Minerva Clark Gets a Clue

by Karen Karbo

  “Do you have someone you can call?” the policewoman asked again.

  This was a good question. I dug in my backpack for my Emergencies Only cell phone. I wanted one with red flames on the faceplate, but because it was for emergencies only, it was plain silver and serious. It was prepaid, with only a certain number of minutes on it. I couldn’t call my dad, since he was out of town on business, like always. I couldn’t call my mom, because she was divorced from my dad and living in Santa Fe, where she taught yoga.

  I tried to call my oldest older brother, Mark Clark. I always call him by both names. When I was a baby I liked how they rhymed and it stuck. Plus, even though he’s only twenty-four, he’s really dadlike. More dadlike than my dad, actually.

  The call went to voice mail. I started to get nervous. What was the point of having an Emergencies Only cell phone if in an emergency no one was around to answer it? What would they do to me if I couldn’t find someone to pick me up? Would I have to go to jail, too?

  Crap.

  My only choice was to try flaky Morgan, my youngest older brother. I caught him between classes. He’s a philosophy major at college and can’t decide whether he wants to be a lawyer, like our dad, or a spoken word poet, whatever that was. At the moment, he was a junk food vegetarian, living on mostly Doritos, Mountain Dew, garden burgers, and the occasional banana, which is the junk food of the fruit kingdom.

  “I need you to come get me,” I squeaked into the phone. I tried to explain what had happened, that Jordan had been pulled over for rolling through a stop sign and having a smashed taillight, and now she was sitting in the back of the patrol car, waiting to be taken I didn’t know where, jail or somewhere.

  “They arrested her for running a stop sign?” asked Morgan. “I don’t think that’s legal.”

  “It was the stupid taillight. Or something. I don’t know! I just know that someone needs to come get me! Quills is going to be so mad I left the arcade. I’m so busted!” I felt a twirl of fear in my stomach.

  “They’re arresting you, too? I know that’s not legal.”

  “No! Not me! Jordan. They even put her in handcuffs.”

  “Min, tell me you’re not making this up. Remember the Law of Karma.” Morgan was also a Buddhist. I thought you had to be old to be a Buddhist, but apparently you can be a twenty-year-old college student, too. The Law of Karma, as explained to me by Morgan last year when I’d lied about eating the last piece of his birthday cake, was basically this: Every bad thing you do will one day come back and bite you in the butt; to avoid being bitten in the butt, don’t do bad things.

  I started to blubber for the second time that day. Morgan said, Okay, okay, he’d come get me. I told him to hang on one second, then called out the window to the police officer, who was leaning against the side of the car, examining her French braid for split ends. I guess I wasn’t considered a desperate criminal in need of watching.

  She asked me if Morgan would also drive the red Jetta home, or somewhere, since Jordan was our cousin. I didn’t say anything, but handed the phone to the policewoman. While she and Morgan talked I reached inside my hoodie pocket to pet Jupiter. His fur was so soft.

  Suddenly, from inside the car, a cell phone rang. It was loud. For a minute I thought it was my cell phone, but the French braid cop was still talking on it. I looked at the carpet hump between the seats and saw it was Jordan’s phone.

  Without thinking I answered it, just to keep it from ringing or something.

  I put the phone to my ear, but before I could even say “Hey,” the voice on the other end said, “I don’t know why you’re being such a bitch, but don’t hang up on me again. You’ll regret it if you do.”

  I snapped the phone shut fast. My knees were shaking. I turned around and looked at Jordan in the back of the police car. Her cheeks were all blotchy, as if she were crying.

  I’d recognized the voice on her cell phone.

  It was creepy Toc, Quills’s best friend.

  - 3 -

  ONE OF MORGAN’S COLLEGE FRIENDS DROPPED him off at Jordan’s car. Morgan talked to the French braid policewoman, signed some papers, then drove us home in Jordan’s red Jetta.

  “This is a pretty nice ride,” said Morgan. We were stopped at a light and he tapped the gas pedal, varooming the engine in appreciation.

  “She just got it,” I said. “She’s been saving up, I guess.” Morgan was wearing his favorite orange and black earflap hat, even though earflap hat weather ended months ago. In the middle of the hat he’d stuck a button that said I BLAME MY PARENTS. He switched on the radio, found a horrible jazz station. I thought my ears would bleed, it was so bad.

  I bit my fingernails. I’d been doing a pretty good job lately of trying to stop. There was a thin white strip at the tip of each nail. Now, one by one, I nibbled them off. I prayed that Jordan’s phone wouldn’t ring again. Why was Toc calling Jordan, and why was he talking to her like that?

  I thought about picking up the phone and turning it off, but then Morgan would wonder why I was fiddling with someone else’s phone. Instead I prayed to the special guardian angel who watched over seventh-grade girls that the phone would stay silent, and so it did.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the look on Jordan’s heart-shaped face as she sat crying in the back of the patrol car. Jordan was not just a tidy girl with perfect hair and a better-than-4.0 grade-point average who looked good in hip-huggers. Sometimes the world confuses all those outside things you can see and measure with being good, but Jordan was really good. My mom and dad had the divorce sit-down with my brothers and me (we sat thigh by thigh on the sofa; Mom wept; Dad tried to make it sound as if they were only taking extremely long separate vacations) around the same time Montgomery High was beginning to cast its spring musical, which that year was The Sound of Music, one of those musicals I always rolled my eyes about but secretly loved.

  Jordan, who was a sophomore then, had been cast as Liesl, the oldest von Trapp daughter, who crushes on a guy named Rolfe, who is way hot but not a good person because he supports the Nazis. Ms. Matilda, the play’s director, asked the cast members to drag in their little brothers and sisters to try out for the parts of the younger von Trapp kids. Jordan doesn’t have any little sibs, and on the very afternoon my mom told my aunt Susie about the divorce—they were drinking wine out of water glasses at Aunt Susie’s kitchen counter in the dead middle of the day—she dragged me down to Montgomery High to try out for the role of Louisa. I didn’t want to do it, but I did it anyway, because that’s how I was then, as you know.

  Louisa was thirteen and moody and didn’t have much to do but sing “Do Re Me” and be one of the awkward middle children. I was only eleven then, but I got the part because I could cry on cue. Blubbering all the time was what was Ms. Matilda called Louisa’s “character tag,” and that rainy spring blubbering was just about all I did. So, for the first time in my life, I was perfect.

  Every day Jordan would pick me up from school and we would take the bus to play practice. She always brought a PayDay for each of us. We were the only people we knew who preferred PayDays to Snickers. Aunt Susie picked us up every night just as it was getting dark. Being in that play with Jordan took my mind off the fact that when I got home my mom wouldn’t be there.

  Jordan had been on the way to our house when she got arrested, so it was only about a ten-minute ride home, but it felt like an hour. The Electric Matador wasn’t in the driveway, which meant Quills was either out looking for me and I was so dead, or else … there was no “or else.”

  We parked in front of Casa Clark, our huge old house that sticks out like a sore thumb in the neighborhood because it’s a pink stucco box. All the other houses are pale gray or moss green, with shingles and wood trim. They’re sweet and cottagey. Casa Clark looks like a Mexican restaurant. It has eleven bedrooms and five bathrooms and a brass fireman’s pole that runs from the third floor to the kitchen. Top that.

  When Morgan and I walked in, Mark Clark, my oldest
older brother, was making dinner. I could hear him banging around in the kitchen, and smell his Just-Spicy-Enough Rigatoni.

  I ran upstairs before Mark Clark could call me into the kitchen. I needed to IM that dog Reggie, who hadn’t even missed a step after I fell off DDR and humiliated myself probably forever. Plus, Julia and the Chelseas had probably text messaged everyone and his brother by now.

  Nobody was around but Hannah.

  Hannahbanannah: Hey, want to go to the water park Sat.?

  Ferretluver: The indoor one or the outdoor one?

  Hannahbanannah: Indoor, dummy! It has all the hot guys!

  Ferretluver: Sure!

  Hannahbanannah: Maybe that hot guy Devon-or-Evan will be working at the snack counter. *hopes* He is sooooo hot. I know yer not into that.

  Ferretluver: Into what? I’m into that.

  Hannahbanannah: The last time Julia and I went to the water park, she tried to hook up with that one lifeguard dude. He’s like 16! :0

  Ferretluver: I’m into the water park. That red slide that goes into the deep end is so cool.

  Hannahbanannah: Yah, I love that slide. We’ll have to go on it lots. And hey—lucky there’s not DDR at the water park. *poke*

  Ferretluver: ??

  Hannahbanannah: Chelsea de G said it was like t-i-m-b-e-r! She can be so mean.

  While Hannah and I had been IMing I’d opened the top drawer of my desk and pulled out my rebus notebook. Hannah didn’t know I kept a rebus notebook. I read my last one:

  FUSS

  nothing

  Big fuss over nothing.

  I felt a sadness whoosh up inside of me, like the tide coming in. Making rebuses used to make me happier than just about anything.

  I could not possibly go to the water park. I said, “sure,” a version of “yes,” but of course I meant “no.” I would die before I went to the water park. The only bathing suit I owned was from last summer, when my mom showed up for a few weeks and bought me a red Speedo with yellow flowers that was an extra long. I complained I didn’t need an extra long. My mom said I would grow into it. I was five-eight already. How much more growing did she expect me to do? She said she wished I wouldn’t back talk. I wasn’t back talking. I was making a point. The bathing suit had one of those horrible ladyish built-in shelf-bra things. I wore a T-shirt over it. It hid everything except of course my Gigantor thighs and bowling-ball knees.

  “MIN-ER-VA!” It was Mark Clark, hollering up the stairs at me.

  In the kitchen, my brother stood at the stove in his businessman-casual khaki pants and polo shirt, stirring the sauce for his Just-Spicy-Enough Rigatoni in a big aluminum pot, humming along to some band from the eighties playing on the kitchen boom box.

  I loved my brother pretty much more than anyone, but even I had to admit that he was really a geek. And I don’t mean computer geek, even though he was that, too. He worked at a big corporation making sure no one could hack into their computer system, which is pretty ironic, since when he was about my age he was a computer hacker.

  Morgan was sitting on the counter drinking a Mike’s Hard Lemonade.

  “You’re not old enough to be drinking that,” I said.

  “Tell Mark what happened with Jordan,” said Morgan, taking a huge swallow.

  “So she ran a stop sign and they hauled her off to jail? That doesn’t sound right. Had she been drinking?” said Mark Clark.

  “No. I don’t know. I don’t think so.” I got a diet cream soda from the fridge.

  “Maybe she had some speeding tickets and there was a bench warrant out for her arrest,” said Morgan. “They can do that if you don’t pay your tickets. Very uncool from a karmic perspective, but it does happen.”

  Morgan and his dumb karma. I rolled my eyes.

  “Still, it doesn’t sound right. Jordan’s always been so squared away,” said Mark Clark.

  I pulled up a stool at the kitchen counter. Mark Clark wanted me to tell the whole story from the beginning. I thought, Why do you even care?

  Then we heard the back door open and slam shut.

  “Is she here?” Uh-oh. Quills.

  I was relieved to see that creepy Toc wasn’t with him. Quills’s face was totally blank. That’s how you knew you were in big trouble with Quills. Except when occasionally he had a hissy fit. Then, look out.

  He opened a cupboard, got out a glass, and set it on the counter. With his back still to us he said, “What in the HELL happened to you? You don’t just leave without telling someone.”

  “I tried to call.”

  “I spent about twelve hours looking around that stupid mall.”

  “It’s only five o’clock. We didn’t get to Tilt until one o’clock. You could have only spent four hours,” I said. “Didn’t Reggie tell you? Reggie should have told you.”

  “According to Reggie, you left without telling him, either.”

  I took a swig of my diet cream soda. It was extra fizzy and tickled my nose. Outside, the rain spattered against the windows. Left without telling Reggie! Like Reggie is my parent? Reggie was my best friend and should have come after me when I ran out of the arcade, and here I was getting yelled at. The tears wobbled in my eyes. Would this worst day ever ever ever NEVER end?

  No one said anything.

  This was the advantage of living with boys. If my mom was still around, she’d yell at me. She’d ask me what I was thinking, or why I wasn’t thinking, and did I know I’d worried her half to death. I probably should have said “Sorry” to Quills, but I didn’t feel like it. Maybe Reggie wasn’t such a dog. Maybe he didn’t tell Quills I fell off DDR and made a humongous fool out of myself. My back was starting to hurt from my bad landing.

  I walked to the dry-erase board and wrote:

  Arrest

  You’re

  “You’re under arrest. That’s my special Jordan rebus.”

  “Whaz up with that?” said Quills.

  “Jordan was giving me a ride home from Tilt and she was pulled over and hauled off downtown to jail,” I said, giving him the TV Guide version of events. I didn’t want to think about it or talk about it.

  “You mean like in handcuffs?” said Quills. “Cool.”

  “No, not cool!” I shrieked. My nerves were shot.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” said Mark Clark. “But let me finish my point. Min, if you ever, and I mean ever, get pulled over, or anything like that ever happens to you—”

  “Don’t say anything until you talk to a lawyer,” Morgan interrupted. I don’t think Morgan liked it when Mark Clark talked all lawyery like our dad. Morgan was the would-be-lawyer-in-training. Mark Clark was already the oldest and a computer genius. Wasn’t that enough?

  “Not the Lecture!” Since our dad was a lawyer, I’d been hearing this speech since before I could walk. I was so relieved not to be in more trouble, I thought it was safe to get a little snotty. I took a big gulp of soda, then burped.

  “Hey, good one,” said Morgan. He took a drink of Mike’s and tried one, but it was wussy in comparison.

  Quills said, “You are both pathetic—” and then he burped losers, really loud. Looooooo-sseerrrrs! We all howled. It was an all-is-forgiven moment.

  “Let me finish my point here,” said Mark Clark. “If you ever get pulled over, don’t say anything until you talk to a lawyer.”

  “You have the right to remain silent,” said Morgan.

  “I don’t really expect you to put yourself in a situation where the cops would have any reason to detain you—”

  “Mark! I got it! Gawd!” I wish I could say that only your mom or dad have the ability to make you roll your eyes, but it can happen with your lecturey older brother, too.

  Suddenly, the phone rang. With all the cell phones in the house, almost no one ever called on the real phone, which hung on the kitchen wall. Morgan answered it; we heard a funny click and traded glances. Morgan pressed a button and put us on speaker phone.

  We made our voices go all high. In unison we said, �
�Hi, Charlie!”

  Our dad’s name was actually Howard, but because we never really saw him, and when we talked to him it was always on speaker phone, we called him Charlie, the invisible boss from Charlie’s Angels.

  “I just called to see how your art opening went, Mark,” said Dad. He was at that moment in New York on business.

  “It’s tonight,” said Mark Clark. “Starts at seven.”

  “I knew that!” said Dad, which he obviously didn’t.

  For a few minutes Mark Clark and Dad talked about Mark’s new exhibit, which I, like my dad, had forgotten about completely. Since it had nothing to do with me—or not at that very moment, anyway—I spaced out. I thought about what my hair must have looked like when I fell off DDR. It had been in a ponytail, but the scrunchie had come out. I must have looked monster scary.

  Then I heard Mark Clark say, “I bet I can get Minerva to give me a hand.”

  “Sure,” I said automatically. I thought maybe he was talking about pouring the rigatoni into the strainer, or making garlic bread, or something.

  “It won’t take long,” said Mark Clark.

  “Whatever.” I wondered if maybe the scrunchie was still on the floor of the arcade. Someone had probably taken it, or maybe the janitor picked it up. Would a scrunchie be something the janitor would take to the lost and found, or would he toss it out? I was pretty sure that he would toss out a plain elastic ponytail holder, because it looked so much like a rubber band. This is what I was thinking about when I said yes to the thing that would change my life.

  “Don’t say okay until you know what you’re agreeing to,” said Charlie over the speaker phone.

  But it was too late. I’d already said okay. That was the bad part about living with all boys. Once you said you’d do something, you were expected to do it.

  - 4 -

  SEVEN THIRTY P.M. WORST DAY IN the Life of Minerva Suzanne Clark. Trapped in the backseat of the Electric Matador.

  “I’m not sitting in front of a bunch of people with electrodes connected to my head,” I said.