Minerva Clark Gets a Clue

by Karen Karbo

  A few square dancing jokes came to mind, but I let them pass. Why had Jordan lied to me? She wasn’t into Toc, so why had she said they were together? She was trying to protect him, but she didn’t even need to. He wasn’t even in town. I tried to remember what her face had looked like when she told me. She was furious, too furious for what was going on, I thought. She’d told me then to mind my own business.

  “Anyway, don’t worry about Toc. He’s a lovesick puppy. That’s his main problem. There’s no need to stress about it,” said Quills.

  “I’m not stressing.” I was stressing. Something was definitely going on.

  “So no more sneaking out or snooping around, all right?” said Quills. “Just let this thing go.”

  “Don’t you have some big report due anyway?” said Morgan.

  “Boston Tea Party,” I said, sighing. “I picked the topic because it had ‘party’ in the title. I didn’t know it was about taxes.”

  “Oh, and this is from Mark Clark.” Morgan unwrapped the paper towel. It was a Rice Krispies square.

  Quills laughed. He unwrapped his paper towel. Another Rice Krispies square.

  “Two great minds—” said Quills.

  “One great thought,” said Morgan.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I take it there are dishes?”

  “Well, d’oh,” said Morgan. They laughed and high-fived. There are definitely worse brothers out there.

  I didn’t say anything else. I wanted them to leave.

  After I heard their steps on the stairs I logged back on to MontgomeryHighChat. I reread QT_PIE865’s flame more carefully for clues. The Rice Krispies squares sat on their paper towels on the corner of my desk, untouched. Instead, I braided and unbraided big sections of my hair.

  Who would call Jordan a hootchie suck-up queen and a biatch? A guy probably. But not Toc. It was clear that Toc had nothing to do with this. He was at the National Square Dancing Convention over Valentine’s Day—wait until I told Reggie!—and had had it bad for Jordan since forever.

  But what about his knowledge of Dwight’s check-cashing scam? Maybe it was just as he said. He knew because his older brother told him. It was so hard to know what was true. Julia had embellished about Jordan losing the Hightower, if you believed Jordan. But Jordan had lied about being with Toc, so maybe she was lying about other things, too. Maybe Jordan really wasn’t a one-hundred-percent-good person. Maybe she was only an eighty percent good person.

  Anyway, someone probably from Montgomery High thought she wasn’t even that. They thought she was a biatch. And about eight million people went to Montgomery High.

  I put my head down on my desk. As I drifted off I thought of another rebus:

  2 ↑ set

  Too upset.

  - 12 -

  I UNLOADED THE DISHWASHER AND RELOADED it with coffee cups, teacups, glasses sticky with Mountain Dew, and a lot of cups and glasses sitting on the counter that didn’t even look dirty. Pots and pans I had to do by hand. I squirted some lemon Joy on a sponge and wiped out the square glass dish from the Rice Krispies squares. I looked out the kitchen window over the sink, but it was dark outside and threw back my own reflection. The bass line of some song thumbed through the ceiling; Quills’s room was over the kitchen.

  One thing about dish duty, it gave you lots of time to think.

  I had to find out who had posted that flame about Jordan. I had a sneaking suspicion that whatever he had against Jordan might have something to do with why Jordan lied to me about Toc’s being with her on Valentine’s Day and with why she had gotten so mad at me. Now that I knew Toc was innocent and that he’d been hooked on her for a while, I could see why she might find me totally annoying for pestering her about him or think I was a stupid middle schooler, or whatever, but she’d been massively pissed off that day. I’d struck a nerve and maybe her flamer knew why.

  Maybe, I thought, they had some busines.

  Some unfinished business … get it?

  I smoothed a red-and-white checked dish towel out on the counter, rinsed out the Top Ramen pot, and laid it on the towel. The obvious way to find out the identity of the flamer was to post to MontgomeryHighChat.com and see if maybe he or she would come out and say who they were, although it was unlikely. And even if they did, I knew only about five people who went to Montgomery High, mostly the older brothers and sisters of my own friends, like Julia’s older sister, Alison.

  I was in the middle of wiping down the counter when I figured it out.

  Mark Clark was sitting at his computer, like usual, but he wasn’t playing EQ. It looked as if he was working on his fractals, or maybe it was businessy stuff.

  I sat in the wooden chair next to his desk and sighed loudly.

  “What’s up?” he said, without looking away from the screen.

  “Computer science homework. I kind of forgot about it.”

  “When’s it due?” he said.

  “It’s extra credit. We’re supposed to find out how message boards work. From a computer standpoint, I mean.”

  “Well, a message board is nothing more than a big database. It’s sort of like a chart that holds information in different boxes.”

  “Uh-huh.” I really didn’t want Mark Clark to click into lecture mode. “But I mean, take a message board like MontgomeryHighChat. How does the message get from someone’s computer onto the board?”

  “Everyone’s computer has an Internet address called an IP address, which is how your computer talks to anything on the Internet.”

  “Is the address like a home address? Like, you can look it up somewhere and see whose computer it is?”

  “Sure, if you knew how, you could.”

  “Huh. I bet you know how.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  We sat. He typed a little. I wagged my foot.

  “So, like, how do you find the IP address? Like, if someone posted a flame about you, could you find out who it was or where the flame came from?”

  “You could. Or you could just ignore it and walk away.” He looked over at me with a raised eyebrow.

  “Yeah, but this is for school. It’s extra credit, like I said.”

  “Okay.” He pulled up MontgomeryHighChat.com, clicked around the site a bit, then pulled up something called NetworkSolutions.com, then clicked around there a little, then typed, then clicked, then typed some more.

  “Man,” he said, “the security on the site really sucks. It took me ten seconds to get into the administrative side of this turkey.” He sat down deeper in his chair, pushed up his sleeves. Okay, he was into it now.

  “Cool,” I said. “Then what?”

  “Then you look up the user history and it’ll give you account information for the user and their IP address, and then you use some network tools—some of which I wrote myself, by the way—”

  “—in your hacker days?”

  He laughed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Anyway, you use some network tools to look up who the IP address is registered to in the real world, and if they have any Web pages tied to it or whatnot.”

  “That’s so cool. How about …” I pretended to be thinking, “QTPIE865. Try that one.”

  More typing, more clicking. “Nope, there’s nothing.”

  I tried not to show how disappointed I was. We Clarks never got headaches much, but I had one now.

  “Wait, is there an underscore or anything in there?” he asked.

  “Maybe. Try QT_PIE865.”

  “Parker Burrows? Is that someone you know from school? Or I’d bet that’s his dad.”

  No, but I knew Pansy Burrows, Jordan’s biggest cling-on and now my number-one suspect.

  On Monday morning I had a PowerBar and a banana for breakfast (no dishes). I ate standing in the kitchen studying the calendar stuck to the side of the fridge. There were two weeks and three days left of school. There were no days off except this Thursday, when we were dismissed at noon. The Junior Rose Festival Parade marched down Sandy Boulevard, two blocks
from our school. Middle school bands played “Louie Louie,” and herds of little kids in tae kwon do clubs and Irish dance teams kicked and leaped their way down the street. The traffic was so bad, no parents could get through to Holy Family to pick up their kids at the normal dismissal time, so we got out early.

  That’s the day I would go to Montgomery High and implement my plan, which involved tracking down Pansy Burrows. I had some questions for her, questions I hoped would rattle her enough to spill. Pansy Burrows was one of those small, nervous girls who in another life was probably a yappy little dog ladies sometimes carry in their purses. I was confident she’d be easy to crack, but I needed to talk to her face-to-face; it was just too hard to tell if someone was lying over the Internet. Plus, on Law & Order the detectives were always just showing up and unnerving their potential subjects. They never, like, called on the phone and said, “Hi, we think you’re guilty of murder. Could you come in for a chat?”

  On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays we had religion first thing in the morning. In class, Hannah sat in front of Julia and Julia sat in front of me. One or both of them were wearing a new perfume that smelled like pineapple. They each wore identical Happy Bunny bracelets strung with pink plastic beads. The Happy Bunny charm read YOU’RE ICKY. When I asked Hannah about hers, she said it was a private joke with Julia.

  “We got them at Claire’s on Sunday,” said Julia. “You know, the day after you flashed your bootie at Hannah’s boyfriend.”

  “Julia, that’s one.” Ms. Kettle, our religion teacher, wrote Julia’s name on the board. Ms. Kettle was one of those ladies who could be thirty or could be fifty. She wore polyester pants that sat up under her armpits and reading glasses on a chain around her neck. Julia smirked and turned back around in her seat.

  It took me a minute to realize that Julia was talking about Kevin, the nice inner tube giver-outer at the water park. Flashed my bootie? They gave me a wedgie! Hannah’s boyfriend? She didn’t even know his name! She’d called him Devon-or-Evan. My stomach felt as if it wanted to fling itself up my throat and out of my body. I clenched my fist around my pencil. I bet Ms. Kettle would do more than write my name on the board if I plunged the point into the back of Julia’s neck.

  Our lesson that day was on the difference between empathy and sympathy. Empathy is when you know how someone else feels when something sucky happens to them, because the same sucky thing has happened to you. Sympathy is when you feel bad for someone because something sucky has happened to them and you know in your heart it’s a sucky thing even though it has never happened to you.

  Ms. Kettle made us get into groups of three, where we would then create a skit illustrating either empathy or sympathy. Hannah and Julia turned toward each other. Their third was Lily Contrell, who I knew for a fact Hannah hated. Lily got straight A’s in prealgebra and brought egg salad sandwiches every day for lunch. She always had mayonnaise stains on her T-shirt and terrible gas. I had a lot of empathy for her, having to partner with Hannah and Julia.

  Reggie, James, and Ari did a skit about a guy whose skateboard gets run over by a bus. Lauren and the two Chelseas did a skit about a girl who dyed her hair red but forgot to wear gloves, and her hands turned flaming red with the dye. This was empathy for Lauren, apparently (it had happened over the summer), and sympathy for the two Chelseas.

  When it was Hannah, Julia, and Lily’s turn, Lily leaned over at the waist and fluffed out her dark blond hair, which was as wavy and curly thick as mine. She put her fists in front of her, as if they were in the pocket of a hoodie, and walked up and down in front of the classroom saying, “Have you seen my ferret? Has anyone seen my ferret?”

  I understood right away that it was supposed to be me. Ms. Kettle watched Lily drag back and forth across the front of the classroom. It wasn’t much of a skit.

  “What are you trying to convey, Lily? Are we supposed to feel sympathy because you lost your pet?”

  Hannah and Julia stood behind Lily and whispered behind their hands.

  “She’s supposed to be me,” I said. I didn’t even raise my hand.

  “No,” Hannah said quickly. “Ms. Kettle’s right. Lily lost her pet ferret and we feel sympathy for her.”

  I glanced over at Reggie, whose hand was in the air. When Ms. Kettle called on him, he said, “I have empathy for both Julia and Hannah for thinking they’re funny when they’re lame.”

  The whole class laughed. Julia blushed and Hannah frowned as they took their seats. I muttered, loud enough for them to hear, “How does it feel to be on the receiving end of instant karma?”

  Julia spun around and said, “F you, Minerva Clark.” She made the massive mistake of letting it fly during a two-second slot of time when no one was acting up, when Ms. Kettle didn’t have her back turned to the board, when everyone could hear her loud and clear.

  “Julia!” Ms. Kettle roared, not as embarrassed or as shocked as you might think. She pointed at the door. “You’re out of here.”

  Julia quickly walked out of the room without looking at anyone, even Hannah.

  Suddenly, something hit me on the shoulder. I looked down and saw a small, triangular-shaped note. The triangle was Reggie’s trademark folding style. I leaned down, scooped it up without anyone seeing.

  Reggie had written his own rebus:

  Too funny for words.

  Tuesday afternoon I came home from school to find Charlie there, home from his business trip to New York. I’d seen pictures of Charlie when he was Morgan’s age, and he had the same thin curly blond hair and hazel eyes. Now he was bald and shorter than all of his sons. Still, he looked like he could take them in any fight, a fact the brothers liked to brag about.

  He’d brought me a four-foot-tall stuffed Statue of Liberty. I pretended to think it was way cool, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it. Charlie didn’t seem to know, either. He said, “I thought you’d find it ironic, Bug.” Bug is his pet name for me. My dad thinks I’m both younger and older than I really am.

  Charlie took the brothers and me to a fancy sushi place downtown for dinner. I ate a plate full of California rolls and drank two bottles of Orangina. He asked Morgan about his “course work” and Quills, whom he called by his real name, Michael, about the “prospect of his rock band” making it big, and wondered if Mark Clark had any advice about a computer problem some lady in their New York office was having. We could tell by the way he talked about the lady that she was his new girlfriend.

  On Wednesday, he left again, this time for Los Angeles.

  I checked MontgomeryHighChat.com every night, but there were no more new posts about Jordan.

  On Thursday after school, I’d gone home and found a dark blue jeans skirt at the bottom of my closet. I wore that and a red long-sleeved T-shirt, plus some clunky black Doc Martens. I put on some mascara and lip gloss. I found a baby-blue corduroy book bag that I’d forgotten I owned, a Christmas present from someone. I pinned a few buttons on it—a Green Day button I had from the concert I went to with Quills, and one I found in a glass dish in a corner of the messy desk that said YOU’RE WEIRD. I LIKE THAT. I was sure I could pass for a ninth grader.

  I showed up at Montgomery High at around two o’clock, at the beginning of seventh period. Montgomery High School is a big public high school, built of red brick, with white pillars in the front. Every once in a while Hollywood uses it for a movie.

  It had been drizzling all day. The halls of Montgomery High were wide and smelled like cafeteria food, floor wax, and wet hair. They were mostly empty.

  I’d found a manila envelope in the third-floor study at home and wrote PANSY BURROWS on the front with black Magic Marker. On my way to the front office, I passed by classrooms, all with their doors closed, the muffled sound of lecturing from inside. One door had a sign over it: MR. TARKINGTON’S CHAMBER OF COMMAS. Ha ha.

  I waited in the main office for about a year and a half before a lady with long folksingerish hair and a purple woven shirt appeared from another office
in the back and asked me if she could help me.

  “Mr. Tarkington needs this delivered to Pansy Burrows,” I said.

  The lady put her hand out to take it.

  “Uh,” I said. I’d been doing pretty well pretending I was a ninth grader at Montgomery High. It hadn’t occurred to me that the school secretary would volunteer to deliver the empty envelope for me. “Mr. Tarkington said I should take it straight to her classroom. I don’t know where she is, though. Pansy Burrows, what class she’s in right now. So I can deliver this. To her.”

  I wondered when, if ever, my mouth would close and words would stop coming out.

  The secretary looked hard at my eyes, probably trying to see if I was on drugs or something. I smiled back at her, hoping I didn’t have any grilled cheese sandwich left in my braces from lunch.

  She sat down at her desk and typed at her computer for a minute.

  “Pansy Burrows … seventh period … Mrs. Yeoman’s class.”

  I held my breath. Did she think I knew where Mrs. Yeoman’s classroom was? “I’m only a freshman,” I said. “I don’t know where that is.”

  “Room 203,” she said.

  I thanked her. You could tell she smelled something fishy.

  There was half an hour left before school let out. I found room 203 on the second floor, at the end of the hall across from the girls’ restroom. I sat in a stall, the empty envelope between my knees, waiting for the bell to ring. One of the faucets dripped in the sink. Two girls came in, used the mirrors, and left. What if Pansy wasn’t in school today? Or what if when the students spilled out of room 203, I lost sight of her in the crowd? Pansy was short. But she had that red hair …

  The bell blared overhead. I jumped so high I banged my elbow on the metal toilet paper dispenser.