by Amy Ignatow
Probably not. She was most likely just thinking the exact same thing.
Beanie was a much better driver than Abe, although when Cookie thought about it, that really wasn’t saying much. When she began to wonder how an Amish teenager in hiding from Auxano got a driver’s license in the first place, she decided that it was probably best not to think about it at all.
Truth be told, there was a whole lot she’d rather not be thinking about.
Beanie pulled up to Nick’s aunts’ house first and parked the car.
“Thank you so much, good sir,” Jay told him, “you are a gentleman and an excellent friend, and I do hope we will see each other again under more pleasant circumstances.” He leaned over Nick to open the passenger side door.
“Wait,” said Beanie. He’d hardly spoken a word the whole trip except to take directions from Cookie and Farshad. He turned around to look at them.
“We should never have gone with that woman and given her our blood and done those tests,” Beanie continued. “That was our first mistake.”
“You couldn’t have known what she was going to do to you,” Farshad said.
“I knew that it was a lot of money for doing very little. Good people don’t give you money for nothing. You’re going to have to pay, sooner or later, and I knew that. We were greedy, and now we’ve been shunned, Sadie and Jesse are gone, and Willis . . .”
“Maybe he’ll be all right after a while,” Nick said. Beanie gave him a hard look, and even though it was dark in the car, Cookie could see Nick’s cheeks turning red.
“Our second mistake is that we told people about what we could do,” Beanie said. “We told our families, they didn’t understand, and then we lost everything. Everything. I was going to work with my father in his saddle shop. I was going to be a saddler, like him. Now that will never happen. Never.” Beanie’s voice trembled and he took a deep breath. “I never thought our own families would turn on us, but they did. You can’t trust anyone except each other, because no one else will understand.
“Our third mistake was that we split up. We left Willis behind, and now we have no idea where Sadie and Jesse are. We don’t know what their powers have done to them. For all we know, they could be like Willis. Rebecca and I might be next.” Beanie was gripping the steering wheel, and Cookie could see that his knuckles had turned white. She looked at Martina, whose eyes also flickered to Beanie’s hands.
“Sadie and Jesse left because they were scared to stay. We stayed because we were scared to leave. I still don’t know who made the right choice, but I know that we should have stayed together.” Beanie turned his head to slowly look at all of them. “You are in this together,” he said, his voice now firm. “Don’t make the same mistakes we made. Whatever happens, no one is going to know you like the other people in this car. And possibly the strange little guy,” he said, looking warily at Jay, who for once was not smiling like a great big goober. “Do you understand?”
Everyone in the car was silent. “Yes,” said Cookie after a moment.
“Yes,” said Martina.
“Yes, we understand,” said Nick.
“Okay,” said Farshad.
“Absolutely,” said Jay.
“Well, look at this!” Farshad’s mother burst into his room with a copy of The Muellersville Sun. He rubbed his eyes and groaned. People needed to start knocking. Or to start assuming that if he was in his room with his door closed that he didn’t want to be bothered.
“What?” he said. “What are we looking at?”
“It doesn’t say your name, but I’m pretty sure it’s about you!” his mother said excitedly, shoving the paper under his nose. Farshad, suddenly very awake, grabbed the paper, looking furiously for news of last night’s break-in at Auxano headquarters. His mother pointed to an article and read over his shoulder.
Farshad scanned the rest of the paper before putting it down, his heart rate returning to normal as he saw no signs of the previous night’s madness. Dr. Rajavi was looking for his reaction to the article. “Wow,” he said.
“Now I know that having everyone do well might hurt your chances of being valedictorian, but don’t worry, I’m sure you’re still doing much better on the regular exams,” Dr. Rajavi said, choosing to ignore his nonchalance. She was clearly thrilled. “Maybe next time they’ll put your actual name in the paper! I’m sure they’ll have all of the high scorers up on the main bulletin board at school; I wish the paper had waited until seeing that before they printed the story. Ah well. Get dressed and come have some breakfast.” She gave Farshad a kiss on the top of his head and skipped out of the room.
Farshad frowned. He was fairly confident that he’d done well on the exam, but had 32 percent of his classmates done as well? Sure, he expected high scores from the other smart kids like Kitty Faber and Emma Lee, and there were always those weird kids who performed well on exams, like Jay, but 32 percent? It made no sense. Farshad had a sinking feeling.
About an hour later he stood in front of the school’s main bulletin board, looking up at the names of the kids with the highest scores. The school secretary had written out all of the names on colorful construction paper and decorated each one with shiny star stickers.
THE DAILY WHUT?
* * *
Something is rotten in the state of Auxano. No one is talking about it (SURPRISE, SURPRISE) but I have it on good authority that there was a break-in at the Auxano main campus LAST NIGHT. Sure, the authorities there are telling the public that it was “a security system malfunction that has since been fixed” but does that explain the several security guards that were taken to Muellersville Hospital under the cover of darkness? Or the discarded lab coats that my sources say were found at the edge of the forest that surrounds the campus?
There’s only one explanation, friends: Violent streaking nudists have stolen something from Auxano, something that our benevolent corporate benefactors would rather we didn’t know about. Now it is well known that most streakers are gentle people who just want to be free of clothing, but whoever broke into the labs was On. A. Mission. We can’t be certain of what they took, but whatever it was, it’s got the administrators at Auxano sweating bullets.
Now I know I’ve been quick to suspect our overlords at Auxano of wrongdoing in the past, but something real is happening and I, your intrepid Hammer, will be the one to find out exactly what it is. Until then, friends, when you see a naked person you’d best run in the other direction.
Always beware,
The Hammer
* * *
Cookie and Martina didn’t talk much during the long bus trip to Philadelphia. Cookie had told her mom that she was spending the day with Addison and Claire. It was a lie, and Cookie was not happy with the way those were stacking up. But she’d made up her mind to accompany Martina to Philadelphia, in no small part because Addison and Claire hadn’t actually bothered to invite her over. Spending the day with Martina wasn’t really high on her list of fun things to do, but it was better than doing nothing.
Dr. Deery was surprised to see them. “Hey,” he said, looking around as he ushered them into the building, “Ed, where are you?”
“He’s not with us,” Cookie explained, as Martina took the stolen vials of blood out of her backpack to give to Dr. Deery. “There were some problems at Auxano.”
Dr. Deery paled. “What sort of problems?”
Behind Cookie a cell phone buzzed on the counter of the old butcher shop. She caught a quick look at the screen before Dr. Deery picked up the phone and pocketed it. “My girlfriend,” he explained, “I’ll call her back later. What sort of problems?”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you, once again, to all the incredible people at Abrams Books who just won’t stop being awesome all the time: Jason Wells, Chad Beckerman, Caitlin Miller, Pam Notarantonio, and of course, the ever-magical Susan Van Metre.
Many thanks to Tori Doherty-Munro at Writers House and to my agent and guiding light Dan Lazar, who is really very
patient with me when I’ve had a little caffeine and can’t stop telling him all of my ideas at once.
I want to send deep gratitude to all the readers who have sent me the most wonderful notes throughout the years—I deeply wish I had the time to answer each one. But I don’t! Because I have so many stories I still want to tell you.
No thanks whatsoever go to my cat, Dr. Josephine Frimplepants. You are too loud at 3:30 AM. Get it together.
And last of all thanks to my friends and family, in particular Mark, Anya, and Ezra, for all the hugs. I get so many hugs, you guys. Everyone should get so many hugs.
AMY IGNATOW
is the author and illustrator of the Popularity Papers series and The Mighty Odds. She lives in Philadelphia with her family and doesn’t get enough sleep. Her cat is loud.
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