by Karen Karbo
I rushed out of the bathroom just in time to see the back of Pansy’s head moving off down the hall. She was talking loudly to friends on either side, making circles with her arms and ducking her head, acting out some drama, probably. I stayed as far behind her as I dared, following her out of Montgomery High and into the gray, drizzling afternoon.
- 13 -
PANSY BURROWS WAS POSSIBLY THE SHORTEST senior at Montgomery High. Lucky, for me, her hair was a beacon, a perky orange-red splotch among all the taller brunettes and dark blondes. Pansy Burrows walked fast, and the halls were packed with students. Half of the girls were dressed in shorts, tank tops, and flip-flops, as if the day were sunny and hot instead of chilly with drizzle. The halls smelled like wet clothes and too many different kinds of fruity perfumes. The students surged toward the doors. I got pushed back against the lockers and was bounced against a girl fixing her messy bun in the tiny mirror hung inside her locker. I muttered, “Sorry,” and she released a small smile at me before slamming the locker shut. “No worries,” she said.
For some reason, that made my heart feel big in my chest, that little meaningless smile, that “No worries.”
I looked like I belonged there. I did not look like some freak show loser. I did not look like a seventh grader even.
But in that one minute I paused just to feel happy, I lost Pansy Burrows.
I saw her red hair bobbing along the wide sidewalk outside. I pushed down the stairs and out the doors. She was striding down the sidewalk with a tall, dark-haired chum on either side of her. She didn’t seem like a cling-on with these girls; they looked like real friends. They had their arms interlocked and were skipping/walking in some goofy way that was part of some private joke, probably, or out of a movie. Whatever it was, it put them a good block ahead of me.
They turned right on Broadway, and I thought they must be going to catch the bus. There was a stop near the corner. A couple of old guys snoozed on the bench, and a gang of students tried to squeeze beneath the glass roof.
I wasn’t sure what to do if Pansy stopped and waited for the bus. Stand and wait with her? I’d been so pleased with myself for figuring out a way to find her, I’d sort of forgotten that I was going to have to talk to her.
I went over my theory again in my head, that Pansy had literally stolen Jordan’s identity as the ultimate cling-on move, as a way of becoming Jordan. You saw this sort of thing in a lot of psycho killer movies. I was still working on how this related to Dwight’s murder, but it was awfully suspicious that Pansy Burrows was hanging out all nervouslike in Under the Covers the day before Dwight was murdered.
I chewed on my thumb cuticle. For a second I wished I had Jupiter with me. Reaching inside my pouch and stroking his fur always calmed me down. I told this to Reggie once. He told me a rabbit’s foot would serve the same purpose. I’d had to pinch his arm for that one.
Pansy’s two chums peeled off at the bus stop, but Pansy kept walking, head down, hands in her pocket. She swung a little as she walked, probably listening to music, an iPod or a CD player in the woven bag slung over her shoulder.
The drizzle stopped and the sun leaped out suddenly, blinding me. I kept on going, past the bus stop, on down Broadway. I had no clue where Pansy was off to. Broadway was lined with shops, small businesses, and about eighty-seven Starbucks; no one lived on Broadway.
I stayed a block behind her. It was easy. She never looked up or turned around. It made me wonder why, in movies, when people tail other people, they were always ducking into doorways or stopping to pretend to window-shop. It’s completely unnecessary.
As we cruised along, I tried not to think about the pile of dishes waiting for me at home and who might be around to see that I wasn’t doing them. Mark Clark—still at work. Quills? Work. Morgan? Studying for finals, hopefully. I didn’t want to think what would happen if I started slacking off dish duty and not showing up when I was supposed to. I’ve never been in that much trouble before.
At Broadway and 18th I spied Under the Covers down two blocks, on the other side of the street, and suddenly I knew Pansy Burrows was headed to the bookstore, where we first met. Just as this occurred to me, she stopped at the corner, waiting for the light to change. Pansy fussed with her CD player, hidden in her shoulder bag. She frowned, tapped her tiny foot. She looked so overdone, with her Curious George baseball shirt, jeans miniskirt, black fishnets, tie-dyed high tops, and pigtails. Long dangling earrings. Rings on most of her fingers. It was the too much of someone who was trying to make up for being too little. I felt sorry for Pansy Burrows.
Sure enough, Pansy skittered across the street and ducked into Under the Covers. I was breathless with guessing right, and also with the thought of returning to the scene of Dwight’s murder. The crime scene tape was gone by now. On Law & Order it always seemed to be up for weeks.
Inside the shop I half expected to see Dwight behind the counter, but of course it was someone else, a woman with short blond hair and those half glasses old people always wear, except this lady wasn’t that old. She wore bracelets that jingled when she moved. She was flipping through a stack of papers. She smiled at me without really seeing me and went back to her work.
I could feel my heart pounding in my ears. I kept imagining Dwight’s body lying on the floor behind the counter. The store had wood floors. Does blood stain wood?
I made myself focus. I could not afford to freak out.
Pansy stood at the magazine rack, her back to me. I had no clue what to do. Out of the corner of my eye, something drew my attention: the plastic tub of glittery sea-blue eyeglass cases. I sidled over and picked through the cases, buying time. I opened one and snapped it closed too quickly, and Pansy turned around. She looked right at me, then went back to her magazine.
I picked up a copy of Teen Vogue and flipped through it. When she looked up at me again, I said, “Pansy Burrows. Remember me? Minerva Clark?”
“Oh sure. How you doing?” she said, closing her magazine around her pointer finger.
I could tell she still hadn’t figured out who I was.
“I’m Jordan Parrish’s cousin. We met here last week.”
“Oh right! How are you? How’s Jordan? I used to see her here, like, every day about this time. Haven’t seen her since last week, though. She okay?”
This was my chance. “Uh, no, she’s not okay. How could she possibly be okay?”
Pansy played dumb. “I saw her at lunch yesterday. She looked fine to me.”
I felt myself coming down with a bad case of impatience, like a flu bug that crashed in out of nowhere.
“She’s pretty together. Even after someone framed her by giving the cops her name when she was arrested. Did you know that little stunt may cost her the Hightower Scholarship? And if she doesn’t get the Hightower she won’t be able to go to college?”
“I heard it might be going to someone else, yeah.” She glanced down for the briefest moment.
“Well, QT_PIE865, of course you know. You posted it in your flame. Why Jordan, Pansy? What’s she ever done to you?”
“You’re on crack,” she said, slamming the magazine back on the rack and turning on her heel. The magazine slid to the floor. The lady behind the counter looked up. I smiled too big, knelt in a ladylike fashion to fetch the magazine and replace it properly, then followed Pansy out of the store.
“I’m really just trying to find out who did this to Jordan and why,” I called after her as she marched down the street.
“Why do you care?” she spat back at me. “Don’t you have anything better to do? Aren’t you, like, in sixth grade or something? Aren’t you supposed to be home listening to Avril Lavigne and playing with plastic horses?”
“Why do you care if I care?” I said, catching up with her in about five steps. “That flame came from your computer.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she nearly shouted. Her face was the color of the summer’s first sunburn.
“The IP address of t
he computer is registered to your dad.”
She folded her arms and kicked at something nonexistent on the sidewalk. “Zoe did it. I was downstairs getting chewed out by my mom for forgetting to take out the recycling or something and Zoe got on my computer.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about. Then I remembered Julia mentioning to me that Zoe McBride, another girl at Montgomery High, was the next in line for the scholarship if they wound up pulling it from Jordan. I didn’t know anything about Zoe and I didn’t understand why she would flame Jordan.
“There’s a lot of gossip and stuff at school about how Zoe so totally does not deserve the Hightower. Not just that, but Zoe’s family is pretty rich. She’d get to go to college anyway. People feel really sorry for Jordan. It’s all, ‘poor Jordan this and poor Jordan that.’ Zoe just wanted everyone to know that Jordan isn’t the perfect princess everyone thinks she is.”
I bit my lip, less painful than biting your tongue, and it accomplishes the same thing. The taste of my strawberry-kiwi lip gloss distracted me for a minute. I wanted to shout like a big baby, “Don’t say that about my cousin!” but that didn’t seem the right thing to do. Something in Pansy’s round, freckled face said she was telling the truth.
“I’m not saying that what Zoe did was cool, flaming her like that …” Her voice trailed off. She folded her arms across her chest. I tried to recall the exact words of the flame, something about Jordan being a poseur, something about how it was time people finally got wise to her. I thought about how she lied to me about being with Toc on Valentine’s Day. Then a thought dropped into my head from nowhere: I remembered how when my mom and dad got divorced my mom tucked my hair behind my ear and said, “Sometimes even people you think you know backwards and forwards can surprise you.” I didn’t have a clue then what this meant. Now I was starting to get it.
“What do you mean about Jordan not being a perfect princess?” I asked.
“I’m not totally sure,” she said, fumbling in her bag, then pulling out a pack of cigarettes.
“You smoke?” I said. D’oh.
“Remember when I saw you guys here whenever that was, last week? And she was like, ‘Pansy Burrows, how are you?’ like I didn’t see her here every afternoon at the same time?”
“Not really, but go on.” I remembered something like that, a weird skip in the conversation.
She lit her cigarette, then inhaled and exhaled quickly. “My mom works at that dry cleaners on the corner, and every day after school I come and hang out here until she gets off work. Every day. And Jordan’s always here. And I mean always. She comes in, she talks to Dwight, or talked to Dwight I guess. Sometimes he’d give her one of those cases—the ones on the counter by the cash registers?—and she’d tuck it in her backpack. She never looked inside, never took out any sunglasses or anything, never bought a book, never stayed longer than about five minutes.”
I could see Pansy was getting amped about this. She’d thought about it a lot, too. I guess that’s what comes of being a reporter for the high school newspaper.
“I don’t see how that makes her a bad person.”
“No one said she was a bad person. She’s just not Miss Perfect. She’s into something. Maybe selling pot or something. I don’t know what, and I don’t think Zoe knows anything, but the point is that if someone is out to get Jordan or whatever, she’s probably got it coming, and it’s probably someone who isn’t like your average high school student or whatever. That’s just my opinion.”
The sky was now a sad, flat gray, more like February than May. I brushed a few drops of rain from my cheeks and nose. “That is weird.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Suddenly, I felt so tired. I hadn’t taken a nap since I was a little kid, but I could have used one then.
Pansy stared up at me, blew a smoke ring. “Why do you care? I mean, it’s not like it’s any business of yours.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Jordan used to be my idol. We were in The Sound of Music together once.”
Pansy narrowed her eyes. “Oh wow. It was our spring play a couple of years ago. You were one of the von Trapp children.”
“Louisa,” I said. “The one who sobbed all the time.”
“I was on the tech crew,” said Pansy.
“Really? Cool,” I said.
“So you’re just trying to get to the bottom of this because …”
“It bugs me how no one seems to care. There’s the stuff with Jordan, but also the fact that the cops arrested the wrong person for Dwight’s murder, some poor homeless dude who really had nothing to do with it.”
“You’re curious,” said Pansy. “You’ve got the mind of an investigative reporter, just like me.”
“They think because I’m thirteen I can’t possibly find anything else interesting except myself.”
Pansy laughed, wished me well, and hurried into the dry cleaners at the corner. I heard the electronic bell chime from where I stood on the sidewalk in the rain.
Back at Casa Clark no one was home. Normally, I like someone to be there when I come home, but that afternoon I was happy to be alone. The dirty dishes were stacked high in both sinks, glass and china towers carefully balanced by my evil brothers. The counters were covered with glasses. Most of them had only had water in them, I knew. There was not one clean fork or spoon left in the silverware drawer. I sighed. As long as I was madly scrubbing when someone walked in the door I’d be cool.
I fetched Jupiter out of his cage and did some ferret surfing, where I dragged him around on a dish towel and he stood in the middle with his nose up, his short legs apart for balance, big kahuna. We ran around and around the sofa until I nailed my shin on the corner of the coffee table. That hurt.
On the floor next to the front door a pile of mail lay beneath the mail slot. I limped over to see if maybe there was something for me. I used to have a subscription to American Girl, which is so lame and which I would never ever read, but still, I missed having something come for me.
So I was surprised to see a long white envelope addressed to me. Someone had printed my name and address off a computer and taped it to the envelope, no return address.
Inside there was a sheet of white paper that said:
Me quit
I’M you
I held the paper between both hands, which had started trembling. I stared at the rebus—Quit following me, I’m bigger than you—and then I stared at my hands. I was truly amazed. I’d thought “trembling with fear” was just an expression.
There was a small crash, a scrabbling sound. I jumped about ten feet and dropped the letter. Seventeen million questions hopped around in my head all at once, like kernels of popping corn.
What was that noise? What had I done to deserve a death threat? Because that’s what this was. Someone telling me to stop following them or else? But who? Who would send a death threat to a seventh grader? Jordan? Toc? The identity stealer of Jordan? The murderer of Dwight? Was it only a joke perpetrated by Reggie? Or even Hannah or Julia? What was that noise?
Only Jupiter, bored because we’d stopped ferret surfing before he was ready. He’d knocked my baby-blue corduroy book bag off the coffee table, where I’d left it. The flap had opened when it hit the floor, and the dang creature was crawling around inside. Jupiter loved nothing more than getting into a bag full of stuff. I felt a twitch of longing for the girl I was only a few weeks before, who loved nothing more than playing with her ferret.
I wanted Mark Clark to come home. I wanted Quills and Morgan to come home. I wanted them to come home so I wouldn’t be alone, but I did not want them to come home and find this rebus. If they knew I’d received a death threat, they wouldn’t let me out of their sight, much less out of the house.
And death threat rebus or no death threat rebus, there were a few things I still needed to do.
- 14 -
THE HIGHTOWER SCHOLARSHIP OFFICE ADDRESS was right on their Web site. It was easy enough to get there after school on Friday. Morga
n didn’t have any classes on Friday, so he was the BIC that day; I found him in the garage fussing around with the front wheel of his mountain bike. I told him I was going to the library to work on a report, and he said, “Great.” Then he heaved the bike up by its handlebars and gave the wheel a big spin. I felt deeply bad that I was getting so good at telling white lies, but I told myself this was the last time. Morgan didn’t even tell me to be careful crossing the street. Sometimes I don’t think Morgan is qualified to be the BIC, but whatever.
I made Reggie go with me. I was too freaked out by my death threat rebus to go by myself. During the bus ride I filled him in on the new information I’d gleaned from Pansy Burrows, that it looked as if Jordan and Dwight might be in on the checking account number scheme together. Or anyway, Jordan knew more than we thought she did, and that she was maybe not even an eighty percent good person, maybe more like sixty-six percent.
“I’m thinking maybe she didn’t even save up for her car. Or, she did save up, but it wasn’t, like, from a job or anything. It was stolen money.” I told him about her necklace, the small gold J filled with diamonds.
“This is so awesome,” said Reggie. He ripped open a pack of Shock Tarts with his teeth and dumped about half in his mouth. Reggie brought his skateboard with him everywhere he went, and he had it slung across his lap like a TV tray table. “I can’t believe your cousin is a real crook.”
“Well, we’re not totally sure. But we’re kind of giving up trying to solve the mystery. That’s why we’re going to the Hightower office.”
I sighed and looked out the window. A mom jogging with a baby stroller huffed past us. I hated to say that the death threat rebus scared me enough to stop snooping around, but it had. I knew I was supposed to think, “No one will ever scare me away from finding out the truth!” like all the one hundred percent good sleuths did, but I really did want to make it to my eighth-grade graduation. I’d also reached a dead end. If it wasn’t Toc, and it wasn’t Pansy Burrows, I had no clue who it was. It was someone I didn’t know and couldn’t seem to get to, either.