by Lisa Doan
Why didn’t I think of that? I supposed crocodiles had survived for millions of years by their cunning ability to sneak up on people. They were masters of surprise.
Jana mulled over the idea of having a vice chairman. Terry said, “Promoting me to second-in-command will help me stop thinking about my tragic life all the time.”
Then he turned to me and smiled.
That’s when it hit me. Vance wasn’t interested in the dance committee. He had figured out on the bus that I liked Jana and this was just another one of his plans to wreck my life. He didn’t even really like her; he was just using her to torture me. He had moved on from physical pranks to psychological warfare. It had started with fooling me into thinking he had flunked fifth grade. Now he had wormed his way into Jana’s clique by pretending to be tragic and was getting Jana to like him. When would it end? When would his voracious appetite for vengeance ever be satisfied?
Should I run? That’s what I would usually do, but if I ran I would be running away from Jana, too. The sunlight pouring in through the cafeteria windows made her hair look like a lit match.
If I ran, I would run from all the work I did at the pool. I had spent nearly fifty dollars on frozen Snickers bars. I was closer than ever to Jana remembering my name and that she actually knew me. Could I really give all that up and go back to regular old Chadwick, a middle-of-the-herd nobody?
No, I was too close to victory. Put your swagger pants on, Chadwick. Fire-hair was worth fighting for.
I decided it was time to let Vance know that he couldn’t scare me away this time. I put on my most grim and serious face and stared him down.
Carmen elbowed me and said, “Do you need to go to the bathroom or something?”
I looked away, but not before narrowing my eyes at Terry to send him a message—the hunted was not fleeing this time. The flamingo had reared back and flapped its wings in fight mode.
The battle for Jana Sedgewick’s heart had begun.
* * *
Rory sprawled across my mom’s white living room couch, throwing Cheetos in the air and trying to catch them in his mouth. We weren’t even supposed to be in there, but Mark and his football buddies had taken over the den and my room was such a mess that we would have had to sit on dirty clothes. (If you sit on a pair of my used socks, you will carry the smell around with you all day. I don’t know what is coming out of my feet.)
I had already pointed out that I would be blamed for the sneaker marks and orange spots on the couch because my mom said that when I had guests in the house they were my responsibility.
“That’s what I love about your mom,” Rory said. “It’s never my fault.”
“Anyway,” I said, “what are we going to do about the Nile crocodile?”
“So you’ve totally given up calling him the assassin?”
“That was last year,” I said.
“Why do we have to do anything about Terry?”
“He’s pretending to like Jana to get back at me because he’s figured out I like her. It’s just another one of his pranks, only now he’s playing with my mind instead of my stomach or my hair. He’s got her totally tricked into thinking he’s tragic and interesting. I’m not going to let my nemesis ruin my entire sixth-grade year by stealing my girlfriend.”
“I’m pretty sure it would be news to Jana that she’s your girlfriend.”
“You know what I mean—my future girlfriend. We have to make Jana see that he’s the same evil crocodile that he always was.”
“I’ll just point out,” Rory said, “that your idea that Terry is the Lord of Darkness has never caught on due to lack of evidence. Even if you could prove it was him doing stuff to you every single time, the guy pulled a couple of pranks, so what? On top of that, Jana Sedgewick doesn’t seem interested in you at all.”
“There’s tons of evidence against Vance! We both know he was responsible for the chicken salad sandwich that nearly took my life,” I said.
“The note on the bottom of your Ring Ding was anonymous,” Rory said. “You can’t know it was him.”
“What about my hair falling out? You know that was him.”
“Maybe,” Rory said, “but nobody ever saw him tamper with your shampoo bottle. It could have been anybody at the campsite.”
“So under your theory, you think there are random other people who are also trying to wreck my life. Not just Terry?”
“I don’t know,” Rory said. “I never really thought about it.”
“It’s just him,” I said. “He’s the only one playing tricks on me. Tricks that could easily go wrong and end in tragedy, like that sandwich almost did. Now, he’s hanging out with Jana. He’s trying to destroy my whole plan. She’s supposed to keep seeing me at the dance committee meetings, which will lead to getting used to me as part of an overlap group, which will lead to getting to know me, which will lead to being interested in me. Remember? Campaign Lurk and Creep?”
“So you really feel like Jana getting to know you will lead to interest?” Rory asked. “I can’t picture that.”
I ignored Rory’s skepticism. “First, we have to get Vance out of the way,” I said. “I’m not going to keep running away from him. Not anymore. My only chance with Jana is to expose him as a fraud.”
“You’ll never be able to do it,” Rory said. “Jana and Bethany have decided he’s tragic, which makes him interesting. They’ve taken him on like an extra-credit project. They are going to cheer him up if it’s the last thing they do. You’ll never prove anything against him.”
I knocked Rory’s legs off the couch for the fifth time. “I’ll prove the Jeep accident never happened, which unravels his whole tragic story. Like you said, if he’s not tragic, he’s not interesting. His dad is either missing eight fingers, or there was no falling Jeep and he is not tragic. All we have to do is get a photo of his dad’s hands, with all the original fingers on them.”
“How are we supposed to do that?” Rory said.
“It’s simple. We’ll find out where his dad works. Terry said he has his own auto repair shop.” I grabbed my phone and Googled “auto repair Vance.” For all I knew it was another one of Terry’s lies, but I had to start somewhere.
“Bingo,” I said. “Vance Auto Repair on Mystic Lane.” I clicked on the Google map. “It’s two blocks from where Terry gets off the bus. It must be right near his house. We’ll follow Terry off and make up some cover story about why we’re getting off at his stop. Then we’ll pretend we’re walking the other direction, then circle back around after Terry has gone inside. All we’ll have to do is figure out which guy at the shop is Terry’s dad—I’m guessing they probably look alike. Then we run up to him and get a picture of his hands and we’ve got the proof! What could be simpler than that?”
Rory stared at me. “That’s a lot of work to prove Terry told a lie.”
“It’s bigger than just a lie. I’m defending justice,” I said. “Somebody has to stick up for what’s right. Terry Vance can’t be allowed to get away with this made-up story and have Jana like him. Because that would be wrong.”
“Uh, okay, Captain America.”
* * *
The next day, the buses revved their engines and got ready to pull out, but there was still no sign of Terry.
“He probably has detention,” Rory said.
“We’ve got to search the school,” I said. “He’s in there somewhere. Once we find him, we’ll casually keep an eye on him, and if he gets on the second bus, the mission is a go.”
We ran through the cafeteria, checked the detention hall, peeked into empty classrooms, and made sure he wasn’t with the nurse making up another tragic story. We finally found him in the last place we looked. The library.
Either it was a sign of the apocalypse, or Terry was up to no good. There was no legitimate reason for the crocodile to be near books. I had never once seen him use his library card. The library had always been one of my safe havens from Vance. Kind of like how a flamingo might walk into
the water, figuring a lion wouldn’t want to get its feet wet. It gave the flamingo a break from constant high alert, and the flamingo could sit behind the last row of shelves and eat its granola bar in peace.
I motioned for Rory to go down one aisle while I went down the other. I had to find out what Vance was doing in my flamingo lake.
Terry was pulling out books and then shoving them back on the shelves. He yanked one from the nonfiction section and said, “Absofreakinlutely.”
I peered around the corner. Terry strode up to the checkout desk with a book in his hand. The librarian stared at him. Poor Ms. Bagelthorpe; I guessed she probably thought Terry was checking out a book as a ruse so he could start a fire or plant a bomb.
I motioned to Rory, and we crept along the nonfiction aisle. I scanned the shelf, looking for the space where the book had been removed. I wrote the call number on the back of my hand and raced to the computer desk.
As I typed in the number, Terry disappeared out the door.
“Well,” Rory said, “we lost him again.”
I stared at the computer screen. “Look at this,” I said.
The call number had brought up a book called The Psychology behind Gaslight.
I scrolled down to the description.
The movie Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, was released in 1944 and instantly sparked a national conversation: Was it truly possible to convince a sane individual that they were, in fact, insane? The heroine of the film is slowly and intentionally driven mad by her husband. Could that happen in real life? This book delves into the psychology of perception and how the human brain processes what it believes to be fact. It is, indeed, possible to drive a person mad, if you understand how the mind works.
I staggered to the nearest chair and collapsed into it. “Do you see what this means?” I cried. “This is about me! Terry Vance wants to drive me insane. He won’t be satisfied until I’m locked up somewhere. He’s taking it to a whole new level.”
Rory leaned against a bookshelf. “I don’t know why he needs a book for that,” he said. “As far as I can tell, you’re driving yourself insane.”
Suvi staggered past with an armload of books. She dumped them on a table and said, “Did I hear somebody mention insanity?”
“I did. Hey,” I said, pointing to the screen, “you’re smart, do you know how this whole gaslight thing works?”
Suvi read through the description, nodding. “Of course,” she said. “A systematic and purposeful manipulation of the psychic apparatus.”
“That sounds bad,” I whispered. “What does it mean?”
“In layman’s terms,” Suvi said, “it means that whoever checked out this book intends to disrupt and destabilize somebody else’s sense of reality.”
Suvi said a lot more on the subject, but most of it was like another language. She seemed to know a lot of long and obscure words. Rory’s eyes had glazed over but I kept nodding to be polite.
Finally, she said, “In conclusion: blahcomplicatedwordsyoudonotknowblahblah.” I had no idea what Suvi’s final conclusion was, but I knew what my own was. The Nile crocodile was an evolving predator; his hunting strategies were growing in scope and sophistication. He was an evolving predator that had to be stopped by proving his dad had all his regular fingers. He had to be stopped before I got gaslighted into insanity.
* * *
Rory and I missed the second bus and had to wait an hour for Mark to pick us up. We rode home in the back of his rusty Subaru while I contemplated how to keep my sanity despite Terry Vance’s plan to wrestle it away from me. Mark spent the ride advising his girlfriend on how she could improve her grade in speech class.
“You’re naturally quiet,” Mark said, “so that’s something you’ll need to overcome. You can practice by talking to me. You know, more than you usually do.”
Cheryl shrugged.
“We could practice doing a debate, like I say one side of the argument and you say the other.”
Cheryl twirled a hunk of her hair around her index finger and stared out the window like the Home Depot was most remarkable building she had ever seen.
I was becoming more and more convinced that Cheryl thought Mark was her Uber driver. I was always tempted to tap her on the shoulder, point at Mark, and say, “Hey, do you know that guy?”
“Like, I’ll say,” Mark continued, “why I think the Eagles are going to the Super Bowl this year. Then you say why you think they’re gonna flame out. Your learning curve should be pretty fast; I got a B in speech last year.”
Cheryl slumped in her seat and muttered, “Yay.”
Mark spent a couple of minutes listing all the reasons the Eagles would go to the Super Bowl. Cheryl responded with silence. At a stoplight, Mark considered Cheryl’s unusual style of mute debate. Then he said, “We could always debate Downton Abbey.”
Cheryl twitched, which would not win any debate state championships but was a big win for Mark. I’m not sure how Mark has missed that Cheryl is not interested in his advice. Or interested in him, generally. Or even interested in being barely alive. For all his talk about how girls aren’t robots, he had one sitting right next to him.
CHAPTER FIVE
At our second dance committee meeting, Jana gave an inspiring speech about volunteering while I watched Terry out of the corner of my eye to make sure he wasn’t launching his plan to drive me insane. Jana told us that volunteers always got back more than they gave. I thought about shoveling snow off of old Mr. Swanson’s driveway for him and how all I ever got was a wave from the front door. It must depend on who you volunteered for.
Finally, she said, “We can feel proud about donating our personal time to the school.” Then her cheeks turned red and she stammered, “So, this thing happened. Principal Grimeldi said the rule where you can’t be voted king or queen of the dance if you’re on the dance committee was totally unfair and she’s getting rid of it. She said nobody should be penalized for helping out. I didn’t even know that was a rule so I was like, whatever, it’s not like I would win.”
“You could totally win,” Bethany said.
“No, you could totally win,” Jana said back.
“I’ll vote for you, Jana,” Terry said.
“I’ll vote for you too,” Bethany said.
“You guys!” Jana cried. “You are the best ever.”
“I’ll vote for you,” I said to Jana.
Jana stared at me. Sometimes my timing is not very reliable. I came into that conversation way too late.
“I can’t say who I’ll vote for,” Rory said. “I haven’t even heard the campaign promises yet. Though it might be helpful for the candidates to know that I can be swayed by Cheetos.”
I could always count on Rory. No matter what I did, he was always worse.
“Though Cheetos are delicious,” Suvi said, “that would still constitute electoral fraud. It’s not the cost of the gift but the gift itself that is concerning.”
I started to wonder what went on in Suvi’s house. Their dinner-table conversation must be like a meeting of Nobel prize winners.
Rory stared at Suvi. I was pretty sure he was wondering about exactly how many bags of Cheetos she might have tucked away in her kitchen cabinets.
“Anyway,” Jana said. “On to business.”
Jana got an update from Carmen and Bethany about the decorations. They found blow-up palm trees at a dollar store and Carmen had gone up to her attic and borrowed all the white Christmas lights. There was tons of hula music on YouTube, so Jana was going to find out if they could play the videos on a bunch of screens for the hula dance off. Suvi had shopped around for prizes and was leaning toward travel mugs from the dollar store—inexpensive, yet useful.
Jana scoffed at last year’s snack offerings of potato chips and pretzels and said this year we would cater to a more sophisticated palate by offering herbed goat cheese on delicate rice crisps. That was way more sophisticated than my palate. The one time I tasted goat cheese, I though
t I was eating the inside of my sock.
Jana checked her notes and said, “That’s it for official duties. Terry, you were going to finish the story you were sharing over lunch before we were so rudely interrupted by the bell.”
Now Jana was eating lunch with the crocodile? When did that happen? The guy was stealing my dreams!
“Right,” Terry said, smiling at me, “so like I was telling you, late one afternoon last summer I see this kid pick up a dead squirrel by the side of the road. I followed him home to see what he was going to do with it. I’m thinking, c’mon, what does a person do with a dead squirrel? Was he going to give it a funeral or something? I looked over the kid’s backyard fence and guess what he did? He skinned it and grilled it for dinner.”
Where was this going? Why was he smiling at me?
“That is so disgusting,” Jana said. “Who was it?”
“Well,” Terry said cracking his knuckles, “I don’t want to say. I’ll only reveal that he has a really weird first name.”
All eyes turned toward me.
“You have got to be kidding,” I said.
“Chadwick is a pretty weird name,” Carmen helpfully pointed out.
“I would not like to characterize any name as weird,” Suvi said. “However, a brief look at the most popular boys’ names so far this year does indeed exclude the name Chadwick. Of course, I only memorized the top one hundred, so Chadwick could very well be number one hundred and one.”
Suvi! Stop with all the reading and facts! Don’t you ever sleep?
“I did not grill a squirrel for dinner,” I said. “I was not wandering around the streets looking for dead animals. Jana knows I was at the pool every single day.”
“I do?” Jana asked.
“I’m the candy thrower,” I said.
Jana touched the bridge of her nose, right where I had hit her with the frozen Snickers. “Oh,” she said, “the plaid-shorts guy.”
I couldn’t tell if that was a compliment or not. I said, “Rory, tell them I didn’t grill a squirrel.”
“Not that I saw,” Rory said.