,” she’d said. “No one likes losing anything to a crook, but it wasn’t a huge bunch of money. Enough to hurt, but it’s more her pride than anything else.”

Grandma Dotty wasn’t always right about things, but when it came to the big stuff like this, she usually was. Georgia was out at a friend’s house, so at least she didn’t have to see Mom upset. As for me, all I wanted to do was find Sid and push him into a shark-infested pool. (In my mind he was already sitting on the edge of a shark-infested pool when I found him, which, I admit, isn’t very likely, but it helped.)

“So,” I said, sitting down across from Grandma Dotty, “what happened with Sid?” I’d known that Gudonya had been cleaned out, but stealing money? That was a whole other thing.

“He took ticket orders from a bunch of folks in town,” Grandma Dotty said, dipping a cookie into her cup of coffee and taking a bite. She’d actually bitten into a coaster, but she seemed to like it, so I didn’t say anything. “And money from folks all over.”

“Wouldn’t it have been easier to just go through with the yoga festival?” Kasey said.

Grandma Dotty shrugged and put down the coaster. “I guess, but I don’t think Sid was the real deal. If he was a yoga teacher, I’m the Queen of England.” She nodded at Kasey. “It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if he turned out not to be Australian.”

Kasey looked at me. “Told you so.”

I pointed out that no one liked a person that says “I told you so,” but Kasey wasn’t listening. She had a strange expression on her face. (Although it would have been weird if she’d had a strange expression that wasn’t on her face. Like, where else would it be?)

“I need to make a phone call. Right now.” She stood up and left the room at about a zillion miles an hour. I guess sometimes you just really have to make a phone call.

“So,” I said, “what now?”

Grandma Dotty’s hand shot into the air like she’d had a brilliant idea. Maybe she was going to come up with the answer to our problems. Maybe she knew stuff we didn’t. She was old and wise, after all, like an owl, or a wizard, or something. “Macaroni cheese,” she said.

I helped Grandma make macaroni cheese, which, considering it was a microwave packet, meant putting plates out and, uh, that was about it. By the time I’d finished, Kasey was back and grinning. It was kind of scary, tbh.

“What?” I said. “You’ll find out,” Kasey replied. “Mmm, smells good!”

I knew Kasey wasn’t telling the truth about the smell. Grandma Dotty’s macaroni cheese was a long way from Mom’s Leftover Meat Loaf Spaghetti Special and it tasted like cardboard. Cardboard with cheese, but it was still cardboard. I snuck a couple of pieces to Junior and even he wasn’t real enthusiastic. In the words of one of our songs, everything really did suck.

“Come on,” Kasey said. “Cheer up.”

I waggled a fork at her. “If the next thing you say is ‘she’ll be right, mate,’ I swear I’ll put you on a plane tonight.”

“She’ll be right, mate,” Kasey said with a wink. “So what are we going to do? And by ‘we’, I mean you, obviously.”

“Obviously,” I said. “Maybe I could change my name? Go into hiding? Get plastic surgery? Move to Australia? Or I could go into school tomorrow with absolutely no plan and let Miller pound me into sausage meat. It’s not like someone’s going to knock on the door with a brilliant idea to fix everything, is i—”

There was a loud knock on the door.

I looked at Kasey. “Your phone call?”

“My phone call,” she said with a nod.

“Rafe?” a voice yelled from behind the door. “Kasey’s had a brilliant idea to fix everything!”