“You don’t know the half of it,” Jett puts in. “You’ll never guess what I found in her cottage.”
I nearly swallow my tongue. “What were you doing in Ivory’s cottage?”
“I broke in,” he replies like it’s the most normal thing in the world.
“You what?”
“After what happened with Tyrell’s dad, I had to learn more about this so-called pathfinder,” Jett explains. “Like why all the adults love her so much. Turns out it’s because she brainwashes them.”
“That shows how much you know!” I explode. “Meditation can be really intense when you get to a high level like Ivory. It might seem like brainwashing to someone who doesn’t understand—”
“I was there too, Grace,” Tyrell interrupts me. “Maybe it wasn’t brainwashing—I’m not sure what to call it. But it definitely wasn’t right.”
“Maybe this will convince you,” Jett tells me. “She has a cell phone in there—the lady who confiscates everybody else’s technology. And a closet full of expensive dresses—”
I cut him off. “It’s not a crime to have nice clothes.”
“And you know what was in her jacket pocket?” he goes on. “A restaurant receipt—for steak!”
“She took someone out to dinner,” I shoot back. “Just because her guest ate meat doesn’t mean she did too.”
He looks exasperated. “You haven’t heard the best part yet. She’s got a whole stack of checks in her desk—big ones, with lots of zeroes. They’re made out to Friends of the Oasis. And there’s one from practically every adult here. Your mother, for one.” He turns to Tyrell. “And your dad—dated the same day we heard Ivory messing with his head.”
I roll my eyes at him. “Is this supposed to be an example of the great Baranov brain? People come here because they believe in the Oasis. Is it so weird that they make donations to the place?”
Tyrell seems torn. “I don’t know, Grace. My family’s not rich. We saved up the money to come here because my folks are obsessed with their diets. But big donations on top of that? I don’t think we can afford it.”
“We’re not rich either,” I insist. But when I think about it, it’s tough for kids to judge that kind of thing. I’ll hear my dad grumbling about the cost of Benito’s dog food and figure we’re practically broke. But then my folks will go out and splurge on a seventy-two-inch TV. “Like you would know anything about living on a budget,” I add to Jett.
Jett spreads his arms wide, splashing hot water in my face. “Matt wrote a check and he doesn’t have a lot of money. This is different. ‘Friends of the Oasis’—it sounds like a charity, but what is it? When you pay your bill here, you pay the Oasis, not any ‘Friends.’ What’s up with that?”
I’m annoyed. “Well, according to you, a whole lot of people have written checks to the Friends, so it must be something.”
“Of course it’s something! The question is, is it something sleazy?” He turns to Tyrell. “Ivory had your dad crying at the thought of losing the Oasis and made him promise to do anything to save it. Next thing you know, there’s a check for seventy-five hundred bucks of your family’s money sitting in Ivory’s desk drawer.”
Tyrell is tight-lipped. “I’m not talking about that,” he mumbles. “And if you were my friend, you wouldn’t talk about it either.”
“I am your friend,” Jett exclaims. “That’s why we have to get to the bottom of this.”
“My family is none of your business,” Tyrell shoots back.
I wheel on Jett. “Can’t you see he’s upset?”
“I know he’s upset! What Ivory did to his dad—”
I cut him off. “Meditation is very personal and highly emotional! A lot of people are moved to tears!”
“You weren’t there!” he thunders.
I don’t know if I’ve ever been so angry. “This isn’t about Mr. Karrigan! This is because you always have to prove that you’re right and everybody else is stupid! It’s not enough that you don’t like it here. There has to be some terrible secret.”
“You guys are blind!” he accuses us. “You can’t see what’s staring you in the face!” He turns his back and starts splashing away.
When I try to put a comforting hand on Tyrell’s shoulder, he shrugs me off.
I was wrong about all the things that are spoiling the Oasis this summer. There’s exactly one thing and its name is Jett Baranov.
21
Jett Baranov
“People are ostriches,” Vlad always says. “When they don’t like the world around them, they bury their heads in the sand so they don’t have to do anything about it.”
My father has never met Grace or Tyrell, but he’s got the two of them pegged perfectly.
I kind of forgive Tyrell. Seeing his father fall apart like that had to be a nasty shock. But what’s Grace’s excuse? She’s such a cheerleader for this wellness freak show that anything against the place has to be a rotten lie. To her, meditation is the greatest thing since sliced bread. She’ll never accept the fact that Ivory is using it to brainwash customers into writing big checks to Friends of the Oasis.
Most important: What is Friends of the Oasis?
That’s the big question. Is it a real charity? If so, then it’s definitely different from the wellness center, which is an actual registered business that charges its customers for the privilege of coming here to be starved to death and bored stiff.
But people give to charity out of the goodness of their hearts. They don’t have to be brainwashed into doing it. Charity or no, something smells. Ivory is either a crook or a psycho—probably a little bit of both. And what about Nimbus? He’s the big tofu around here. Is he in on this? Or is he just the doofus who’s too clueless to see what his number two is doing right under his nose?
Only one way to find out. I’m going to pay a visit to the cottage of Magnus Fellini.
The one time you can be sure Nimbus isn’t going to be home is when he’s out leading Awakening, making half-asleep kids do jumping jacks. That’s where I tell Matt I’m going when I head out first thing in the morning with my trusty lock-picking paper clips.
Like Ivory, Nimbus lives in a regular cottage—number 6. He doesn’t even have a special sign or symbol on his door—that’s how modest he is—although the welcome mat says BE WHOLE. What does that even mean anymore? Maybe: Give your whole life savings to Friends of the Oasis?
As I’m breaking in, the first thing I notice is I don’t have to. The door isn’t locked. I step inside, ready for anything. If Ivory had a cell phone and evening gowns, this place could be decked out like a gangster’s penthouse, with racks of cash, gold bricks stacked everywhere, and a couple of tommy guns in the umbrella stand.
I don’t see that. Instead, I see the same modest carpeting and furniture that’s in all the cottages.
Oh, yeah—I see one more thing. Sitting at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of muesli and drinking juice, is Brooklynne Feldman.
I’m so caught off guard that my first thought is: What a coincidence—we both broke in at the same time. But who breaks into a cottage just to have breakfast? Goldilocks, maybe. Nobody else.
We stare at each other in shock for what seems like forever. Finally she speaks.
“Okay, so now you know.”
Honestly, I don’t know anything. So I keep my mouth shut, hoping she’ll explain.
“How did you figure it out?” she asks.
I keep bluffing. “It was kind of obvious.”
She shrugs. “After all these years, you’re the only one who’s ever learned the truth.”
And that’s when it hits me: she’s barefoot, wearing shorts and a tank top she probably slept in. She lives here!
“The way people admire Magnus is almost too much,” she goes on. “Like he’s a guru or a wizard or something like that. I thought it would be weird if it got around that he’s my dad.”
Her dad! Nimbus is her father?
I’m not sure why I’m so shocked. Every
body’s father has to be somebody. Look who mine is!
“Your name is Feldman, not Fellini!” I blurt.
A smile tugs at the corner of her mouth. “So is his.”
“He’s Magnus Feldman?”
“Try Marvin,” she tells me. “But Marvin Feldman doesn’t sound like the name of a guy you’d follow to a remote wellness center, where you kiss the world goodbye and devote yourself to health, exercise, and meditation. The name change was my mother’s idea.”
“She’s here too?” Just how many secrets does this family have?
Brooklynne shakes her head sadly. “She couldn’t handle the lifestyle. She married a stockbroker, and when he turned into a pathfinder, she couldn’t hack it. That’s why I come to the Oasis every summer. It’s not vacation; it’s joint custody.”
I almost relate to that. My folks aren’t divorced, but my mom is crisscrossing the globe for Orthodontists Without Borders three-quarters of the time. And, sure, she does it because she loves helping people. But I’ll bet some of her motivation isn’t totally different from Brooklynne’s mom. It’s probably even tougher being Mrs. Vladimir Baranov than being Mrs. Nimbus Fellini—even if the food’s better.
I’m astonished, but I probably shouldn’t be. Brooklynne always knew things about the Oasis that she had no business knowing. Like where the boat was docked and where to find the key for it. And the shed where we kept Needles—Brooklynne was the one who first showed it to Grace. There had to have been at least a dozen times where she said something that made me pull up and think: How would a normal guest get a piece of info like that? Now I have my answer: She’s not a normal guest. Her father owns the place. More than that—he’s Captain Whole, the wellness superhero who dreamed up the entire thing!
“Why did you lie to us?” I demand.
She flushes a little, but doesn’t back down. “I didn’t lie. I never said Magnus wasn’t my father, and I never said my father was somebody else. I just avoided the subject.”
“That’s baloney, and you know it,” I accuse her. “Five minutes doesn’t go by in this place before your dad’s name comes up. I complain about him. Grace never shuts up about how great he is. When we were hiding Needles and taking the boat to Hedge Apple, whose rules did we talk about breaking? You had a million opportunities to fess up, a million chances to say, ‘Funny coincidence about that guy Nimbus . . .’ But you didn’t. Why? Are you spying for him?” I feel my eyes narrowing. “Did you tell Ivory about the candy bars?”
She’s appalled. “Never! I loved hanging out with you guys and looking after Needles! And the Hedge Apple trips were great—including the food! This has been my best summer ever!”
“That didn’t stop you from dropping us like a hot potato the minute Needles was out of the picture,” I charge.
“I dropped you? You dropped me! You got mad; Grace got defensive; Tyrell got weird. What was I supposed to do? I was always the outsider in the group.” She leaps up from her chair and faces me. “If I had told Dad about Needles, don’t you think the pathfinders would have shut us down? Or if I ratted you out about Hedge Apple, don’t you think the launch would have been moved someplace you couldn’t find it?”
“Maybe all that was going to happen,” I counter, “but you were biding your time, piling up the evidence.”
She stares at me. “This is a wellness center, not a cop show. I admit I covered up who my dad is. I wanted to be treated like everybody else. And you know what? I was right. Look how you’re treating me now that you know.”
I’m speechless, but only because my head is spinning. The nerve of this girl, lying to us and then making it seem like it’s all our fault for getting mad at her when we find her out.
Worse, this ruins all my plans. How can I search the cottage with her standing here glaring at me? Which means I have no way of finding out if Nimbus is in on Ivory’s scam. And I don’t dare tell Brooklynne what I know, because for sure, she would run straight to her father. I’m dead in the water.
I backpedal out of the cottage. “Forget you ever knew me.”
She says, “My pleasure,” and slams the door in my face.
Grace once told me that in the original plan for the Oasis, there were no doors at all. “Before you can be whole,” Nimbus’s philosophy went, “you first have to be open.”
I consider shouting that at Brooklynne. But as Nimbus’s kid, I’m sure she already knows.
The cramps are back, and no wonder. It’s been days since my last candy bar, and more than a week since I’ve been to Hedge Apple for real food. I sit in the dining hall, glaring at a brussels sprout on my plate. If I swallow one more veggie, the gas in my stomach will expand and I’ll float off the ground like the Hindenburg and probably end up the same way—in a fiery explosion.
“You’re not eating,” Matt reminds me from across the table.
These days, he’s spending so much time meditating that the fake-incense smell clings to his clothes. He’s tucking into one of those world-famous Oasis veggie burgers—which taste a lot like pretend meat—smacking his lips like he’s never experienced anything so delicious. It might even be true. If Ivory can brainwash him into donating big bucks to Friends of the Oasis, maybe she can convince him that the rabbit food they serve here is gourmet stuff.
I frown. It sounds like a joke, but there’s nothing funny about it. What Ivory can do to unsuspecting people is some kind of mind control. I should know. She almost did it to me and it was pretty scary. Scarier still is the fact that she’s using it to separate people from their money.
“Where’s Miss Meditation today?” I ask. Ivory usually holds court from the front table in the dining hall, sitting so tall in her chair that her shiny dome of crew-cut platinum hair commands the room like a star atop a Christmas tree. Watching the adults line up, hoping for a smile or a nod, is pretty nauseating—and that’s saying something in this building.
“She’s off tonight,” Matt replies reverently. “She works so hard and she’s so devoted.”
“Right.” Devoted to ripping people off.
The frustrating part is, I’m the only one who knows what she’s doing and I can’t make anybody believe me. Not Grace. Not even Tyrell, who’s seen it happening. And Brooklynne? Yeah, right—like I can tell Nimbus’s daughter. Her dear old dad could be Ivory’s partner, or even the brains of the outfit. Maybe he’s the one who split that ninety-dollar porterhouse with her.
The thought of pathfinders gorging on steak while the rest of us gas up on Oasis chow is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
I leap to my feet, overturning my chair. “I—I’m not hungry!” I stammer for Matt’s benefit.
I exit the dining hall via the longest strides I’ve ever taken. I already know where I’m going before the door closes behind me. There are real burgers out there—just a couple of miles upriver. When I head for the boat, I’m running.
As I make my way through the woods along the Saline, a terrible thought haunts me: What if the launch isn’t there? What if our conversation before got Brooklynne so upset that she blabbed to her dad about everything we’ve been doing?
But, no—there it is, bobbing at the small dock. And—I check—the key is still in the knothole under the loose board.
As I putt-putt out into the river, I start to relax a little. I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing, but I’m positive it’s the right thing for me. If I had to watch Matt take one more bite of that veggie patty, I would have popped a blood vessel.
I feel the vibration of the boat’s engine struggling against the current and ease up on the throttle a little. The way my luck has been going these days, I’ll burn out the small motor and be stranded on the mighty Saline until I drift into the Gulf of Mexico.
About halfway to Hedge Apple, I spot the bike Brooklynne and I noticed on our previous trip. Has it been there all this time? It’s not like Ivory to lose track of one of her fleet of Oasis bicycles. Or maybe this isn’t the same bike. I think it’s leaning against a
different tree.
At the bend in the river, where the town of Hedge Apple first comes into view, something totally unexpected happens: I’m aware of the corners of my mouth turning upward. I’m smiling. It makes no sense. There’s absolutely nothing positive about my life right now. I’m in wellness Alcatraz; Needles flew the coop; my friends hate me; and Matt—along with every other adult—is under the spell of a meditation Marvel villain. There’s zero to be happy about. But for some reason, chugging into this un-town feels like coming home.
Or maybe it’s the prospect of a real hamburger that’s boosting my mood. What could be more uplifting to a starving person with gas pains? Maybe I should get a steak. I reach into the pocket of my shorts. I’ve only got twelve bucks—the downfall of my candy business has taken its toll on my finances. Okay, no steak. But that burger is going to be epic!
I’m so anxious that I just about take out the dock. But no harm done—the launch bounces off a row of tires protecting the wood. On the rebound, I manage to lasso a pylon and get tied up. Not the most graceful arrival, but I’m here.
I choose the barbecue place over the greasy spoon because the menu describes their burgers as half pounders. It’s a nice night, cool for Arkansas in July. So after I place my order, I sit down at an outside table.
I’m chilling there, trying to smell my cooking burger through the smoke coming out of the kitchen vent, when I hear the roar of an engine that could only belong to one vehicle in this town.
The black Ferrari 488 Spider drives slowly down Main Street, pauses at Hedge Apple’s one and only stop sign, eases gently around the corner, and takes off up the road with a shriek of fine-tuned acceleration.
Snapper! I crane my neck to catch a glimpse of him, but the car is already moving away at dizzying speed. It doesn’t matter. His destination is obvious—the mansion.
I’m torn in two. I know where he’s headed. I know how to get there. He’s mine.
But my burger! It’s coming! It’ll be ready any minute!
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