From the Desk of Zoe Washington

by Janae Marks

  It was a reply from Susan Thomas, and I skimmed through the email, looking for Marcus’s name. But it wasn’t good news. She said she only moved to Brookline eight years earlier, so she wasn’t living there when Marcus would’ve gone to a tag sale. She wasn’t the right person.

  My shoulders slumped as I put my phone down. I was back at square one.

  When I heard Trevor come home that night, I texted him to come over so I could show him the email.

  “This is hopeless,” I told him.

  “Are you sure you don’t know anything else about her? Can you ask Marcus again?”

  “All Marcus said he remembered is her name, what she looked like, the fact that she lived in Brookline, and she mentioned students at one point. Oh, and she was married, with no kids.”

  “I have an idea.” Trevor pulled my laptop toward him and opened a search browser. He typed in “Susan Thomas Brookline MA professor.”

  “Oh.” My eyes lit up.

  “There are so many colleges in Boston,” Trevor said. “Maybe she teaches at one of them.”

  “That makes sense.” I wished I’d thought of it.

  Unlike the other times we searched for Susan Thomas, this time the results got smaller—the first page was all websites about the same person. The first link was to a Harvard University page for a Professor Susan Thomas who worked in the math department, and below that was a résumé website for the same person.

  Trevor clicked on the first link.

  “There’s a picture.” I stared at the small rectangular box that appeared next to the professor’s biography. The picture was in black and white, but it was clear that she had dark hair and dark eyes. I squinted at it. “Does it look like she has freckles?”

  Trevor leaned in to the picture himself. “I’m not sure. Let’s read her bio.”

  The two of us stared at the computer screen as we read it. Right there in the first line, it said that she was a Massachusetts native.

  “So she grew up here,” Trevor said.

  “But it doesn’t say whether or not she lived in Brookline,” I pointed out. “What about the other website that came up below this one? The résumé one—it might say where she’s lived.”

  Trevor clicked back over to the website and we stared at her résumé. There, at the bottom, under education, it said Brookline High School.

  “She lived in Brookline!” I said. “It has to be her!”

  “It says she went to high school there,” Trevor said. “She must’ve grown up there. But Marcus said she was in her thirties when he met her.”

  “Right, but maybe she lived there for a while after. Or moved back, or something.”

  “Yeah,” Trevor said.

  I switched back to the Harvard page. I scrolled down and found a list of classes that Professor Thomas would teach when the fall semester started in a few weeks.

  “Do you see this?” I asked, still staring at the screen. “Classes start up at Harvard on August thirtieth. School doesn’t start for us until September sixth. Maybe one of those days in between, we can go to Harvard and talk to her, figure out if she’s the same person Marcus met. And if she is, I can see if she remembers him.”

  Trevor nodded. “But how will we get to Harvard without your parents finding out what we’re going there for? Maybe you should try emailing her first.”

  “You’re right.”

  I opened my email and wrote out a similar message to the one I’d sent the first Susan Thomas. “Let’s hope she replies faster than the last one.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I needed a plan. It’d been a few days since I sent the email to Professor Thomas, and still no response.

  “I’m tired of waiting for her email,” I told Trevor. We were sitting at the bottom of our porch steps one afternoon, eating orange Popsicles after riding our bikes around the neighborhood. Well, Trevor was eating his Popsicle. A few seconds earlier, my phone chirped and I dropped my Popsicle while trying to get to my pocket as fast as possible. Butternut was on it in a second, happily licking it while I checked the email—which turned out to be spam. I wanted to throw my phone on the ground, too, but Trevor stopped me. I put it in my pocket instead and debated going inside to get another Popsicle.

  “Can you call her office at Harvard?” Trevor asked, keeping his voice low so Grandma wouldn’t hear us from inside.

  “If I have to.” I opened the Harvard website on my phone and searched for Professor Thomas’s name. I found her phone number on her department’s page.

  I tapped my finger on the number so my phone would start calling and then quickly put it to my ear before I could change my mind. It started ringing, so I got up and walked a few steps away from the house so Grandma definitely couldn’t hear.

  Ring.

  Ring.

  Ring.

  “Hello, you’ve reached the office of Professor Susan Thomas in the Harvard University math department. I’m away from my desk, so please leave a message, and I will get back to you as soon as I can. Thank you, and have a nice day.”

  There was a beep at the end, so I had to think fast. “Uh, hi, um, Professor Thomas. This is Zoe Washington. I sent you an email last week, asking if you knew a man named Marcus Johnson. He said he met you thirteen years ago at your tag sale? I put his picture in the email, so can you please let me know if you recognize him? It’s really important.” I gave her my email address and phone number before thanking her and ending the call.

  I’d gotten a little sweaty from the bike ride, but now I was drenched in sweat from talking on the phone.

  I’d earned a second Popsicle.

  “Do you think she’s ignoring me?” I asked Trevor a couple of days later. I stood on the edge of the driveway while he practiced shooting his basketball into the net above the garage.

  He dribbled the ball for a few seconds and then took a shot. The basketball hit the rim of the net but then went in. “Maybe your email went into her junk folder,” Trevor said.

  “And my voice mail too?”

  He bit his lip. “I don’t know. Maybe she heard how young you were and didn’t want to get involved.”

  “Well, that’s rude.”

  “Yeah.”

  I kicked a pebble with my foot. “This is so annoying. If she’s going to ignore my messages, then we have to go find her. She’ll definitely be around when classes start again next week. This is our chance. She won’t be able to ignore me if I’m right in front of her face.”

  Trevor took another shot before asking, “But how are we going to convince our parents to let us go there without telling them why?”

  “We won’t tell them. We’ll go without them knowing.”

  But how?

  “How about this,” I told Trevor, standing closer to him and speaking even softer. “We’ll tell our parents that we want to ride our bikes. Then we ride to Davis Square, take the T to Harvard Square, and then walk to Harvard’s campus. If we time it right, we can get there before her class ends. Then I can show her Marcus’s picture, see if she remembers him—which hopefully she will. And then I’ll finally know.”

  “Do you think they’ll really let us be gone for that long?” Trevor asked.

  “How long do you think it would take all together, for us to get to Harvard and back?” I asked.

  Trevor pulled out his phone and opened the map app, so we could calculate our route. We decided we needed three hours to do everything.

  I smiled. “Three hours isn’t bad! But that’s too long for a bike ride. Let me think.” I paced our driveway while Trevor shot the basketball into the hoop a few more times. He missed the first couple of shots, but made the last one.

  I snatched the basketball from Trevor as an idea came to me.

  “Hey!” he said.

  “What if we ask our parents to go to the movie theater in Davis,” I said. “We can tell them we also want to get ice cream at the J.P. Licks. If they drop us off, we won’t even need our bikes, which will give us more time.”
>
  Trevor smiled. “Good idea. I bet they’d let us hang out in Davis for a few hours.”

  “Yeah.” Mom let me hang out at the mall alone before, with Jasmine and Maya. Davis Square, with all its restaurants and college students walking around, seemed like a safe place for us to spend a few hours. Hopefully our parents agreed. “Okay. Ask your parents tonight if we can go next Thursday. Professor Thomas’s class is from twelve to one thirty, so if we get to Davis at twelve thirty, that should be enough time to find her class before it ends.”

  “My mom works the night shift on Thursdays, so she can probably drive us. We have to make sure we get back to Davis when she comes to pick us up,” Trevor said. “Or we’re dead.”

  “We’ll totally be back in time,” I said with confidence. “We know exactly what we’re doing, and exactly where we need to go. This is going to work!”

  The real worry that was lodged deep in my throat was that all this sneaking around wouldn’t be worth it in the end. That we wouldn’t find what we were looking for—the truth about Marcus’s innocence. Then I wouldn’t know if Marcus was lying to me.

  But I had to stay optimistic.

  I was still holding Trevor’s basketball, so I dribbled it a couple of times. Then I took a shot. It went right into the basket.

  “Nice,” Trevor said. “Lucky shot.”

  I turned to him and grimaced. “What do you mean, lucky?”

  “I don’t know,” Trevor said. “I thought . . . I mean, I didn’t think you liked basketball. Or any sports. You always complain about gym class.”

  “That’s because some people in gym class stink,” I said. “I can’t even trip by accident without some people making a big deal about it.” I didn’t bring up Lincoln tripping me on purpose again, but the way Trevor looked down at his feet made it clear that he knew what I was talking about. “I like sports better when I can play with my friends.”

  I picked up the basketball again and made another shot. It sailed right in. Nothin’ but net.

  “Whoa,” Trevor said, his eyes wide.

  “How’s that for lucky?” I said, grinning. “You know, Marcus used to play basketball as a kid. He was really good, apparently.”

  “Really?” Trevor said. “That’s cool.”

  “Anyway, I don’t not like basketball,” I said. “You never asked me to play with you. It seemed like you only wanted to play with your brother or other friends.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t know.” Trevor went over and picked up the ball, then tentatively asked, “Want to play some more right now?”

  I smiled. “Sure.”

  We played a couple rounds of horse until our parents got home from work and we had to stop for dinner. We agreed to text each other after we asked our parents about going to Davis Square.

  This plan could be a total failure, but at least I had Trevor back.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  It was just Mom and me for dinner, since Dad had to work late. She’d brought home Thai food takeout, and we both had plates with pad thai and spring rolls in front of us. So far, it’d been the quietest dinner ever, which was fine by me. I didn’t have anything to say to Mom. Well, except for one thing I still had to ask her.

  I swirled more noodles around my fork and came out with it. “Can I go to Davis Square with Trevor on Thursday?” I asked. “We want to watch a movie.”

  “Oh.” She sounded surprised. “I can take you over the weekend.”

  I shook my head. “It has to be Thursday.”

  Mom reached for the bottle of sriracha and squeezed some more on her pad thai. “Why?”

  “There’s a group going—other kids from school will be there. As, like, an end-of-summer thing.” I paused, and then added, “I mean, twelve seems old enough to watch a movie with only my friends.”

  Mom narrowed her eyes. “Let me think about it.”

  “Please? Davis Square is crowded during the day. There will be lots of people around. The ice cream place is right across the street from the movie theater. We want to go there after the movie.”

  “Who else will be there?” Mom asked.

  “Um.” I thought fast. “It’s a couple of Trevor’s friends. From basketball. Now that Trevor and I are friends again, I’m going to try to get to know them.” The lies rolled off my tongue so easily, which made the pit in my stomach grow.

  “What about Maya? Is she back home yet?”

  “She won’t be home until the weekend after,” I said.

  Mom stared at me for what felt like an eternity, and then said, “You will only go inside the movie theater, and then right across the street to the ice cream shop. No walking around anywhere else.”

  “Yes!” I tried not to show how excited I was. “Trevor said his mom could drive us.” I wasn’t sure if he’d gotten permission yet, but I hoped he had.

  “All right,” Mom finally said. “You must have your phone on the entire time, on vibrate when the movie is playing, so if there’s an emergency, we can reach each other.”

  “Okay.”

  Normally this was the part when I’d give her a hug, but for some reason, it felt weird. Awkward. The Marcus stuff was taking up space between us. So I just said “Thank you” and finished eating my pad thai.

  When I got back to my room after dinner, I texted Trevor.

  Me: Mom said I can go to Davis for a few hours without a chaperone!

  Trevor: Mine too! She can drive us.

  Our plan was a go.

  The day before our Great Harvard Adventure—GHA for short, as I liked to call it—another letter from Marcus arrived.

  To my Little Tomato,

  I’m so glad we got a chance to talk on the phone—not once, but twice. It was so great to hear your voice out loud. I think this good mood will last me awhile!

  I don’t know what you’re planning, now that you have my alibi witness’s name, but I hope you don’t get yourself into any trouble. What I want most is for you to live a happy life, and not have to worry about me being in prison. Just enjoy being a kid, okay?

  Summer is almost over. You’re going into the seventh grade, right? How do you feel about that? When I was in middle school, I always liked math class, strange as that sounds. I found it satisfying to solve all of those equations, like they were puzzles.

  Before I go, here’s another song for your playlist: “To Zion,” by Lauryn Hill.

  Love,

  Marcus

  I listened to the song after reading the letter, but decided not to write back right away. I wanted to wait to see what happened the next day. If everything worked out, I’d have some good news to share.

  The next morning, I woke up early and packed my backpack, making sure I had everything Trevor and I needed. There was my journal, with all the notes I’d taken about Marcus’s case and Professor Thomas. I’d written down details about her class, like what time it ended and what building it was held in. I’d also printed a map of the campus and circled where we’d enter it and where her building was.

  I was also bringing my picture of Marcus, and at the last second, I stuffed his letters in between pages of my journal too. I wasn’t sure I needed to take them with me. It’s not like Professor Thomas would need to see them or anything, but I felt better having them. They were a reminder of why I was doing this in the first place.

  The night before, while my parents were watching TV, I snuck into the kitchen to make snacks. I made two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—one for me, and one for Trevor. I also grabbed a couple of apples from the counter and two bottles of water. I didn’t want Mom to see the food, since I was only supposed to be seeing a movie and getting ice cream while I was gone. So I stuffed everything into my backpack underneath a sweatshirt. I normally brought one to movie theaters in case I got cold, so Mom wouldn’t find that weird.

  When my parents left for work, instead of Grandma coming over, I went to Trevor’s house to hang out until it was time for us to head to Davis Square for our “movie.” Trevor’s mom’
s shift didn’t start until that night, so she was going to drop us off and pick us up.

  In his bedroom, I showed Trevor everything I’d packed in my backpack for our adventure, and we went over our plan—quietly, so his mom wouldn’t hear us.

  At noon, Patricia poked her head into his room. “Ready to go?”

  We went outside and got into her car. Trevor sat in the front passenger seat next to his mom and I sat behind the driver’s seat.

  “Excited for the movie?” Patricia asked once she pulled out of the driveway.

  “Yup!” I said. Trevor glanced back at me and I smiled at him.

  “I can’t believe how fast you’re growing up. I remember when you two would watch a movie together curled up on blankets in our living room. Now you’re going off on your own, meeting friends.” Her voice got all nostalgic. “I know middle school can be tough, but this is the beginning of such a fun time for you two. Your first taste of independence.”

  “You’re not gonna cry, are you?” Trevor asked his mother, sounding annoyed.

  “Of course not,” Patricia said, though her voice did sound a little like she was holding back tears. “Anyway, the movie starts at one, right?”

  “Yup,” Trevor said right away. “We’re meeting our other friends inside the theater. Whoever gets there first is supposed to save seats for the rest of us.”

  “Right,” I said, impressed at how easily Trevor lied to his mom. Maybe I was rubbing off on him. I was glad I’d decided to give him another chance, and that he was coming with me today. There was no way I could do this alone.

  The drive to Davis Square took only five minutes. Trevor’s mom pulled in front of the Somerville Theatre, which was an old-timey theater that still had some of its original features. The words “Somerville Theatre” were engraved in stone on the front of the building. The marquee didn’t have screens with electronic letters—instead, it had black letters that had to be stuck to the sign. Every time a movie changed, someone had to stand up on a ladder and switch them by hand.

  “All right, kids. This is your stop.” Patricia looked at me in the rearview mirror. “You have your ticket money, Zoe?”