“Plus a bunch of other stuff. But the thing about Bananaman is that for the past three years, his stuff was export only. No selling in town.”
“But now?” Digby said.
“Something’s changed. His stuff’s been showing up local,” she said.
“So, it’ll probably only be a matter of time before the cops get interested . . . and maybe even responsible businessmen like yourself will feel the hurt,” Digby said. “You should remind him that people sharing a small patch like River Heights should be more neighborly when they’re doing business.”
“You’re interesting . . . I never saw a kid with so many ideas.”
“I think we should share,” Digby said.
“Share? Share how?” she said.
“Like I tell you that at least some of the stuff getting sold around here’s been stolen from Bananaman. He probably doesn’t know it’s happening,” Digby said.
“Who’s stealing from him?” she said.
Digby cocked his head. “You’ve never seen Sesame Street? Your turn. Share.”
“No one knows who he is or how he runs his operation, but I checked and his stuff turns up in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Toronto by Friday morning every week. So that means . . .”
“Thursday night,” Digby said. “Every Thursday night, a ton of this stuff leaves River Heights and goes all up and down the East Coast without anyone noticing.”
“Alistair and I checked out every roadhouse, outhouse, and henhouse, and we haven’t found anything. A cook operation that big should be easy to find. Of course, you could just tell me who’s been stealing and I could figure it out that way,” she said. “Or maybe I could make you tell me.”
She cackled. Digby laughed. Alistair laughed. I wanted to laugh to fit in, but Kitten’s dead eyes freaked me out, so I just stood there, my face twitching.
“I don’t get what’s funny,” Henry said.
“I’ll tell you who they are after we’re done with them,” Digby said.
“I don’t know, kid. I’m not the patient type. I don’t think I could stand the suspense.”
“I’m confident you’ll find a way,” Digby said.
Kitten tapped her nails on the bench she was sitting on. “Fine. But don’t make me wait too long.”
“You’ll be the first one I tell.” Digby started to leave.
“Hey!”
We froze.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” She pointed to a digital scale and held out her hand to Digby. “Okay, noobs, you’re supposed to give me a dollar bill to calibrate the scale. Don’t let them use their own bill because I guarantee, it’ll be a funky hollowed-out one. It won’t matter much for when you’re just buying weed, but if you’re buying stuff sold by the gram . . .”
I produced a dollar when it became clear Digby didn’t have one to give.
“A dollar bill weighs one gram exactly,” she said. The scale agreed. “So, you want an onion? A cutie pie?”
“Uh . . .” Digby said. “What does twenty bucks buy?”
“Usually, not much. But for you . . . a dime of my finest. My thank-you-and-please-come-again rate.” She took the twenty from Digby, weighed out a pile of shriveled leaves, and poured it into a Ziploc bag labeled BALONEY. She winked and said, “Recycle and reuse.” She gave Digby her card. “They call me Mello Yello. For obvious reasons.”
“Right,” Digby said.
“Because I’m chill,” she said. “Anyway, I’m shutting down my bricks-and-mortar operation. Call anytime.”
On the way out, Alistair pointed at Henry wearing Digby’s jacket. “My jackets fit like that too. My wrists get cold in the wintertime. I wear wristbands.”
The sun seemed brighter when we finally got out of that shed. My skin was buzzing. Maybe it was the relief of making it out alive. Or maybe I was high from breathing Mello Yello’s smoke. I looked to see if Digby and Henry felt weird too.
“I’m starving,” Digby said. The munchies? But then, Digby was always starving, so that might not have meant anything at all.
At the diner, after we stuffed our faces and high-fived each other for surviving another one of Digby’s idiotic dares, we pieced together what we knew.
Marina Miller: still missing. Her gynecologist: Schell, known pornographer and small-time drug dealer. Ezekiel: friends with Schell. There was a good chance Ezekiel was also stealing from a drug dealer named Bananaman. Bananaman: not small-time.
“Lemme guess, you’re not telling the police any of this,” Henry said.
“Not for free, anyway,” Digby said.
“You mean in exchange for your sister’s case files?” I said.
“For starters,” Digby said.
The guns, the drugs, the missing girl: These were really happening to the three of us. But after we were done talking about all that, the conversation turned to the dance. Even at the time, I was aware it was ridiculous that the ideas of getting shot and turning up dateless at the dance caused me an equal amount of stress. They did, though.
SEVENTEEN
At school the next week, I was on my way to Spanish when I realized I really needed the bathroom. “No biggie, just go to the bathroom,” you say? It’s not that simple. Girls’ bathrooms here are marked off and defended like gang turf. The bathroom I usually went to was clear across campus, though, and I was already late to class. Again.
The nearest one was the main bathroom by the cafeteria. I’d gone to it once at the beginning of the year and swore I’d never go back. This was the bathroom where the Big Girls on Campus (mostly seniors and a select group of junior girls who were either majorly ballsy or had been given the seniors’ seal of approval) hang out and competitively primp. No one went in alone and no one’s there to actually use the toilets. The place smelled like a salon.
But I really needed to pee, so I went in, hoping it was close enough to the start of classes that it might have emptied out. No joy: It was packed.
One group of girls shared a curling iron. “No, it’s good when your hair steams. It’s the frizz coming out,” one girl said.
Another group huddled together passing around lipsticks.
At one of the stalls, two girls were using Sharpies to write a Hot or Not list of boys on the door.
“Ew, Darla . . . no. Nose grease,” one said as she crossed off her friend’s last entry. “Disqualified.”
I felt a fireball of hate hit me in the chest. Sloane. She stared at me as I walked to the stalls. She and her backup blond girls were at the sinks nearest the windows, which was probably the most valuable bathroom real estate because they were beside the only full-length mirror and the hand blower with a nozzle that could be flipped up so it doubled as a hair dryer.
One blond backup pointed at me. “Hey, isn’t that—”
“Yeah. Why’s she here?” Sloane said.
I ducked into a stall and caught my breath.
Outside, Sloane said, “Okay, check this out. Who am I?” I peeked out of the crack by the stall door and watched Sloane do robot arms and mime falling forward stiffly over and over. “They had to cut the volleyball net,” Sloane said to her laughing posse. “Loser.”
I felt a wave of exhaustion. Two more years of this if I didn’t get into Prentiss.
Then the laughter hushed up. It reminded me of a video I once saw where it went really still right before a tornado touched down and ripped up a town. I looked back through the crack but Sloane and her gang weren’t by the window anymore. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sloane’s phone peeking over into my stall.
Now, in the old days, I probably would’ve done the normal thing: Scream, storm out of the bathroom, thank God they hadn’t filmed me actually peeing, and then obsess about why Sloane was picking on me.
But these were new days. I had a scar on my chin. I was on a first-name basis with cops. For
the past few nights, ever since the Dumpster fire, Digby had been coming over to hang out and eat, and I guess the sly tricks from the outrageous stories he’d been telling me had sunk in. I batted the phone out of Sloane’s hand. I heard her gasp as she lost her grip on it. It clunked against the porcelain before slipping underwater in the bowl. That’s the sound of eight hundred bucks going down the toilet, I thought. I wanted to cheer when the screen distorted, then shorted out and went black. I kept it together, though, and walked out of the stall.
Sloane confronted me at the sinks. “You owe me a phone.” There were red spots on her cheeks.
“You mean the phone you were using to film me in the bathroom?” I said.
The red spots on her cheeks grew, but she backed off. “Whatever. It’s fine. Plenty more where that came from.”
“It’s okay, Sloane, you can get it fixed,” one blond backup said.
“Leave it,” Sloane said.
But the blonde had fished the phone from the toilet and was holding it out to Sloane.
“I said leave it!” Sloane screamed. That’s the problem with needing a posse to represent: They represent, all right, and when they do something humiliating like dive into a toilet, they take you down with them.
Sloane ran out and the other groups of girls openly laughed at her.
“That was like that YouTube of the giraffe kicking the lion.” One of the Sharpie vandals stuck her hand out for me to shake. “My name’s Bill. This is Darla.” Bill draped a toilet paper sash across my chest. “For your bravery, your bitchiness under pressure, and your service to all the girls of River Heights High . . . we thank you.”
“Hi . . . Bill?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard right.
“Well, it’s really Isabel but yuck, right? Ever since that movie-that-must-not-be-named, Isabel, Isabella, Bella . . . no. Just no,” Bill said. “So, did you really get arrested?”
“Well, we were taken into custody, which isn’t really the same thing.”
“That guy Digby. What’s up with him?” Bill said. “Are you two . . . ?”
“Digby? No.” I said.
“I remember in grade school his sister was murdered. He was messed up,” Bill said. “I mean, he was never normal or anything. But now . . .”
“With the suit,” Darla said.
“And the attitude,” Bill said. “Hot.”
“Hot,” Darla said.
“He’s number four,” Bill said.
I read the list. “No Henry Petropolous?”
“Petro-puh-lease. He’s so . . . pedestrian,” Bill said.
“So pedestrian,” Darla said.
“Saying you like him’s like saying your favorite pizza topping is cheese. Snore,” Bill said.
It was like I’d stepped into some weird alternate universe. Where had these girls been the whole time?
Instead of jewelry, Bill had grocery lists and notes-to-self scribbled up and down her arm like a tattoo sleeve, new writing sitting on top of the old scribblings that hadn’t washed off yet. Her clothes were a vintage-y, Grandma, biker mix and she wore makeup but not in a way that said she was doing it to look pretty, because that would be lame. Plus, she had a gravelly voice. Darla had the same vibe, but she was basically an echo. Darla was Bill Lite.
Then I remembered who they were. “Oh, wait. You guys got the homecoming formal canceled,” I said.
“Everyone remembers that part but forgets that we got the budget for the formal donated to the Covenant House,” Bill said. “Anyhow, all we did was start a petition. The people spoke.”
“And it was basically only a moral victory because the Blooms just cut a big-ass check so their little Cinderella would still get to go to the ball,” Darla said.
“Darla, we didn’t do it to piss Sloane off. We did it for Covenant House,” Bill said. “Your life’s not a movie starring Sloane.”
“Whoa. You’re right. That’s deep,” Darla said.
See? Bill Lite.
“So. Digby,” Bill said.
“Yeah, we want to know about Digby,” Darla said.
“Among other things . . . like how you get your bangs so smooth.” Bill held her phone out to me. “We need to hang.”
I know I sound weird, but it was an instant friend crush. I wanted to be friends with Bill so much that, high from the first meaningful contact I’d made in that school besides my questionable friendships with Digby and Henry, I blurted out something I would regret horribly. “Yeah . . . we should hang out. Gimme a call and I’ll call Digby.” They wanted the Digby freak show? I’d give them the Digby freak show. I took her phone and entered my number.
My feet weren’t touching the ground when I left. I saw it all so clearly: Bill, Darla, and me at the mall, the three of us eating lunch, the three of us not taking crap from Sloane. I was so busy daydreaming, I didn’t notice the boys’ bathroom door open until a hand shot out and dragged me in by the elbow.
I found myself standing beside the urinals.
“Hey, Princeton, I was just gonna go looking for you,” Digby said.
“What the hell?” I said.
A boy at a urinal turned and also yelled, “What the hell?” and then what-the-something-else when he realized he’d peed on his own shoes. Some boys coming in saw me and backed out of the bathroom.
One kid said, “Oh, man, I heard she was a guy.”
“You realize that’s gonna be the new rumor about me now, right?” I said.
“I like it. I might help spread that myself. Big-city transgender teen moves to small town to establish new identity, start new life. Calls herself Zoe,” Digby said. “That TV movie writes itself. You’ll be famous. All the girls will finally want to be your friend.”
“Until they ask to see it and I’m suddenly some big fraud.”
“Stuff a sock down your pants and don’t date until college. Who’s gonna know?”
“As always, excellent advice. So what am I doing in here? This place reeks.”
“I remembered where I’ve seen that banana logo before.”
“You couldn’t come out of the bathroom and tell me that instead of dragging me in here?”
“No, look.” Digby took me to a stall where, on the wall, someone had crudely drawn the skateboarding banana.
“Okay, so . . . now you wanna find who drew this?”
Digby pointed at writing under the drawing. “F2 1600.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know, but look. The paint underneath . . . it’s streaky. Like this spot’s been wiped.” Digby stuck his nose against the stall wall and sniffed.
“That’s disgusting.”
“Turpentine. This writing under the banana changes. I bet these are, like, instructions and they change all the time.”
“Time. Like, sixteen hundred . . . military style? Four p.m.?”
“So F2 is . . . the place? Obviously the place. Drug dealer telling customers the place and time. But what does F2 mean?”
We stood there in silence. The halls had gone silent too.
“Great. Class started. I’m late. Again. And I still haven’t peed.”
I went into a stall and tried to pee. Seconds passed. Then a minute.
“Hey, Digby, turn on a tap. I can’t go.”
“Would you feel better if I peed too?”
“Just do it, please. It’s starting to hurt—”
“Hey, let me see your book.”
Digby reached over the stall door, took my bag off the hook, and rummaged through it. My lip gloss rolled across the floor. Of the boys’ bathroom. No way was I putting that on my lips again.
“Just tell me which book you need, I’ll get it for you,” I said.
“The Student Handbook. I know you carry yours around, Princeton.”
The handbook had the school rules and regul
ations, pictures of the teachers, and the class schedules and room assignments. It was totally dorky, but I carried it around because I liked the homework planner in the back.
“The one with the blue cover. Would you not throw my stuff on the floor, please?”
I finally peed and came out of the stall. Digby was looking at the campus map in the handbook.
“F2’s a storage room across from the labs,” he said. “That’s gotta be it. They’ll be there at four. We should go.”
“Because our last drug deal wasn’t stupid enough.”
“What are you talking about? That went well.”
“Don’t you think we’re gonna eventually run out of luck? Plus, we go to school here. Whoever’s selling will probably know we were the ones who broke into Schell’s office,” I said.
“Hm . . . you’re right. We can’t go.”
“No. We can’t.”
Digby washed his hands, a vague expression on his face.
“Hello?” I said.
“Hey,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m thinking.” He balled up his paper towel.
“So, you agree? We can’t go.”
“Yeah. No. We can’t go.”
He three-pointed the paper towel and said, “Um, okay . . . see you at four.” He walked out before I could remind him again that we couldn’t go.
EIGHTEEN
I had after-school plans to group chat with friends from back home. I’d flaked on them the last few times without giving a reason and they thought I was just blowing them off. Truth was, I’d gotten caught up doing Digby stuff, which I couldn’t explain to them because, frankly, I didn’t know how to.
They used to get pissed when I bailed. I’d get angry messages and, like, a turd icon in my inbox. But the last time, they were just “whatever” when I skipped. My former closest friend, Cecily, never brought it up, but she had definitely been treating me differently. She’d chat but be really distant, then she’d include me when she sent group updates like, “Sex and the City+pizza=Woohoo!” to remind me I was missing out. Honestly, freezing me out for real would be less hurtful.
Trouble is a Friend of Mine Page 12