I squeezed through the hallway crush of students to get to my locker, popped it open, and out tumbled another note. I swiped at it, missed, and my books and folders slid out of my arms, dumping to the floor. The crowd hopped around my mess, and the note disappeared under a trampling of sneakers and boots. It slid down the hall. I snatched it off the ground, brushed off the grit, and unfolded the squares. Slanty messy writing in pencil.
A confession! Really? My insides squirmed. A climber? Jake was a regular at the gym but didn’t have access to my school. Tom was at school but didn’t go to the climbing gym. Nick had access to school and the gym, but he’s sworn up and down that he wasn’t my stalker.
I couldn’t sit still all day. Mom would have said I had ants in my pants. It felt like ants were running up and down the entire length of my body. I was jumpy and twitchy. In Algebra II, I was so distracted I almost forgot to meet Tom at the pencil sharpener. I scurried over just as the bell rang, stumbled, and dropped my pencil. Tom and I bent over to grab it at the same time, cracking our heads together.
“Oh,” we groaned, holding our heads and laughing at the same time. “Not again.”
“Oy vey,” Tom said, grasping my hand to pull me up. “Call us King and Queen Klutz.”
“Muy torpe,” I said.
His lips curved into his cute crooked grin. “Ooh, you’re getting good.”
The algebra problems on the whiteboard made me dizzy, so I focused on the back of Tom’s neck as he hunched over his notebook, his cute ears peeking through his wavy hair.
He twisted to look over his shoulder at me. I held his gaze and smiled; he winked.
I must confess. Who?
I told Kaitlyn and Nick about the latest note at lunchtime. They both had to work after school. So that definitely ruled out Nick. Kaitlyn said she’d race to the gym as soon as she got off work.
I found Jake in the bouldering cave at Planet Granite. He traversed the wall, eyes on his next handhold, and didn’t notice me coming in. I stood behind him in spotting position as he prepared to pull himself over the roof. He twisted his arm up to reach the next hold and caught sight of me.
“Argh!” he yelled and fell, taking me down with him. He landed smack on his chalk bag, sending up a puff of powder.
“What’re you doing sneakin’ up like that?” A streak of white chalk smeared with sweat across his brown cheek.
I laughed. “Get off me, you weigh a ton,” I said with a shove.
He jumped up and swatted the air to clear the haze of chalk dust.
“You’re here early,” he said.
“I didn’t know I had a set time to be here.”
“I mean you’re earlier than you usually get here.”
I shrugged. Was it just me, or did Jake look nervous?
“Over here.” He motioned to the corner. “Me and Nate finished puttin’ up a new route.”
I read aloud the word written on lime-green tape at the start of the climb: “Metamorphosis.”
“Yeah, I named it after you.”
I raised my eyebrows. “As in Kafka?”
“Huh?”
I shook my head. “Never mind.”
“I was trying to think of a song title, you know, ’cause you’re a rock star. Get it? ‘Rock’ star?”
I raised my eyebrows higher.
“Yeah, I figured you wouldn’t get it. Metamorphosis. Because you used to climb like a caterpillar, and now you soar like a butterfly.” He acted out the transformation, slowly flapping his hands, creeping forward on tiptoe, then floating his arms up and down.
Too funny. I couldn’t lower my eyebrows. I couldn’t help it, he was just so darn cute. “Are you turning poetic on me?”
Jake hung his head and shrugged.
“Metamorphosis, huh?” I scanned the new route, lime-green tape marking the holds all the way up and onto the ceiling.
“There are metamorphic rocks, too,” I said. “It’s when a rock goes through a transformation, changing its form, like when it’s been exposed to heat and pressure. Chemical reactions, minerals form, different textures emerge.”
“Cool.” Jake handed me the rope. “Climb on.”
I shook my head. “You first.” The gym was nearly empty, the ropes hanging in neat, still lines all along the walls. Someone else had directed me to come here today. The ants ran up and down my body again.
“No fair. I put up the route. If you watch me do it, it won’t count as an on-site for you.”
“Don’t care. You go first.” I kept an eye on the entrance, waiting for something, anything, I wished I knew what.
Jake looked around too while he tied in to the rope. Who was he looking for?
“Climbing.”
“Climb on.”
Jake climbed like he had started off on the wrong foot. He made awkward lunges, and almost slipped twice before he even got to the overhang. He tried to maneuver over the crux, came up short, and dynoed toward the next hold. He missed. The force of his fall popped me off my feet, and I dangled in the air.
“Hiíjole!”
Two hands grasped the back of my harness.
Tom? What was he doing here?
He pulled me down beside him.
“You know you probably shouldn’t be climbing with a concussion.” He gently touched the spot on my forehead where our skulls collided earlier. “Good, no goose egg this time.”
My hands slackened on the rope, dropping Jake.
“Hey! Stop distracting my belay babe! Hold the line, will ya!”
“Sorry!”
“Just bring me down.”
I lowered him to the ground and removed the rope from my belay device, waiting for Tom to say something else.
Loud voices erupted from the entrance. Kaitlyn marched toward us, dragging a protesting Nick by the hand.
“I thought you had to work?” I asked.
“We’re on our way. Nick has something to tell you.” She jabbed him in the ribs.
He looked helplessly at Tom and Jake. More climbers had entered the gym by now. Sensing something going down, they drifted closer to us.
“No, Jake has something to tell you,” Tom said.
“I’m confused.” I said.
Jake’s mouth twisted like he couldn’t get his words out, and Tom put him in a headlock. Which was pretty funny-looking with Jake almost a head taller than him.
“I did it,” Jake blurted. “I’m the one who wrote the notes.”
My eyebrows were glued to my hairline. “What’s going on?” Tom gave Jake a noogie and released him from the headlock. “It … It started off as a way to get you to climb again,” Jake said. “We heard you were in town, but you hadn’t shown up yet. Then Nick met you at school and said you didn’t sound like you were gonna climb anymore. I was like, Whaaaat? I knew you had to climb. I’d read every article ever written about you. I watched the X-games. You couldn’t quit. I had to help you.”
“Help me?”
“Well yeah, okay … it, it was for me too. I wasn’t here that first day you showed up. Blake and Nate said you didn’t even climb that day. My climbing idol—living in the D! I had to getcha to climb with me.”
Jake looked so young and earnest. His tall, skinny body was drooped down, pleading with me, his idol, to understand.
“You are such a nut,” I said, with a slug to his arm.
“Your turn.” Kaitlyn poked Nick again. “Fess up.”
“I only said I didn’t write the notes. I didn’t say I hadn’t delivered them.” Nick held his hands, palms up, in his innocent gesture. He leaned toward me and whispered, “Oh hey, thanks for letting me come to California with you guys.” His dimples flashed, and he hugged Kaitlyn around the neck.
“You’re going back to California?” Tom asked. “When? For how long?”
“We leave on Friday, for spring break,” I said.
“But you’re coming back, right?”
I glanced at Kaitlyn. “I … I’m not sure. I don’t know yet.” My words faded as I met his eyes. I held his gaze for a moment, but looked away as heat rose into my face.
Kaitlyn spoke up. “There is still a missing piece to this mystery. How come Tom is here?”
“I wanted to make sure Jake fessed up.” Tom spoke directly to me. “I made the mistake of telling him about the dance, and how stupid I was, and how I wished I would have gone with you. The next week, he told me about the note he had written trying to get us together.”
Jake confessed even more. Now he seemed proud of what he had pulled off. “I gave the notes to Nate, who gave them to Nick, who put them in your locker.”
No wonder I hadn’t figured it out, there was no single person to blame. Nick was always at school early for swim practice. It would have been easy for him to sneak the notes into my locker when no one else was around.
Kaitlyn shook her head. “You guys are unbelievable. All this time we’ve been trying to figure this out. You really pissed us off, you know.”
“And creeped me out,” I said.
Jake looked a little sheepish, but still proud, like the murderer confessing at the end of one of my Agatha Christie mysteries. Nick looked gleeful and way too smug.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “So, you’ve read the climbing magazines and blogs, and you could have Googled me and found out about my first 5.14a and my bomb at Hueco Tanks, but what about the different handwriting? How’d you learn to write like that?”
Jake squinted at me. “Huh?”
“Oh yeah,” Nick said, “I didn’t deliver those paper airplanes.”
“Hang on,” I said. “They’re in my coat.”
I showed them the difference in notes, the slanting scrawl vs. the perfect block printing.
“That’s my writing,” Jake said, pointing to the messy one. “I’ve never seen anyone write that other way.”
So I was right; two different people had been writing these notes. And I had an idea about stalker number two. I just didn’t understand why or how.
“That’s engineer writing,” Tom said. “My dad writes just like that.”
“Why’d your dad send her notes?” Jake said.
“Doofus,” Tom faked a punch at Jake. Jake raised his fists and fake jabbed back. “Somebody like him must have done it. And no, it wasn’t me,” Tom said.
“Not just engineers,” Nick said. “My aunt’s an architect. She writes like that too.”
I kept quiet about my suspicion. I needed to solve this mystery on my own.
Kaitlyn glanced at her phone. “Oh my God! We’re going to be so late to work. You okay?” She squeezed my shoulder. “We’ll talk more later?”
I smiled and nodded.
“Let’s go.” She grabbed Nick’s hand and pulled him away. I could hear him protesting as they left. “But we were just getting to the good part …”
The crowd around us melted away, pointing at other routes, tying in to ropes. Someone turned up the music, “Welcome to the Jungle,” and a guitar riff blared from the speaker overhead.
“Darn, I can’t believe I fell off my own route,” Jake muttered, hands on his hips, head tilting back to follow the handholds and footholds up to the ceiling.
“You going to show us how it’s done?” Tom asked.
A calm heat settled deep into my muscles, replacing my jittery, electric-spark nerves. I lifted my sweatshirt over my head, revealing the T-back tank top underneath. I knew I looked as strong as I felt, and thanks to my recent growth spurt, I even had curves. The look on Tom’s face added fuel to my confidence, and I tossed my sweatshirt to him. For the first time, I understood how Becky must feel when she climbed. Climbing brings you attention, makes you interesting—to boys.
I tied in to the rope, took a slow deep breath, and climbed. My breath remained steady; my body knew the route before my mind figured it out. I twisted and stretched, reached and pulled, pushed and danced and floated to the top. I slithered upside down across the ceiling and clipped the final bolt. Tom whistled.
“Right on!” Jake pumped his fist, then lowered me down.
“That’s why I named it after you.” He released himself from the belay and floated his arms up and down. “Butterfly,” he called out over his shoulder as he pranced away.
Tom and I cracked up as Jake joined a group of climbers at another route. I lifted my ponytail, cooling the sweat at the nape of my neck.
Tom rested his hands on my bare shoulders, leaned his mouth close to my ear, and whispered, “That was so hot.”
The tiny hairs at the back of my neck prickled. Electricity shot straight to the depths of my belly and radiated beyond.
“I could watch you all day,” he said and kissed my cheek.
It wasn’t ants dancing up and down my spine; I was sprouting wings.