THE PLAN had been to go swimming after the game, and the boys wanted us to come, but it starts to look like rain. And with Ally’s new development, we decide to hang out at my house. The General drops her off after being sure Ally wasn’t too traumatized.
“It’s like a mouse mattress. No joke,” Ally says, adjusting how she sits on my bed. “Weird, you know.”
“No, I don’t,” Rose says.
“I’m just glad it happened at the end of the game, not the beginning,” Ally says. “Pitching seven innings with this thing between my legs would have been murder!”
“TMI, Al!” Rose exclaims.
“No such thing as TMI on this topic,” I say. “This is real girl stuff that we’ve got to share. Let’s commemorate.” I pick up my Polaroid camera.
“What? Getting my period or winning the game?”
“Both,” I say and squeeze in between Rose and Ally on the bed. “Smile.” Instead, we make funny faces as I click the button. As soon as the undeveloped photo shoots out of the camera, Rose pulls it off and starts blowing on it.
“Why are you doing that?” I ask.
“On the Internet, it says if you blow on a Polaroid picture, it develops faster.”
“Is that where you learn everything?” I ask.
Rose nods. “Pretty much.”
“Does this mean I’m more mature than you guys?” Ally asks, her face absolutely serious. “Now, I mean?”
Rose and I look at each other and bust up laughing. “No!” I say.
“Absolutely not!” declares Rose.
Ally’s face falls. “Oh. I just thought…”
“You’re definitely more mature than yesterday,” I say because she suddenly looks so sad.
“Oh, good.” And Ally’s smiling again, her mood changing at the rate of a golden retriever’s.
“Speaking of pictures…” I grab my library copy of James and the Giant Peach and pull out the photo I found yesterday in A Wrinkle in Time. I told them about my whole adventure before the game but they have yet to see the actual picture of the house. “What do you think?” I hold up the black-and-white photo and watch them study it.
“It’s a house,” Rose says.
“An old one,” adds Ally.
“It’s the house where Girl Detective lived.”
They examine it more closely. “Have you ever seen that house before?” Ally asks me.
“Maybe,” I say, unconvincingly.
“You know it could be anywhere,” Rose says and flips onto her back, looking up at the ceiling.
“Yeah, but it could be around here,” I say. “Why would she bury the box on our island if she didn’t live in our neighborhood?”
“Good point,” Ally says.
“And I feel like the final clue is just waiting for us under a creaky floorboard by a bookshelf in her bedroom. Just like the clue said. Rose, look at it again.” I hand her the picture. “If this is what Girl Detective’s house looked like back then, what do you think it looks like now?”
Rose gives it serious attention, then hands the photo back to me. “Old.”
I gaze down at the black-and-white image in my hand and silently agree. It would definitely look old by now.
“Popcorn!” My mom’s voice calls up from downstairs. “And Zora’s putting on a movie. You girls want to come watch?”
None of us moves until we hear a burst of thunder and Rose says, “I’ll go.”
“It’s not even raining yet!” I say.
“It’s not the rain I’m scared of,” she says and heads toward the stairs.
“Chicken,” Ally jokes and pulls a book from my shelf. She plops back on my bed. “I want popcorn!”
“She’s not coming back,” I say.
“And I’m not watching Frozen.”
I look down on my bedspread and see that our Polaroid selfie has developed nicely. Rose is doing moose ears with her hands, Ally is sticking out her tongue, and I’ve got my eyes crossed. I take the picture to my corkboard and pin it to an open spot near the center. Only a few more selfies and my corkboard will be completely full.
“What’s this?”
“What’s what?” I ask.
“This,” Ally says and I turn around. She’s sitting up, holding my copy of When You Reach Me in one hand and a little card in the other. A Valentine’s card.
“No, give me that!” I rush over but Ally springs to the other side of the bed, putting the mattress between us.
She reads from the card: “Roses are red, Violets are blue, Didn’t want a girlfriend, Until I met you.”
“Come on, Al.”
“Romeo likes you?!”
“Not so loud.” I stare at her, wishing desperately that I had destroyed Romeo’s card on the day I got it. “Yeah,” I finally say. “He does.”
“Since Valentine’s Day and you never told me!”
It thunders loudly and I close the bedroom door. “How could I? If I told you, you’d say we have to tell Rose and—”
“We have to tell Rose.”
“We can’t tell her. She’ll hate me.”
“Do you like him back?” Ally asks.
“I don’t know. No! He’s a nice guy but I don’t want a boyfriend.” I look at the book that was supposed to guard my secret and want to strangle it. “Ugh! Since when do you read?”
“Funny.”
“She’s going to feel like an idiot. I’ve let her make a fool of herself with Romeo when I knew he didn’t like her.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“But I didn’t want to hurt her,” I say. “You get that, right? You know, for the greater good.”
Ally shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter. There’s no greater good with us.”
I sit beside her on the bed. I know she’s right but … “She’s moving, Al. In a couple of weeks. Maybe she never has to find out. Maybe we can just let it go.”
“Let it go, let it go,” she sings, like Elsa from Frozen. Then looks at me. “No.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re friends! We don’t keep secrets. Not from each other.”
I trace the line of a big purple bedspread-flower with my finger. “I don’t know what to do.”
“If she finds out and you don’t tell her and she moves away, we’ll lose her forever. She won’t trust us anymore.”
“Us?”
“We come in a package, Birdie. We’ll be her American friends who lied to her.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t lie.”
“I know. But I’ll be lying now.” She pauses. “You want me to tell her?”
“No! I’ll do it. Just let me find the right time, okay?” I look at Ally pleadingly. “Okay?”
She hands me Romeo’s Valentine’s card and gets off the bed. “But soon. Really soon. You don’t have much time left. This time next week you’ll be in Chicago!”
“I know,” I say, my eyes dropping.
It’s silent for too long and I can feel Ally’s eyes on me. “Okay,” she says. “Come on. Let’s go watch Frozen.”
As Ally leaves the room, I pick up When You Reach Me, which is lying guiltily on the bed. “Traitor,” I say and put the book back on my shelf. The mood ring on my finger has turned green but it might as well be black. I’ve been so focused on the mystery of Girl Detective this summer that I’ve completely avoided the case of Rose and Romeo.
Because once I tell her the truth, who knows what will happen next.