Minerva Clark Gets a Clue

by Karen Karbo

  “We’re fine!” yelled Tiffani.

  The man waved and walked on.

  “I just don’t know why everyone’s on me!” sobbed Jordan.

  “No one’s on you,” I said.

  Tiffani snorted. “Oh gosh, Minerva. First there’s a mistaken arrest, then Doug from the bookstore is murdered, then Jordan is told she might not get the High-tower, then her psycho seventh-grade cousin turns into a junior stalker.”

  I stared so hard at Tiffani I thought my eyes would pop out of my head from the strain. “What are you talking about?”

  “What are you doing here, Minerva?” asked Tiffani. She bent down to collect Jordan’s dress and help her to her feet.

  “His name’s Dwight, not Doug,” said Jordan.

  I thought, Okay, okay, forget Dwight for a minute (as if). I needed to remember why I was here: to tell Jordan my suspicions about Toc, who had it in for her. I didn’t have concrete proof yet that he’d given the police her name, but I was sure enough to warn her to be careful. That’s why I was here!

  So I started in. I told Jordan I thought it was unfair that someone got away with giving her name to the cops, not just unfair, but weird, really. I mean, why her name? If someone wanted to avoid getting arrested, why didn’t they just give some random name? Why Jordan Parrish? It wasn’t like Sarah Jones or Jennifer Smith, which sound fake, but also probably belong to dozens of real girls.

  Obviously, it was someone who knew her, someone who knew she’d gotten the Hightower Scholarship and knew she’d lose it when it came out that she’d been hauled down to the police station. I didn’t know if this was true at all, but it sounded good. It sounded serious, and what I really wanted was for her to take this seriously and to watch her back. “Someone has it in for you,” I said.

  “Someone else has been watching too much TV,” said Tiffani, laughing and rearranging her bracelets. Jordan laughed, too, but it was just something to do. She wasn’t amused at all.

  “And I started thinking about it, and I think you should watch out for Toc,” I said. “You know my brother’s friend Toc?”

  “And he’s going to do what to her?” asked Tiffani.

  This was a good question. I felt the sun beating down on the top of my head. Did I really think Toc was going to murder Jordan? If he had murdered Dwight, surely he was capable of murdering my cousin, too.

  “I just think that if Toc did something creepy and against the law like stealing your identity, that he might do other stuff. I asked him where he was on Valentine’s Day”—this was a pure lie, but I could see that Jordan had calmed down and was starting to look around a little; she was losing interest. “That was the day the person who got arrested gave the cops your name, remember? I asked Toc where he was, and he got this really weird look on his face. I could tell he’d been up to something.”

  Jordan sighed. She took her hair out of its messy bun and stuck it back up again. She was all done crying, and suddenly she was mad. It was like accidentally stepping on the tines of a rake hidden in long grass—blam, right between the eyes.

  “You know, Minerva, Tiffani’s right. I don’t know what little girl Nancy Drew bull you think you’re pulling here, but you don’t know anything, okay? And I don’t need you snooping around in my life. I’m fine with the way things have turned out. Just do me a favor and stay out of it.

  “And for your information, Toc was with me on Valentine’s Day, so he couldn’t have been the one to mess up my life. Got it? In fact, if you want to get technical, I’m the one totally responsible for all the crap that’s come raining down on my head. It’s my own fault! Got it?” Her face had gone from white to red. She pushed past me and rushed away, the plastic bag holding her fancy dress flapping against her legs.

  Tiffani started after her, then on second thought stopped and put her hand on my shoulder. “Don’t feel bad, Min. She’s just really upset.”

  I turned to watch as Tiffani ran and caught up with her friend. I didn’t know what to think, except that now I’d have to find my own way home. I’d somehow counted on Jordan being so grateful that she’d offer me a ride.

  - 11 -

  WHEN I GOT HOME QUILLS WAS standing in the middle of the kitchen pulling on the ends of his crayon-yellow blond hair and having a full-on hissy fit. Quills. The cool brother. What was Quills doing home? Wasn’t he supposed to be at work? Uh-oh. Mark Clark was leaning against the counter with his arms folded across his business-casual polo shirt (even though it was Sunday, Mark Clark always dressed in business casual) telling him to relax.

  I came in the back door. I could have snuck past the kitchen and fled upstairs, but I knew Mark Clark and Quills were arguing about me and where the hell I was, and I would be in even more trouble if I ran and hid in my room, so I walked right into the kitchen.

  “Where were you!” yelled Quills. “What’s up with you? Where’s your head at, little girl! First you just take off from Tilt. Now you just leave the house!” He was bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet like a madman. There was spit in the corner of his mouth.

  “I told Mark Clark,” I said. “He was playing EQ.” That was code for, I could have told him I was going to set my hair on fire and jump off a bridge, and he would have said, “Have a good time.”

  “You said you were going to meet Reggie,” said Mark Clark. “And that was”—he turned his wrist over and looked at his watch—“three hours ago.”

  “This is seriously uncool of you,” said Quills. “Seriously uncool.”

  “I thought you were at work,” I said.

  “I got off early,” he yelled. “And it’s a good thing, too, since no one else seems to be minding the fort!”

  Minding the fort? What fort? Was this more of Quills being ironic?

  I stood there.

  They stood there.

  What was hanging in the air, of course, was that they shouldn’t have to be dealing with me, that this was parent business.

  “Where were you, anyway?” said Mark Clark.

  “It’s just going to make you madder,” I said.

  “If you were out doing drugs or getting into some kind of trouble that’s just going to come back and bite all of us in the butt, you’d better tell us now,” said Quills. He tugged at the hair behind his ear so hard I thought he was going to pull it out of his head.

  For a second I thought about saying, “Darn, caught me!” but this clearly wasn’t the time to break out the attitude.

  “I went to meet Jordan. That’s why I wanted her phone number yesterday, remember?”

  “Jordan our cousin?” Quills asked, as if he’d never heard of such a thing.

  “No, Michael Jordan,” I said. I couldn’t help it.

  “You’re in enough trouble as it is, dude. I’d watch the back talk,” said Mark Clark.

  Dude? Mark Clark was calling me dude. Maybe I was just on the verge of hysteria, but I started to smile. I stared down at the linoleum so he wouldn’t see it.

  Then Mark Clark clicked into lecture mode. I got a long speech about how even though I was in seventh grade and felt all grown up, I wasn’t all grown up and I couldn’t just come and go as I pleased. But the worst thing I did was lie about where I was going, because if I started lying, then they’d never believe me again, and it was important that we trusted each other.

  I kept staring down at the floor. There was something mashed into the linoleum that could have been either a piece of mushroom that fell off a pizza or a really icky bug. I tuned in to Mark Clark now and then to see if he’d gotten to my punishment yet. Finally, he said the worst words you can say in our house: dish duty.

  My head snapped up. “Dish duty? But why?”

  “I just told you why. Weren’t you listening?”

  “Yes,” I said. No.

  “You are lucky it’s only for a week,” said Quills. He stomped out of the room, then marched right back in. “Oh, wait! All this rage has made me really thirsty!” He got out a glass, filled it halfway up with water
, drank half, then tossed the rest in the sink. “Minerva, dishes,” he said, then stalked out for good.

  I would rather be grounded to my room for a month than do dish duty, which my brothers knew. Even though we had this huge house, I lived in my room. I loved my room, with its ferret posters and white shutters and high four-poster bed. I didn’t have a TV in my room, but I had my computer. Make me stay in my room for a week! See what I cared!

  But dish duty was the pits. Dish duty meant cleaning up after three evil boys. And on the weeks I was punished with dish duty, they were extra evil. Mark Clark would make complicated dinners that used every pot and pan we owned. Morgan, who snacked on Cap’n Crunch and usually rinsed out a single bowl and spoon and put it on the windowsill for the next time, would get a fresh bowl out of the cupboard every single time. Quills—who’d had more dish duty growing up than either of the other brothers—was the worst. When Humongous Bag of Cashews practiced and someone went out for the usual Carl’s Jr. run, Quills would make them all eat off plates. He’d even dump each individual bag of french fries onto a plate.

  There were dirty dishes from the time I got up until the time I went to bed. It was the same as being grounded, only with lemon-fresh Joy. I hated my brothers. Why couldn’t I just have a normal mom who yelled a couple of mean things, then cried because she worried she was wrecking my self-esteem?

  I ignored Quills’s dirty water glass and the cookie sheet from yesterday’s nachos, still propped against the side of the sink, and stomped upstairs myself.

  Ferretluver: So after I got SLAMMED with dish duty for telling the bros I was with YOU, Mark C. said you called?

  Borntobebored: Wahn-wah. Sor-ry.

  Ferretluver: What about the blues festival?

  BorntobeBored: Haven’t left yet. Hey! Ya got to check out MontgomeryHighChat.com.

  Ferretluver: I went to find Jordan to tell her that I think my bro’s creepazoid friend Toc was probably the one who stole her identity, but she just ripped into me. I think she and Toc are an item. Or were an item.

  Borntobebored: Maybe it wasn’t Toc. Maybe it was whoever posted this flame. Unless it was you who posted it! :

  Ferretluver: ME?? Why would I post it?

  Borntobebored: Cuz yer cous was being a biatch! And you just trying to help her find out who’s messin wit her.

  Ferretluver: I don’t even know what site yer talking about. I’ll have to check it out. Anyway, we gotta work on our Boston Tea Party report.

  Borntobebored: I’d rather pin my hand to a burning log with a dull fork!

  I linked to MontgomeryHighChat, and sure enough, someone had flamed Jordan:

  QT_PIE865:

  I for one am relieved that it’s payback time for hootchie suck-up queen Jordan Parrish. Those of us who pay attention know what a poseur she is. And now she lost her big scholarship. Boo-hoo. It’s about time people got wise to that biatch.

  I logged off. My head hurt. My brain was exhausted big-time from all this thinking. I thought everyone liked Jordan, and I mean really liked her. Not like with Chelsea de Guzman, where people said they liked her, just so she wouldn’t start some mean vicious totally untrue rumor about you. Jordan was nice to people like cling-on Pansy Burrows.

  I took my rebus notebook out of my desk drawer and flopped down on my bed. I didn’t feel much like puzzling out rebuses these days. I looked through all the ones I’d made so far. I tossed my notebook across the room.

  Why had Jordan yelled at me like that? What had I done to make her so mad?

  An odd feeling stirred inside my chest. I sort of missed the old Minerva Clark, who worried endlessly about being a Gigantor or having hair that was too thick and not silky enough, not straight enough or curly enough, who thought endlessly about how she looked like a dorkazoid with her braces, that her boobs were too flat and her butt was too big. If I was that girl again, I would be too worried about how I looked all the time to get caught up in a mystery that was getting messier by the day. It was like how I sometimes secretly missed playing with my stuffed animals. Life felt safer then, predictable.

  I opened my closet door and scrounged around the pile of ugly clothes that always seemed to wind up off the hanger and on the floor. Maybe if I found something really horrible, it would stir the spirit of the old Minerva.

  I found a pleated pink (pink!) skirt Nana Clark had bought at the Goodwill. Nana Clark loved the Goodwill. The skirt had little pockets on the hip with kittens (kittens!) embroidered on it. I found the matching white top with pink sleeves and a pink chest pocket with yet another kitten embroidered on it. I pulled the shirt over my head and struggled into the skirt. It had a side zipper that zipped only halfway. I hadn’t even checked myself out yet, but I could tell I wouldn’t feel any self-hatred. All I thought was, What a stupid, cheap skirt.

  I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time.

  Hey, pretty in pink, just like the movie title said.

  I spent the next hour going through all the ugly clothes I could find: puff-sleeved blouses and T-shirt dresses, long skirts with matching belts, a plaid hat like Scottish people wear. I finally dragged out the most awful dress ever made: a bright yellow dress with a scoop neck and an A-line skirt that I wore to another cousin’s wedding last June, where I was forced to be the flower girl. I remember putting on the hideous dress and refusing to leave my room. I cried until my eyes swelled shut. Until that moment, I had never understood why some people wished they’d never been born. I felt like a school bus rambling down the aisle with my stupid basket of rose petals, and more than one person at the reception afterwards had made egg yolk jokes. I put that dress on and stared hard at myself. I turned on the overhead light and stared harder. If I wore dresses, this one wouldn’t be so bad. Except the color, of course, made me look as if I had a tropical disease.

  I crawled back into my RAMONES FOR PRESIDENT T-shirt and khakis and lay on my bed, looking up at the glow-in-the-dark stars that Mark Clark had stuck up there when I was little. No wonder I didn’t want to play the Change Game with Hannah and Julia. It wasn’t that the game was lame or boring—although it was that, too—it was that I couldn’t think of anything I’d change. The voice that told me I was ugly was dead, electrocuted that night at Mark Clark’s art opening.

  Now I really was a freak. I didn’t know one girl at school who thought she was okay just the way she was.

  There was a soft knock on the door. Morgan stuck his head in before I could say, “Come in,” which I hate. His hair was wet from the shower, and his hazel eyes were soft with concern. Morgan was always the peacemaker. Maybe because he was closest to me in age or because he was a Buddhist.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Whatcha doing?” he asked as he sat on the very edge of my bed. He cradled something wrapped in a paper towel in his hand.

  “Nothing.” I wished I had Jupiter there so we could drag him around on a towel or something and not have to have a Moment. I looked outside the window over my bed. The sky was pink with sunset.

  “The bros filled me in.”

  “I bet they did.” And people say girls tell each other everything.

  “So why’d you sneak out?” he asked.

  I sighed. I had a blue-and-yellow Powerpuff Girls comforter on my bed, a Christmas present from last year. I traced the outside of Buttercup’s big green eye. I was too old for the comforter but not old enough to demand a new one.

  “I had information for Jordan that I thought was important. About who’d stolen her identity and made her lose her scholarship.”

  “She lost her scholarship?” asked Morgan.

  “You’re not allowed to have an arrest on your record. Even one that’s a mistake. Or that’s what they say. I guess they haven’t decided for sure. I don’t know.” I crooked my arm over my eyes. I thought about mentioning Dwight’s murder, but suddenly I was just too tired.

  Morgan considered this. One thing that was good about Morgan, he listened to yo
u as if you were someone he’d hang with. He was never fakey nice, the way some grown-ups were, pretending to find everything you said entertaining.

  I heard the door open again. I took my arm away from my eyes and saw Quills standing there. He, too, had something wrapped in a piece of paper towel.

  “Oh,” he said, but then he just stood there.

  “What kind of information did you have for Jordan?” asked Morgan.

  “I think Toc did it, stole Jordan’s identity. I think he wants to mess with her because she broke up with him or something.” I looked straight at Quills. I sat up and pulled my knees to my chest. “I know he’s your friend and everything, but I think he’s got really bad vibes.”

  “Toc’s not a bad guy,” said Quills.

  I snorted.

  “I know he comes off as kind of a jerk sometimes, but it’s all an act. There must be kids like that at your school.”

  I thought of Reggie’s friend James, who always wore a tweed newsboy cap at a jaunty angle and wanted everyone to call him JET, his initials. He quoted movie lines and pretended they were his own, even though they were from movies everyone had seen a million times.

  “Well, anyway, Jordan says Toc was with her on Valentine’s Day—that was the day the person was arrested who said she was her.”

  Quills laughed. “In his dreams.”

  “That’s what Mark Clark says,” I said.

  “It’s pretty much common knowledge,” said Morgan.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Toc’s been hot for Jordan since high school,” said Quills. “Remember that New Year’s Eve party Mom and Charlie had that one year? He met her then. He was a senior and she was a freshman. But she’s so not into him, it’s pathetic. We’ve told him for years to get over it, but the poor guy continues to pine.”

  “But Jordan said they spent Valentine’s Day together.”

  “I don’t think—wait …” Quills interrupted himself, then gazed up at the ceiling, thinking. Then he started laughing, his arms crossed over his skinny middle. “Nope, Toc wasn’t in town on Valentine’s Day. The Cashews had a gig that weekend, I remember. Toc was out of town all week. His mom made the whole family go to the National Square Dancing Convention—in Nebraska or somewhere—Toc comes from a long line of champion square dancers. It’s his deepest secret.”