She kept right on singing. As she sang, she pictured Tenny beside her, his eyes half shut, his head bobbing, playing his guitar.
Just a few streets away, in a small, comfortable home that smelled pleasantly of meat loaf, a plump gray-haired woman named Sally Ann was working on a project. Sally Ann had three giant piles of photographs of her various grandchildren, and it was well past time that she organized the pictures into albums. As Sally Ann spread the pictures across the table and wondered where to begin, her husband, Harry, came whistling into the room. She looked him up and down. “Is that ‘Moonlight in Vermont’? ”
“Why, so it is,” her husband answered with a mischievous smile. Sally Ann set down her glue stick and looked squarely at Harry.
“All right, you,” she said sternly. “What are you plotting? ”
“Why, Sally Ann, I am neither plotting nor planning! I’ve just been figuring out my schedule, that’s all. I thought I might give my Floating Midterm a bit early this year. Like, this Friday.”
“Oh? And have you cleared it with the other teachers? Is there anything else on the schedule it might interfere with? ”
Mr. Melville’s eyebrows danced merrily. “Oh, I don’t think so,” he said with a dry chuckle. “Nothing important.”
22
“LOSE? WE CAN’T LOSE!”
“What S worse than dressing as a giant hot dog?”
“I’m sorry, Principal Van Vreeland. Is that a riddle of some kind? ”
“No, it is not a riddle, you ignoramus! ” hissed Principal Van Vreeland at Jasper. “Time is running out! The Choral Corral is tomorrow! And I have yet to settle on the final terms of my bet with Principal Cohn!”
“Oh, yes, right,” said Jasper under his breath. “That.”
“So here is my current thinking: When they lose, Principal Cohn has to go to school in a giant hot-dog costume. For a week. No! A month! And here’s the best part: On the back of the hot-dog costume, it’ll say GROVER CLEVELAND KISSES MARY TODD LINCOLN’S BUNS.”
“Ah,” answered Jasper noncommittally.
“What? ” Principal Van Vreeland said sharply. “See, buns, like, hot-dog buns, but also—”
“I get the joke, Principal Van Vreeland. But presumably, if our side loses the Choral Corral, then you would be the one who has to wear the giant hot-dog costume.”
“Lose?” Principal Van Vreeland brayed laughter. “We can’t lose!”
“But—”
“But nothing,” the principal interrupted. “Go find me a hot-dog costume! ”
“Very good, Principal Van Vreeland.” Jasper paused at the door. “At least the losing principal’s humiliation will be confined to school grounds.”
He closed the office door behind him, but not before he heard his boss say, “School grounds, eh? Hmmmmm …”
Jasper winced and scurried down the hall.
23
OUT OF TIME
At that very moment, Bethesda was sitting in Mr. Melville’s class, thinking, Why?
And then she thought: Stop it, Bethesda!
And then she thought: Okay, but—why?
It was the mystery. It wouldn’t leave her alone. The same question that had been tugging at her since that night in the food court, when this whole strange adventure began.
Why the deception? Why have Tenny plan the rock show?
She had promised herself not to try to figure it out, to leave it alone, but her mystery-solving mind kept circling back around, dragging the mystery from the closet, saying, Solve this! Solve it! And now it was Thursday: the Choral Corral was only one day away. Soon this chapter of her life would be closed forever, and Bethesda feared she would never know the answer.
“What? Come on!”
Suddenly Bethesda realized that someone was yelling. Actually, everybody was yelling.
“But—but, Mr. Melville, you can’t! ” “We have to practice! ”
The voices of the students were outraged, horrified. “You can’t give the test tomorrow! ”
Mr. Melville, on the other hand, had never sounded so calm and pleasant: “Oh, but I think I can.”
Bethesda looked around. First-period Social Studies was in an uproar. And then she saw the words on the board, scrawled in thick, menacing all-caps: FLOATING MIDTERM. TOMORROW.
Hayley Eisenstein waved her hand at Mr. Melville, spit flying out of the corners of her mouth. “The Choral Corral is tomorrow!”
“It is?” Mr. Melville tried to feign surprise, but the particular angle of his eyebrows left little doubt that this cruel bit of scheduling was no accident. “Well, I don’t expect anyone to be cramming this evening. If you’ve been preparing all along, as is your responsibility, the sudden arrival of the midterm should cause no surfeit of anxiety.”
Everybody groaned. No one in seventh-grade Social Studies knew what the word surfeit meant, but they’d all be cramming like heck tonight, whether Mr. Melville expected it or not.
The mystery of Ms. Finkleman disappeared with a poof from Bethesda’s mind, replaced by a far more urgent problem. She craned around to look at Tenny Boyer, and saw in his eyes what she felt in her heart: Sheer panic. They were out of time. The test was tomorrow, and Tenny was going to fail. As Bethesda watched, he shut his eyes and shook his head helplessly, and Bethesda could just imagine what he was seeing: The cold metal gates of St. Francis Xavier Young Men’s Education and Socialization Academy, swinging opening with a chilling creak to beckon him inside.
As the bell rang and Mr. Melville’s students filed miserably into the hallway, still groaning, a plan materialized in Bethesda’s mind. There was one way she could save Tenny Boyer. But was it really the sort of thing that she was capable of?
The plan followed Bethesda through the rest of her day, from class to class to lunch and back to class and then home. She tried to ignore it, to order it away, but the plan only grew more insistent, followed her more closely, got louder and louder in her mind.
At dinner, the plan was still there, haunting her—tormenting her. She ignored it and tried to eat.
“Hello? McFuzz? Gertrude McFuzz? Are you in there?”
“What? Yeah, Dad.”
“I said, did you enjoy your lasagna? ” He pronounced it la-zag-nah, but Bethesda didn’t laugh. “I thought it was pretty grand.”
“Right. Hey, Dad, can I be excused from the dishes? I’ve gotta get to the library.”
Bethesda’s father shrugged as he stood to clear the dishes from the table. “Okey smokey, pokey. Just be home by nine, okay? Your mom is going to want to say good night. And you’ve got some serious day tomorrow.”
“Yup.”
Bethesda grabbed her backpack off the big chair in the living room where she had slung it.
“Oh, and before you go,” her father said. “Your friend Shelly called.”
“She did?”
“Yep. Oh, what did she say? She said please, please bring her copy of the lyrics tomorrow, because she wrote her bass part on it.”
Bethesda, who had been at the front door, gathering up her bike helmet and shin pads, stopped, confused. “But Shelly’s not even in my band.”
“Oh, then it must have been the other one. Suzie. Man, I can never tell those two apart. Even in person. Forget about on the phone! ”
Standing at the front door, her bike helmet dangling from her hand, Bethesda opened her mouth wide. Oh my god, Bethesda thought suddenly. Of course!
“You know, there was this guy I went to college with whose voice sounded exactly like Beaker from the Muppet Show,” her dad continued. “Have I ever shown you the Muppet Show? Anyway, this kid …”
While her dad rambled on, Bethesda stood frozen, mouth wide, as the pieces flew into place in her mind. Of course, she said to herself again. Of course!
She had solved the mystery of Ms. Finkleman. Why she had never told anyone about her rock-star past. Why she had secretly put Tenny in charge of the rock show, instead of doing it herself.
Her dad was still talk
ing. “You know what they should do, those two? They should get totally different haircuts. Like, if Shelly had a mullet, and Suzie had a Mohawk, a person might be able to keep them straight. Will you do me a favor and tell them that for me?”
“Yes, Dad,” said Bethesda with a goofy grin. “I’ll tell them.”
Bethesda hopped on her bike and gave a mighty holler of happiness as she pedaled to the Wilkersholm Memorial Public Library. It wasn’t that Ms. Finkleman was hiding the fact that she was Little Miss Mystery … that wasn’t it at all!
“Yes! ” she shouted, not even looking around to make sure no one was listening. “I’m a genius!”
She turned into the parking lot and carefully chained up her bike. There was just one mystery left: What was she going to do about Tenny Boyer?
24
WASHINGTON CROSSING THE NILE
That night, at precisely eight o’clock, Chef Pilverton popped out of his hiding place in the food court in the Pilverton Mall and pleaded, in his lusty French accent, for everyone to “Laissez les bon temps rouler! Avec pizza!”
But there was no one there to hear him. No one, at least, from the seventh-grade class at Mary Todd Lincoln Middle School. No one was pigging out on Boardwalk Fries, or shopping for necklaces at the Jangle Room, or deciding among the various schlocky sequels on offer at the cineplex. They were all at home, and though the Choral Corral was tomorrow at third period, they weren’t practicing their instruments. They were studying.
Chester Hu sat in the center of a giant pile of disorganized notebooks and scraps of paper, picking them up at random and trying to decipher his own handwriting. “Ugh! ” he shouted, every time he couldn’t understand his own sloppy scrawl. “I stink! ”
On the other side of Chester’s bedroom, Victor Glebe lay on a beanbag chair with a stack of flash cards as thick as War and Peace, and (judging by Victor’s blank facial expression) equally incomprehensible.
Suzie and Shelly Schwartz sat on either side of their kitchen table playing an elaborate test-preparation game they had invented involving a big-size bag of Chewy Spree. Basically, in the center of the table was a giant pile of Chewy Spree, and if the opposing Schwartz sister asked you a question you couldn’t answer, you had to put a Chewy Spree in the pile; if you got it right, you got to take one out. Suzie was enjoying a slight lead (Shelly always won when they studied for math), until the game came to an abrupt conclusion when the Schwartzes’ doberman, Sammy Schwartz, leaped up on the table and ate the entire scoring system.
Meanwhile, at the Wilkersholm Memorial Public Library, Pamela Preston, Natasha Belinsky, and Todd Spolin had taken over a long oak table in the center of Young Adult. While Natasha and Todd took turns quizzing each other, Pamela twisted a finger through her blond curls, a sour expression on her face.
“Okay, Pamela,” Natasha said to Pamela, holding up a flash card. “What river did George Washington cross on Christmas Eve 1776?”
“I mean, honestly? Rock and roll isn’t even music,” Pamela said. Natasha peered at the back of the card confusedly. “Especially punk. It’s more just, like, noise. Noise to a beat.”
“Pam! Come on! ” said Todd, raising his voice enough to make the librarian look up sharply. “Are you seriously still talking about this?”
“Yeah,” Natasha agreed. “We have to study. Stop being annoyed about the rock show for three seconds and, like, focus. Ooh, hey, are those bar-b-que?”
“They are,” said Todd, passing Natasha his extra-large bag of Soy Crisps, which made a loud crinkling noise. The librarian glared at them. Todd stuck out his tongue and stuffed the chips in his book bag.
“You know what else I’ve been thinking?” Pamela continued, completely ignoring her friends’ attempts to study. “The worst part is that this whole rock nonsense would never have happened if it weren’t for Bethesda’s Special Project, which, technically, didn’t meet the requirements of the assignment. It was supposed to be solve a mystery in your own life, not a mystery in somebody else’s life.”
“Pamela, seriously. Let it go,” admonished Todd, then turned to Natasha with a flash card. “What was the birthplace of Thomas Jefferson? ”
“Detroit? ” answered Natasha.
“That is correct.” (That was not actually correct. Todd always forgot to take notes, so they had made their flash cards from Natasha’s, which, unfortunately, were terrible.)
“Yay!” Natasha clapped her hands. “Give me another one.”
Pamela interrupted again. “But even aside from that, there’s something fishy about the whole thing. Have you guys noticed that Little Miss Mystery, or whatever her name is, doesn’t even, like, pay attention during practice? ”
“You’re the one who doesn’t pay attention, Pam,” Todd shot back, and then turned to Natasha. “What year was the Boston Massacre?”
“1492.”
“That’s right.”
“Yay! I’m so smart!”
“I really wish you guys were, like, on my side. It’s not too late to—”
“Honestly, honey?” said Natasha, with a glance at Todd, who nodded. “Not to be, like, whatever, but if you’re not going to study with us, can you go somewhere else? We really have a lot to do.”
“Fine!” said Pamela. “I will.”
“It was the Nile, by the way,” said Natasha sweetly as Pamela packed up her things. “Washington crossed the Nile.”
“Actually …” Pamela started to correct Natasha’s answer and then stopped, smiling coldly. “That’s absolutely right. You guys are going to do great.”
Pamela was shrugging on her pink spring jacket as she walked down the long aisle in the center of the library when she heard the voices. They were coming from the row of potted ficus trees that separated Fiction from Nonfiction, and so at first it seemed oddly as if two of the plants were talking. In fact, it sounded like the two plants were preparing for Melville’s test.
“The French,” said the first ficus. “The answer is, the French and the Indians.”
Pamela stopped walking and tilted her head. She would know that voice anywhere: Bethesda Fielding.
“Huh? ” said the other ficus.
This second voice was even easier to identify. There was no one in the world who said “Huh?” quite like Tenny Boyer.
So the king and queen of rock and roll are studying for the big test, Pamela thought. Whoop-de-do for them.
“Yes, Tenny. You can remember it, because it’s called the French and Indian War.”
“Oh. Yeah. That totally makes sense.”
Pamela rolled her eyes. Man, she thought. I sure hope Melville grades this on a curve. She kept listening.
“It’s not happening.” Tenny sighed. “It’s all, you know—it’s still all gray. I’m sorry you wasted all this time, just because of Ms. Finkleman’s stupid deal. But it’s too late.”
Ms. Finkleman?
Deal?
“No, Tenny,” Bethesda said, her voice sounding a bit desperate. “We’ve got time. We’ve got twenty minutes. Let’s not waste it.”
“No. I think it’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen here. I am going to fail this test. So I’d rather go home and practice my solo. They won’t be having any rock shows at St. Francis Xavier.”
“Come on, Tenny! I, um … I believe in you.”
Pamela covered her mouth to keep from snickering.
She believed in him? What a waste of perfectly good belief.
“Bethesda,” said Tenny sadly. “Get real.”
There was a long silence, and for a second Pamela thought maybe Tenny and Bethesda had quietly packed up and left the library. She risked a peek between the two ficus trees. No, there they were, Bethesda Fielding and Tenny Boyer, sitting in total silence, neither looking at the other. Tenny fingered chords on an imaginary guitar, while Bethesda sat with her eyes half shut, looking tired and agitated. But then Bethesda spoke, quietly, so quietly that Pamela had to lean forward slightly to hear what she was saying.
“Tenny,” Bethesda whispered. “I have a plan.”
Bethesda had seen the plan on a TV special about a couple of bad kids who cheat on a test. She couldn’t remember whether they got caught or not, although she sort of doubted they would make a special about kids who get away with cheating. But the thing was, those kids were stupid. Bethesda was smart. And one thing she was certain of, after about a zillion hours of fruitless tutoring, was that Tenny Boyer was smart, too—despite all appearances to the contrary. He just couldn’t memorize facts. At least, not facts about American history.
“No way,” answered Tenny immediately. “No way are you going to get in trouble to help me.”
“I’m not going to get in trouble, and neither are you. We’ve just got to be careful.”
“But …”
“Tenny. It’ll be easy. And, I mean, to be honest? It’s the only way.”
Tenny let out a long, tired sigh. He looked up at the clock. The library was closing in a few minutes. He rubbed his fingers against his exhausted eyes.
“Are you … I mean, Bethesda. Are you sure?”
“Yes,” said Bethesda. “I am.”
Tenny reached out his hand, and Bethesda shook it. She remembered another handshake, that fateful night in the food court with Ms. Finkleman. Bethesda had promised her that Tenny Boyer would pass Mr. Melville’s class—no matter what. As Tenny stood and crammed his copy of A More Perfect Union and his piles of disorganized notes back into his bag, Bethesda gave him a confident smile and a little thumbs-up.
Inside her mind, Bethesda’s fancy lawyer-lady voice delivered a stirring closing argument. So cheating on the Floating Midterm was wrong, said the lawyer lady … or was it? Wasn’t it true, as Bethesda had finally figured out, that Ms. Finkleman had been lying to the whole school about being a rock star all along? And surely she had her reasons.
So now Bethesda was going to do something equally bad—and she had her reasons, too. Tenny was too talented! She’d watched him create this whole concert, watched it go from bad to okay to—well, to amazing. And now he was going to get yanked out of Mary Todd Lincoln and shipped off to St. Francis Xavier? Why? Because he couldn’t memorize a bunch of stupid facts about the American Revolution?
The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman Page 11