Lola Benko, Treasure Hunter

by Beth McMullen

  “Why should us oldsters miss out on all the fun?” she asks. Great-Aunt Irma is on a first-name basis with a number of important CEOs and is often invited to speak at important conferences.

  But she never goes. This is because she does not leave the house. Ever. For any reason. She says it’s because Zeus cannot be alone, but the internet calls her condition “agoraphobia” and it’s the reason she is not here in the emergency room with me as the doctor pokes and prods my body. I smell strongly of the rosemary hedge that cushioned my fall. Just serve me up with turkey, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce and call it Thanksgiving. For the record, everything hurts. My shoulder sports a big purple bruise and there’s a bloody stab wound inches above my left butt check, compliments of the aggressively sharp elbows of those stupid ballerinas. When the doctor touches my swollen left wrist, I howl like a lost dog.

  “We’ll need an X-ray of that,” she says, looping a stethoscope around her neck. “Likely broken, but overall I’d say fortune smiled on you.” Fortune? I don’t think so. I’m left-handed. “This could have been serious.” The doctor takes a step back just as Emily flies into the room. Uh-oh. There goes the peace and quiet.

  “Lola!” Emily conveys relief, anger, and disappointment all with just my name. That takes talent. “Sorry, Doctor, I’m Emily Singleton, Lola’s caseworker.” That means she’s the one in charge of making sure I stop ending up in the police station. This is not an easy job. “Is Lola okay?”

  After assuring Emily that the bronze dancers got the worst of it, the doctor leaves to arrange for my X-ray. She must not notice the steam billowing from Emily’s ears or she never would have left me here alone with her. It’s not safe. I hang my head and try not to think about the trouble I’m in. Because from the look Emily’s giving me, it’s a lot.

  Emily looms over me as I sit on the hospital bed, twirling a length of hair around my finger until the skin on my scalp sings. Usually Emily offers encouragement but not today.

  “You could have died,” she says flatly. “You fell two stories, not to mention the sculpture is a complete loss. The homeowner, a very influential community member, called the mayor and yelled at him about the high crime rates in this city. Do you think the mayor enjoyed being yelled at?” I’m smart enough to know this is a rhetorical question, one that doesn’t require an answer. I stay very still. “And then the mayor called me. He wanted to know why delinquent kids are allowed to run wild in the streets. He said your rap sheet is longer than most of his speeches and we all know the mayor likes to talk. I can’t make this one go away, Lola. You’ve gone too far. They are going to take action this time.”

  “Action” means I go up the river, check in at Club Fed, head to the slammer. I’ve been told it’s a place out beyond the mountains, a campus of gray concrete buildings with bars on the windows and watery gruel at every meal. The inmates do hard labor all day, laundry and harvesting vegetables and making license plates. You’re not allowed to laugh or have fun or read or play video games or anything. You’re just a prisoner until you turn eighteen, after which they kick you out into a world that doesn’t really want you back. My mouth goes dry. If I’m in lockdown, that means no one is looking for my father.

  Emily scowls, pacing the small space like a caged animal. I feel a lecture coming on. I will get no sympathy, despite the stitches in my butt and my broken wrist. “You promised Great-Aunt Irma,” Emily begins. Yep. A lecture. “And you promised me that you would behave. Why can’t you apply this level of dedication to some other pursuit? Something legal perhaps? I cannot emphasize enough how disappointed I am.”

  Oh, I get it. Her disappointment practically glows. Emily’s tried hard to unravel my propensity for crime. Her theory is that the loss of my father has driven me to indulge in risky, attention-seeking behavior. It’s a nice theory. I like to encourage her so she doesn’t feel bad about herself, but of course, she’s totally wrong. At the moment, I’m in it for the cash.

  “You promised you would go to school,” she continues, waving her arms and practically taking out the blood pressure machine, “and do your homework and join the chess club and generally stay out of trouble. In case you were wondering, theft and intent to sell stolen property is not staying out of trouble. And you could have been seriously injured! Killed, even!”

  For the record, I never committed to the chess club idea. At least not verbally. Strands of Emily’s curly hair break free from her tight ponytail and form a frizzy halo around her head. She sits down hard beside me on the hospital bed. The paper crinkles.

  “I know it’s been rough,” she says softly. “But you can’t undo what’s done, even if you hate it. You have to move on. We have to do better than this.”

  She is absolutely right. Something has to change.

  I have to stop getting caught.

  CHAPTER 4 WHAT COMES AFTER GETTING CAUGHT

  I SIT ON A WOODEN bench outside the judge’s office, my lime-green cast resting in my lap. The bench is tattooed with hearts bearing initials. It seems an odd place for a romantic declaration. And knives aren’t allowed in here, so what would you carve with? A pencil? A really strong fingernail? While I’m pondering this, Emily comes to fetch me. Her expression is unreadable. I follow her into Judge Gold’s office. It’s not my first visit.

  “Lola Benko,” booms the judge as we stand before her. She’s tall with white hair and a huge voice. She makes me nervous and not just because she holds my fate in her hands. “I’ll be honest. I wish I weren’t seeing you again so soon.”

  Judge Gold peers at my rap sheet through half-moon glasses. All those attempted plane rides, the breaking and entering, the self-driving car. She shakes the page at me. “Are you on a solo mission to wreck your life? What’s next? The albino penguin at the zoo everyone is talking about?” Hold on. What’s this about an albino penguin? “Don’t you have friends you want to spend time with? Kids desperate to sign that cast?”

  I shrug. The idea of real friends is nice, really nice even, but until recently, my nomadic lifestyle didn’t make it practical. Who wants to be BFFs with a girl who is just going to up and leave? Besides, I don’t have time to worry about friends. I need to stay focused on finding my father.

  “I’ve seen your test scores,” the judge says finally. “You’re off the charts. You could do anything. Tell me why you do this.”

  Her words throw me back on my heels. We stare at each other. It’s like she can see inside my brain, to the murky dark corners. Her eyes fill with something. Sadness? Recognition? Come on, Judge Gold! You’re just supposed to ship me off to make license plates, not ask about my motivation.

  Because the truth is, I don’t know how to explain what desperation feels like. No one believes that my father is alive. No one will listen. “I don’t know,” I mumble in response.

  “Of course you don’t,” the judge says, tossing aside my rap sheet. “You’re twelve. Life is complicated. Now, listen closely. You’ve committed a serious crime. But even though it doesn’t seem so, you are, right at this moment, very lucky. Strings have been pulled on your behalf. Your victim has decided not to press charges if you are willing to make some changes in your life.”

  I’m unclear on Judge Gold’s definition of luck, but I know I don’t have luck or strings. I keep my face neutral, unsure of what is going to happen next. Emily pats my head like I’m a baby chicken.

  “Instead of being remanded to the juvenile detention facility in the mountains,” the judge continues, “you will be sent to Redwood Academy, right here in San Francisco.”

  “The what?”

  “Redwood Academy. It’s a private school but, more important, a change of scene for you. A second chance.”

  “Private school?” My only experience with private schools is on television. Basically, beautiful people wearing expensive clothes and being mean to each other.

  The judge offers me a sympathetic smile. “It’s better than jail, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Yes, ma’am,
” I say quickly, relief flooding my system. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “Redwood is academically rigorous,” the judge adds. “If all goes well, you will simply not have time to get into trouble. Win-win. And just so we’re clear, this is the last chance this court will afford you.”

  “Thank you, Judge,” says Emily. “I know Lola will try her absolute hardest to make this work.”

  I smile benignly, thinking about that albino penguin. Maybe it’s time to go beyond art?

  “Good luck, Lola,” the judge says, dismissing me with a wave.

  “Thank you, Judge,” Emily repeats, grabbing my good wrist and pulling me from the judge’s chambers. When we’re clear of the building, she stops abruptly.

  “This is great,” she says, offering a grin. It looks weird, too big and wide. “A second chance. Or in your case a fifth or sixth chance, but who’s counting?”

  “What’s Redwood Academy?” I ask quietly. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m no fan of Holly Middle School—it’s boring and smells like bleach—but at least it’s a known quantity.

  “It was all Mr. Tewksbury’s idea,” Emily says. “He was uncomfortable with a kid being sent off to the detention center when the kid in question has had some tough times.”

  Now I feel extra guilty. I tried to take something from Tewksbury that didn’t belong to me. Not only that, but I ruined it! And here he is, nicest man on the planet, giving me a second chance. For the moment, I’ve dodged a one-way trip to the gray buildings where I would spend the rest of my natural days laundering sheets and harvesting carrots.

  Dad always says you make your own luck. But maybe, sometimes, luck happens anyway.

  CHAPTER 5 REDWOOD ACADEMY, OR NOT PRISON

  THE UNIFORM IS NOT LUCKY. It’s a terrible horrible pleated skirt, scratchy knee socks, ugly brown loafers, and a button-down white shirt that will surely strangle me by day’s end. I flush with anger as Great-Aunt Irma chortles in my bedroom doorway.

  “You look darling,” Irma says, her violet eyes gleeful. She pulls invisible lint off the uniform’s matching red cardigan.

  “Darling!” squawks Zeus, and I swear he rolls his glassy parrot eyes. That’s it. Even the bird knows I look like a dork. I am not going outside like this. Judge Gold can send me to the slammer. I bet they have nicer uniforms.

  “I look like a feral peacock.” I groan. The best course of action would be to crawl back under my fluffy comforter, the one decorated with cute kittens and rainbows, and pretend to be invisible.

  “You do not look like a feral peacock,” Irma responds. After the crushed-ballerinas episode, I expected immediate grounding for life. Instead, Irma said that if the great Benedict Tewksbury could forgive me, then she could too. This was followed by a physics lesson on the nature of thin ice. It went on for quite a while and I understood that the consequences awaiting me if I screw up again will make kid prison up in the cold mountains look like a dream.

  “This is a great opportunity,” Irma continues. “I’d go back to seventh grade if I could.”

  She’s obviously insane. No one wants to go back to seventh grade. I tug at the collar of the wretched shirt. I will not survive this day. I will die of humiliation before lunch.

  Emily arrives in a cheery yellow Volkswagen Beetle to shepherd me to my first day at my new school. As we drive across town, she prattles on about how I’m going to love being challenged at Redwood. I barely listen as I click my newest tinkering project, a retractable thumb extension, in and out. Fastened from a spring, discarded scissors, and some wire, it’s kind of like a modified whirligig but enables me to manipulate a pen and a fork while my hand is stuck in the annoying cast. I call it the ThumbBot 1.0. Of course, last night I shot applesauce all over the wall when I tried to use it with my spoon, but that’s what version 2.0 is for. Dad says failure is just an invitation to improve. You have to try again and again. I shift in my seat, trying to keep the weight off my butt stitches. How am I going to sit through an entire day of classes? The kids are going to think I have fleas.

  We head into the Presidio, a fifteen-hundred-acre park on the northern tip of San Francisco that used to be a military fort. It teems with eucalyptus trees, and soon Emily’s cute yellow Beetle smells like day-old cat pee. These trees were brought here from Australia and their revenge is to stink up the place. We drive a few miles along a winding road, past old barracks rehabilitated to house a rock-climbing gym, a swim club, coffee shops, restaurants, and people, who apparently don’t mind the smell. Groves of densely packed trees pass outside my window. I wonder if rats live in those trees. It seems like it would be a pleasant place to be a rat.

  Lola! Stop it! Why are you thinking about rats? Stop thinking about rats right now!

  I shake the image of happy rats hiding in clusters of trees from my head. No need to make a bad day worse. The entrance to Redwood is through two large stone pillars. Ominous, if you ask me, which no one does. The Beetle creeps along until a large building comes into view at the end of the driveway, surrounded by towering eucalyptus trees. The building is all sharp angles, glass and steel glinting in the pale February sun. Everything here is shiny and clean, photo-op ready. I can already tell this place is going to make Holly Middle School look like a dump.

  “Nice, right?” Emily asks. I shrug. I’m still mad about the uniform. “Wait until you see the cafeteria. It has a view of the Golden Gate Bridge!” But does it have valuable art hanging on the walls, donated by rich alumni?

  Emily reads my mind. “Don’t even think about it,” she says. I imagine that thin ice Irma was talking about. I can practically see through it to the icy water below. There might be fish down there. I have to be very careful.

  “I was just thinking about how much I love the trees,” I respond.

  She gives me some serious side-eye. “You have a chance to turn it all around,” she says. “The only thing that matters is what you do next.” I’m smart enough to keep the snarky retort that bubbles up to myself.

  Twenty minutes later, Emily is gone and I stand before the principal’s big desk while she eyeballs me. Right away I’m suspicious because she wears a pink woolly suit that looks like a sheep having a bad hair day and peers at me over bedazzled reading glasses.

  “So,” she says after a deliberate pause, “I’m Mrs. Boxley, principal of Redwood Academy, and you are Lola Benko, thief, correct?”

  Oh, I don’t like her already. Can I demand to be jailed? Would she wait patiently if I popped out to invent a principal-neutralizing ray gun? Probably not, but she does seem determined to wait for an answer, so I offer my best smile. “I didn’t steal the sculpture,” I say. “I tried, but instead I just ruined it.”

  Principal Boxley squeezes her lips into a tight line. “Is that so?”

  “Yes. I don’t want credit for something I didn’t do.”

  “Wonderful.” She grimaces, casting her eyes down to my file. “It says here that before Holly Middle School, you attended ten different schools in seven years?”

  “Eleven,” I clarify. “Probably the one in Ulaanbaatar isn’t on there because we didn’t really have, like, paper and stuff at that school. Or walls.” When she gives me a funny look, I add that Ulaanbaatar is the capital of Mongolia.

  “I know where Ulaanbaatar is,” she responds sharply.

  “Most people don’t,” I reply. “Because it’s not really a tourist destination, if you know what I mean.”

  Principal Boxley squints at me, as if she can’t really believe I’m here. “You certainly aren’t shy,” she says. I don’t have much experience with regular school principals, but I’m pretty sure this is not a compliment. “We don’t normally admit new students mid-term, especially those of questionable character. But an exception was made in your case as a favor to Mr. Tewksbury. He’s a good man. A great man. A superlative human being in every way. Unlike, say, you.”

  Principal Boxley stands up and circles me. She wears high heels that click on the wood floor like angry crabs trying t
o scurry away. I stay as still as possible.

  “We have a code of conduct here,” she says. “High standards for behavior, integrity, and character. We tolerate no deviations.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Boxley.”

  “We are academically rigorous and disciplined. We strive and succeed. It’s my reputation on the line whenever you kids screw up and I take my reputation very seriously. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Boxley.”

  “Good.”

  Before she can torture me further, a boy comes charging into the room. He’s a head taller than me, lanky with a shag of dark hair covering half his face. His uniform doesn’t look nearly as dorky as mine. “Sorry—oh boy—I mean—sorry I’m late,” he stammers. “There was a fire in the science lab and Liam hit Piper in the nose with the fire extinguisher by accident. And that was pretty bad. And then the sprinklers went off. It got a little out of hand.”

  Principal Boxley’s expression darkens. “Well, that sounds like a problem,” she says tersely. “Lola, this is Jin Wu-Rossi. He will be your guide today, to help get you oriented.” She makes a little flicking motion with her wrist, dismissing us. I’m all too happy to comply. When we’re a safe distance from the principal’s office, Jin asks if I’m okay.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Can’t ever tell with the Jelly,” he responds gravely.

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Boxley, aka Box Jellyfish, aka the Jelly. She wraps you in her tentacles and it’s instant death.”

  “She’s that bad?”

  “Worse.”

  “Great.”

  “We think she has self-esteem issues,” Jin says, raising an eyebrow. “What happened to your wrist?”