Finding the Forger

by Libby Sternberg

  With that one sentence, I had the full picture. Here it is: Mr. Daniels suggests to Sarah that she look at a few Boston-area colleges. He sets up the appointments. Kerrie asks him to take her somewhere. He reveals his other plans. She blames Sarah since she can’t bring herself to blame Dad. And when she expresses her disappointment, Dad chides her. Big argument. Tears. Doug sympathy.

  “Well, Ker, she is applying to colleges kind of late,” I said as gently as I could. “But she’ll be finished with it soon enough. And look at it this way—your dad is learning a lot about how to help you with it when your time comes.”

  This did not help. In fact, if anything, it seemed to make Kerrie madder.

  “That’s what my father said!” she fumed. “But that’s not the point. We always go Christmas shopping together the weekend after Thanksgiving weekend. And now he won’t even be in town!”

  All right, I’m a softie. Despite the fact that Kerrie was being obtuse (I just learned that word in English class, by the way—it can mean “insensitive” and “stupid”), she and I went back a long ways. Well, since freshman year, anyway. Looking at her now, I thought of how hard it must be to adjust to siblinghood after living in Only Child Land for so long. I thought of what a good relationship she had with her dad. Who was I to scoff at that? My dad died when I was too young to know him. If he was around, I’d probably be guarding my moments with him like a sentry, too, right? Maybe we didn’t need a special negotiator flown in. Maybe I just needed to be a better friend.

  “Why don’t you go shopping with me?” I asked tentatively. Then I reached over and squeezed her arm. She smiled ruefully (another new word, it means “mournfully” or “regretfully”).

  “Thanks, Bianca. That’s sweet of you. Maybe.”

  “Doug and I were supposed to go to the mall this weekend,” I continued. “You could come along.”

  “Yeah, he mentioned that.”

  Screeching halt to the Sympathy Train. Doug mentioned our mall date? As in “why don’t you come along on it”? No, no, no! This was all wrong. Doug, being the boyfriend, could not open our dates up to other girls without permission from me. He could only open them up to other boys. I, the girlfriend, was the designated inviter of other girls. Hadn’t he read the dating rules book? Did he need some remedial work here?

  “Uh. That’s good,” I said, pasting a smile on my face. “I’ll call you about a time.”

  “He said noonish.”

  Splat. That was the sound of my heart hitting the floor. Doug even told her the time? He hadn’t even told me that!

  “Yeah. Noonish,” I sputtered. Just then, the buzzer deafened us. It was time to clear out and head to the next class.

  “Thanks, Bianca. You made me feel better,” Kerrie said as we headed back into the cafeteria to get our things. “And don’t worry about your hair. Doug said that’s not why he likes you, anyway.”

  If that was supposed to be comforting, it failed miserably. By the time I arrived at my next class, Honors Geometry, I was convinced Kerrie and Doug had a secret thing going, and she’d ruined my hair on purpose.

  Chapter Five

  FOR A GUY to comment on a girl’s hair, it had to be really, really good or really, really bad. Doug really, really didn’t like my hair. That had to be the case if he’d mentioned it to Kerrie. That lame “that’s not why he likes you, anyway” line that Kerrie had thrown at me told the whole story. His misguided attempts at sympathy later in the day clinched my case. Outside after school, before heading to his bus, he talked to me, but he kept looking at my hair while he talked and his eyes kept scrunching up kind of funny, like he expected it to reach out and grab him or something.

  And when he left, he didn’t do his usual peck-on-the-cheek-when-no-one’s-looking thing or even his funny punch-me-in-the-arm thing. He just said, “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Be in touch”? Like he was going on the Grand Tour or something and would send me a postcard? Something was amiss here.

  So, all the way home by myself on the bus (since Sarah had to go to the museum again and Kerrie was getting a ride with some seniors), I moped my way through the logic of my relationship with Doug. And it led nowhere good.

  Not liking the hair was making him not like me, or at least not want to be seen in a public display of affection towards me. So who wants a boyfriend whose affection rests solely on how good you looked? I mean, what if I was disfigured in an accident? Would he not stand by me?

  I was going from Doug not wanting me, to me not wanting Doug. Who wants a shallow-minded boyfriend, anyway?

  I do, that’s who. (Or should that be “whom?”)

  Sniffling, I got off my bus and walked the block to my house, throwing my backpack on the hallway floor and heading for the kitchen.

  On the table was a note from my mother. “Preheat oven to 350. Wash chicken. Put in roaster pan at 4:30. Cook rice and vegetable. Love, Mom.”

  When I went to get myself a consolation glass of chocolate milk, I noticed the poetry magnets had been changed yet again.

  “Clueless friend/Totally flirt/Feel hot/dream psyched.”

  “Connie!” I yelled. To my surprise, she answered.

  “What?!” she called from upstairs. After waiting a second to see if she’d come down, I gave in and trudged upstairs to her room. Standing in her doorway, I watched as she buckled a leather belt around a short khaki skirt, and fastened gold hoop earrings to her ears. Normally, she was a jeans and tee kind of dresser—just one more reason why I wanted to follow in her footsteps to become a private eye. No pantyhose required.

  “Why did you change my poem?” I asked as she tugged on stacked-heel, mahogany colored leather boots.

  “What is it with you and the poems? Are you going nuts?” She grabbed a jacket that matched her skirt and shrugged her shoulders into it.

  “How come you’re home? And why so dressed up?”

  She walked to her mirror above her dresser and spritzed on some Christian Dior cologne. Then she ran a brush through her short, dark—and naturally wavy—hair.

  “Appointment with a client. I came home to change.” Connie was trying hard to build up a big enough business so she could afford her own place. Having to live with us put a real crimp in her life, especially her love life. She was seeing a guy named Kurt, who looked like a good-hearted muscleman and helped her out of tight spots. He’d helped me out of a couple, too, in the fall.

  She grabbed a big leather bag that matched her boots, and threw some folders and papers into it. She looked so focused and happy that I wanted to grab a piece of her bag.

  “Did someone from the museum call you—about an alarm being set off?” I blurted out.

  “You know I can’t say …”

  “Sarah told me.”

  “All right. Yeah. A Fawn Dexter called.”

  “So you’re on the case?”

  Connie smiled, a kind smile—the smile that says she’s happy enough about something to be distracted from her usual sibling persecution regimen.

  “Yeah, so thanks, if you had anything to do with it.”

  “Can I help you with it?”

  “Look, there is no ‘it.’ Or hardly any ‘it” at all. Which is why I have to go. Need to drum up new business. We can talk later.”

  As she brushed past me, she added, “And by the way, the alarm was tripped accidentally. That’s all.”

  “I already knew that!” I said, following her.

  “Well, I guess you knew that it helped turn up something else.” She ran downstairs and grabbed her car keys from the half-table by the door. I ran after her.

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I did. I knew all about it.”

  She paused while she checked her bag to make sure she had everything, and it was clear she wasn’t listening to me, or didn’t believe me. “Some art students accidentally tripped the alarm,” she said, not looking at me. “But when the cops came out, they found some weird stuff.”

  “I know. Like modern art pieces that m
ight be a little too modern, if you know what I mean.”

  She was heading to the door and I suddenly became afraid that she wouldn’t tell me—that this was just a continuation of “National Be Cruel to Bianca Day.” But she stopped and looked up, and … and noticed my hair. It did the trick. Her eyes filled with sympathy. And so she had to spill the beans. Maybe having bad hair wasn’t so bad after all.

  “One of the art students claimed her stuff was missing. But it was no big deal. It just wasn’t where she left it.” Connie looked at her watch. “I gotta run. Don’t forget to put on dinner.”

  After she left in a cloud of too-much-cologne, I kicked my backpack. She’d given me hardly any new information. So what if some art student forgot her paints or something? I was hoping for a juicy scoop I could share with Sarah.

  Dragging my backpack into the kitchen, I sat at the table and pulled out my books. But I nixed the idea of working. I mean, come on! I had the house to myself for a couple hours before Tony and Mom came home, and who knew when Connie would be back? The computer and the phone were screaming out for me to use them. I opted for the computer, and before you could say “beam me up,” I was logged on and surfing.

  Within a few seconds, Sarah IM’ed me.

  “aren’t you at work?” I asked her.

  “yeah, but i’m researching something for a press release. was-sup?”

  “nothin.” But then I remembered Connie’s info, so I shared it with Sarah.

  “hmmm …” she IM’ed back. Then, “big party here sunday. wanna come?”

  “what party?”

  “exhibit opening. i could get you in. and doug too.”

  Doug and me at the art museum? I envisioned soft music, classy food, sophisticated conversation. Culture could be romantic. I liked it.

  “sure, what time?”

  After we made arrangements, my mood lifted exponentially. The mall date might be muddied by Kerrie’s presence, but the museum date—that would be a real treat. Just me and Doug and all that culture. Oh yeah, and about a hundred patrons of the museum. But they’d be strangers, so it would be like Doug and I were alone, right?

  “thought you’d be in boston on sunday, though,” I typed back, remembering the college trip.

  “yeah, well …” she responded. Uh-oh. Sounded like Kerrie problems again. I didn’t feel up to that, so we then IM’ed each other about a bunch of inconsequential stuff, after which she suddenly threw a hardball at me.

  “if you had a friend who you thought had done something wrong, what would you do?”

  “is this a religion assignment?” I IM’ed back quickly.

  “no”

  “do you know if the friend definitely did something wrong, or are you just wondering?”

  “wondering. sort of.”

  What the hey did that mean?

  “then maybe you should talk to them.”

  “i don’t want to accuse them or anything.”

  Hmm … was she talking about her boss and those Flirt Voice conversations? I had learned my lesson in the fall about not waiting to confront friends in trouble. But what about confronting an adult you suspect might be fooling around? Naw, I just didn’t see it.

  “if you’re not sure they did something wrong, maybe you should just let it be.”

  “even if you saw clues?”

  Clues to what? I wanted to scream.

  “it depends. maybe we can talk about this.”

  I chatted with Sarah and a couple other friends for about an hour or so, blithely ignoring my mother’s “half hour” rule for the phone. I was still enjoying my post-perm grace period. She’d forgive me. I was sure of it.

  Or not. When the last friend typed “g2g” (“got to go” for you cyber-challenged folks), I shrieked because of the time—4:50! And I hadn’t put the chicken in the oven! Maybe Mom would be late, I thought, as I rushed to turn the oven on (to 400—maybe cooking it higher would cook it faster). I rinsed the chicken, did my Emeril imitation (bam! bam!) with the salt and pepper, popped the fowl in the roasting pan, and slammed the door shut. Then I got out a saucepan and pulled out some rice-a-roni, which is a staple of our diet. For years, I thought rice’s natural color was orange.

  After getting that started, I tossed some frozen corn into another pan, then rushed to set the table, being careful to fold the napkins perfectly so Mom would think I really labored over them.

  Good thing, too, because she didn’t arrive late. She arrived early, just two minutes after I managed to get everything in progress. She sniffed the air after she called out her greeting, and at first I thought it was my darn perm, but no, she was smelling for dinner.

  “Bianca, did you put that chicken in?” she asked, coming into the kitchen. She was dressed in a navy blue pant suit, and I thought she looked pretty good. She was still fairly slender, and had soft brown hair and pale blue eyes.

  “Sure thing, Mom,” I said, smiling. But then she went over, opened the door, and saw those pale slimy pieces staring at her. The gig was up. Well, almost.

  “At 4:30?” she pressed.

  “Well, I kind of didn’t put the oven on at 4:30.” Okay, so it was a white lie. But I wasn’t actually saying anything blatantly untrue. Sure, I didn’t put the chicken in until a few minutes ago. But I knew that if she thought I just forgot to turn the oven on and the chicken had been in the oven at the right time, she’d give me points for effort.

  She grimaced but said, “Okay.” Taking off her jacket and draping it over a kitchen chair, she gave me a long stare. “If you want, I can get an appointment for you at Hair Force One on Saturday,” she said. “They could cut off the worst of it.”

  I reached up and touched it again. “I was thinking of trying to wash it tonight one more time. Maybe try a straightener.”

  Mom shook her head. “I don’t think you should put anything else on it yourself. You need a professional.” She grabbed the phone book and started flipping through the pages.

  “I’m supposed to go to the mall with Doug on Saturday. Around noon,” I said.

  She punched in a number and in a few minutes had some receptionist on the line. Within a minute or two after that, she was telling her my tale of woe. A few seconds later, she got off.

  “After school, Friday,” she said.

  “I was thinking of going shopping then.”

  “I thought you said you were going to the mall on Saturday.”

  “Yeah, but I have to get Doug a Christmas gift, and I can’t do that with him in tow.”

  “You can do that another time,” my mother said. “We’re going to Aunt Rosa’s for dinner Friday night.”

  Ouch. She thought my hair looked so bad she didn’t want to be seen in public with me. Even at Aunt Rosa’s. I left the room to go take a look.

  Leaving the room turned out to be a big mistake. You see, while I tended to my hair, which mostly consisted of staring at it in my bedroom mirror and imagining it looking lots different, Mom assumed I was still tending to dinner. But since she was home, I assumed she would be tending to it. Which meant we were all summoned to the dinner table by the sound of the smoke alarm going off, and our baked chicken turned into barbequed chicken—the charred kind.

  Not that Tony minded. That boy would eat anything. In fact, he even complimented me on it. He probably thought I’d done it on the outdoor hibachi.

  Connie didn’t get in until after dinner, when I was wiping off the last of the pots. She wrinkled up her nose and asked “What’s that smell?” before looking at my hair and nodding as if she understood now where the house’s burnt odors originated. But before I had a chance to set her straight (for once, my hair was not the source of something stinky), she breezed past me, grabbed a yogurt from the fridge, and started complaining, which is her version of small talk.

  I sat down at the computer, which is in our kitchen, and pretended to work so I could listen to her. I like a good rant as much as the next girl.

  “Damn jerk. He kept asking me who my partner w
as!” Connie hooked a chair with her boot toe and pulled it out. Connie operated her business under the name Balducci and Associates, except there were no “associates.” I would like to be an “associate.” “He wanted to know if there was a man he could talk to!”

  “Why? Did he have some, you know, sensitive stuff?”

  Connie glared at me like I’d just announced my intention to join the cast of Riverdance.

  “He can tell me anything he can tell a guy. It’s just a freaking divorce case, for cryin’ out loud. Nothing I haven’t seen or heard before!”

  Connie handled a lot of divorce and worker fraud cases. Lots of people think private eye work is all glamorous snooping and murder-solving, when in reality it’s mostly spying on cheating spouses and employees trying to hoodwink their employers.

  I let her rant for awhile longer and then, when I’d soaked up enough, went to my room to study and to call Doug. I gave him the lowdown on Sunday’s date and, although he didn’t sound enthusiastic, we had a nice soulful talk. He ended up giving me all the comfort juice I needed to get me through the night.

  Chapter Six

  THE REST OF my week was pretty uneventful, and pretty much consumed with how to mask my hair disaster from the outside world. The bandana thing had to go the next day. Sarah was right. It violated the dress code in some perverse gender-equality way. You see, boys aren’t allowed to wear caps or hats in our school, so in order to make things “equal,” the powers that be have declared that girls can’t wear any head coverings, either.

  Now, maybe I’m a little nutso here, but I think the reason the boys can’t wear the caps is because it’s a symbol of disrespect. You know, that whole backwards baseball cap kind of thing (and yes, I’m ashamed to say that Doug has worn backward baseball caps on occasion, too) is a sort of “in your face” iconoclasm. (Okay, okay, so it’s vocab week in English. “Iconoclasm” is attacking settled beliefs or institutions.)

  Wearing a bandana, on the other hand, is merely adornment. It has nothing whatsoever to do with attacking institutions, or rebellion of any kind. It’s a fashion statement—the height of conformity! I wanted to look nice, just like the other girls!