by Karen Karbo
“I wanted to talk to you about all this nosing around you’ve been doing,” she said.
I rolled my lips inside my mouth and stared out the window at a Goth couple strolling into a 7-Eleven. I was not going to say a word. I turned the air-conditioning vent on my face, closed my eyes, and tried to focus on the dry, cool air blowing on my cheeks. My mom was an expert at saying the same thing over and over until finally you agreed with her just to get her to stop. Trying to tell your side of things only made the whole ordeal twice as long.
“Poking around into other people’s business is just asking for trouble. Not only that, it’s dangerous and you could get hurt,” she said.
I looked out the window.
“That’s what they have police detectives for, Minnow,” she said.
More looking out the window.
“That’s what they get paid for, solving crimes. You keep this up and one day you’ll find yourself in jail or … or worse!”
“Does the air inside the car get colder if you drive faster?” I finally asked.
“I’m serious, Minerva! This is not something you want to be doing. Life isn’t a movie. What if you discover some drug addict is involved in one of these crimes? Those people don’t mess around. They have guns.”
“I’m serious, too. Quills told me how air-conditioning worked once, but I forgot.”
“Next time please do me a favor and just call the police. Just have that Angus person call the police.”
“All right, fine.”
“Promise me.”
“I said ‘fine,’ all right?”
The air-conditioning whirred as we tooled along in silence. I dared to imagine the conversation was over, reached over, and turned the radio back on.
“I just think there are other ways you can use your … new gifts,” she said.
“What new gifts?” I asked, just to be dense. I sank down in my seat and propped my knees against the dashboard. Mrs. Dagnitz and I had never really talked about the way I’d changed since my accident. I looked over at her. I couldn’t imagine what she was going to say.
“It’s just so nice to see you with all this self-confidence. You should take advantage of it. Have fun, enjoy it. I was thinking we could get your hair straightened. And I’d like to buy you some kicky sandals. Those tennis shoes you like are adorable, but you’re old enough to learn about the world of shoes.”
“The world of shoes?” I snorted.
“Maybe you could straighten your hair before school starts. They have that new Japanese method. It’d be fun.”
“Fun? How is straightening your hair fun? That’s like saying going to the dentist is fun.”
“Going to the dentist can be fun … having healthy, white, perfect teeth can make you feel good about your smile. And a pretty smile does wonders for your self-esteem.”
That word hung in the car like a huge invisible air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. “I already have self-esteem,” I said. “Straight Japanese hair wouldn’t make me have more of it.”
“I said it was a method perfected by the Japanese,” said Mrs. Dagnitz, running a yellow light.
“Mark Clark says you can get a ticket for that.”
“All I’m trying to say is that you’re young, Minnow. You’ve got your entire life ahead of you, and you just shouldn’t be afraid to … what’s the word you kids use? Work it.”
“That would be two words,” I said.
“You understand what I’m getting at?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Instead of doing something interesting I should be obsessed with trying to look like Paris Hilton.”
“I am NOT saying that at all,” said Mrs. Dagnitz.
She lies.
“Thank you. Drive through, please.” I couldn’t believe I had said this to my mother. Mark Clark would have grounded me straight into the afterlife if I had said that to him.
“I just want you to be happy!” she cried.
“I am happy,” I said. Until you showed up, I wanted to say, but even I am not that mean. Luckily, we’d arrived at Whole Foods. Mrs. Dagnitz parked in the space farthest from the door.
“There’s a space over there,” I said, even though I couldn’t have cared less.
“I try to get in as much walking as possible during my day,” she said. “You should, too. It’s a painless way to up your activity level.”
“Can I stay in the car?”
Mrs. Dagnitz sighed loudly. “I love you, Minnow.”
“Love you, too.” I looked out the window at a bum in a dirty hot-pink parka trundling by with a shopping cart full of empty bottles. It was so hot, how could he wear that parka?
Mrs. Dagnitz hopped out of the car without another word. I watched her narrow back as she marched away from the car, and then I called Angus Paine.
2
Mrs. Dagnitz dropped me off in front of Casa Clark after telling me three times to put the groceries away. Compared with the other pretty, wood-shingled houses on our street, our big stucco box looks like a Mexican restaurant. Quills, my brother who is the bassist for the band Humongous Bag of Cashews, says it is something called “eclectic,” a fancy word for “freakish.”
I grabbed the plastic bag full of groceries, hauled myself out of the car, and slammed the door a teeny bit harder than was necessary. Mrs. Dagnitz watched me from over her sunglasses. She didn’t say another word about “working it.” Just the thought of that conversation practically gave me a seizure, which is how I always feel when I’m too embarrassed to even speak. Mrs. Dagnitz roared off to pick up Mr. Dagnitz from yoga. Why they couldn’t leave their yoga back in Santa Fe, I don’t know.
When I saw Kevin’s blue bike propped against the side of the house, I got a funny feeling in my chest, as if a helium balloon were stuck in there. It was such a relief to come home and see that dumb little BMX bike. Kevin was going into ninth grade and had a real summer job. He worked as a manny, a man-nanny, and spent his days playing Legos and opening juice boxes for Harvey and Otis, a pair of eight-year-old boys who belonged to his mom’s coworker. Kevin made ten dollars an hour. In my humble opinion that is a lot of money for a ninth grader.
I dropped the bag of groceries on the kitchen counter and tossed the halibut into the fridge. Last year in health we’d learned that leaving fish out on the counter could kill you. I’d put the other stuff away later. I figured I had a half hour until Mrs. Dagnitz returned.
From upstairs, I could hear Xbox sounds of cartoon bad guys getting blown up. I took the stairs two at a time. I was less happy to see Kevin when I found him in the TV room playing a video game with Morgan, my youngest older brother. Even though Kevin had been my official boyfriend for less than two weeks, I suspected that he came over to see my brothers as much as to see me. Kevin had a snotty older sister but no brothers. I have no sisters and three brothers, and it is more or less Boy Central around my house all the time. Which is part of why it was a little strange having Mrs. Dagnitz flitting in and out. Luckily, she was not staying at Casa Clark with Mr. Dagnitz. Even though my dad, Charlie, was out of town on lawyer business until the end of the month, it would still feel bizarre waking up in the morning and seeing them sitting at the table drinking their coffee.
Kevin and Morgan were perched on the edge of Cat Pee Couch, so named because we once had an evil tabby cat that sprayed the legs of whoever sat in her spot. That tabby is long gone and the couch has been drenched with an expensive pet-odor remover, but on hot summer days you can sometimes still catch a whiff of that bad old cat. Kevin wore khaki shorts and a blue striped polo shirt. He was six feet tall, with shiny brown-blond hair and mountain-lake-blue eyes. I was pretty sure I would marry Kevin one day when we were thirty and he had gotten his PhD in marine biology and had saved the world’s coral reefs and I had gotten tired of my life as a globe-trotting sleuth solving important mysteries they normally reserved for Scotland Yard and places like that. Only then would we be ready to buy our ranch on the island of Maui, where we woul
d surf and raise Appaloosas. I wasn’t quite sure what those were, but Kevin assured me they were most excellent.
Morgan wore his trademark earflap hat, even though it was the dead middle of a humid Portland summer. It was almost never hot in our city, but when the heat finally showed up, it became the guest that wouldn’t leave. Even in the middle of the night it could be eighty-five degrees. People said that’s because we live in a valley, something to do with the hot air getting stuck.
Ned slept curled between them, snoring into his paws. The room was stuffy and smelled of clean dog—Ned had just had a bath—cheese pizza, and chlorine. Kevin was a champion swimmer, which meant he always smelled of chlorine. He swam the butterfly, the most show-offy stroke there is.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” said Morgan, glancing up at me.
“I can’t believe you still have that hat on. It’s eight hundred degrees in here,” I said. Between the boys and the dog, there was nowhere for me to sit.
“It’s my good-luck hat,” said Morgan.
“Hey, babe,” said Kevin. I liked how he called me babe, even though it sort of sounded like something he’d practiced at home in the mirror, winking and pointing at himself with finger guns.
“You can’t hide from me, suckah!” Kevin’s thumbs jigged around the controller as he blasted away. On the screen, the cartoon bad guys threw up their hands and screamed before they exploded. I stood in the doorway for a long minute. He never looked away from the screen.
I’ll tell you one thing: I’m never going to be one of those girls who watches her boyfriend play video games and calls that hanging out. It is more boring than weeding the yard. It is more boring than a parental lecture. It is even more boring than when boys talk about playing video games. How is that possible?
I turned around and ran up the stairs to my bedroom on the third floor.
My ferret, Jupiter, used to sleep in a cage behind the grand piano in the living room downstairs, but after Ned arrived, we bought him a fancy new ferret tower, with four levels connected by ramps and tubes, and moved him to my bedroom. Ned liked to stand in front of Jupiter’s cage, madly wagging his stump of a tail. We couldn’t tell if that meant he wanted Jupiter to be his friend or his snack.
I opened Jupiter’s cage, scooped him up from where he was conked out in his hammock, and tossed him onto my bed. Jupiter doesn’t mind being airborne. He throws his little white legs out wide like a flying squirrel. As usual, he behaved as if he’d never been out of his cage until that very second. He performed his mad inchworm dance until he fell off the bed, bumped into a chair leg, pulled one of my flip-flops under the bed, scampered back out and attacked a wadded-up piece of paper, hurled himself into the air for no good reason, fell backward, dove into one of my shoes, and then was distracted by a CD that had fallen on the floor and that he tried to drag under my dresser.
I plopped down on my bed and watched Jupiter for a while. I crossed my legs and thought about my second conversation with Angus Paine. I’d waited until Mrs. Dagnitz had walked all the way across the supermarket parking lot and disappeared into the market before calling him back. It was too easy. I just had to hit the button that dialed the number of the last incoming call. Tip tap, just like that, and the strange boy was on the line.
I told him I’d love to help him figure out who had burned down his family’s grocery store.
“All right,” he said. He sounded distant, much less warm and friendly than when he’d called me only the hour before. He was annoyed, distracted. I’d say he was playing video games, but I couldn’t hear any noise in the background.
“When do you want to meet?” I said.
Pause.
“Whatever works for you,” he said.
“Are you still there? Hello?” I said loudly. I knew he hadn’t hung up, but his behavior truly bugged. Hadn’t he called me?
“Let’s make it two o’clock tomorrow then,” he said. “At the grocery.”
Is it considered hanging up on somebody if you don’t say good-bye? If it is, then Angus Paine had hung up on me. As I snapped my phone shut, I realized I hadn’t asked for directions to Corbett Street Grocery. But then again, he hadn’t offered to give me the address either. Did he think that just because his family’s grocery was on Cryptkeeper Ron’s Tour of Haunted Portland that I would automatically know where it was? Or maybe between the time Angus Paine first called me and the time I’d called him back, he’d found someone else to help him. Or maybe he’d just decided to forget it.
Man, was it hot up there. The windows were wide open over my desk, but the air was dead still, a breeze the last thing on its sluggish mind. I pulled my hair up and tied it in a knot on top of my head, tugged off my khaki pants, kicked them into the back of my closet, and put on some jean shorts. I have a theory that the reason why jeans never go out of style is that you can fish them out of a dirty clothes pile and they are never wrinkled. They can pass for clean longer than any other type of clothing.
I was just about to settle in with my rebus notebook when I heard someone clomping up the stairs to the third floor.
Kevin!
… who was not supposed to be in my bedroom at all, ever.
The second day Kevin was my boyfriend Mark Clark came home from work early and caught us smooching in the TV room. My face was so red I thought I might give myself sunburn. Kevin leaped up when Mark appeared in the doorway, then got one look at the paid-assassin expression on my brother’s face and made up an excuse about having to go home for dinner, even though he was supposed to be having dinner with us.
After Kevin left, Mark Clark demanded to know if our mom had ever talked to me about the birds and the bees. The birds and the bees! Does anyone under the age of ninety even call it that anymore? I could not believe we were having this conversation. From the look on Mark Clark’s face, he could not believe we were having it either. Mark Clark was sweating, giant pit stains beneath his arms.
We’d been standing in the kitchen. For some reason I was holding a can of refried beans. I was so traumatized, I cannot remember why I was holding a can of refried beans. I told him I needed to practice the piano and ran into the living room and started pounding on our baby grand. I haven’t taken piano lessons in five years. Then Mark Clark came after me and said I wasn’t allowed to have Kevin in my room. Never ever EVER. A week later, I found the can of beans under the piano bench.
Now Kevin came over and sat on the other edge of my bed. There was nothing weird about it. Why Mark Clark was so hysterical, I don’t know. Kevin turned my rebus notebook toward him and took a mechanical pencil out of his pocket. Kevin is the kind of boy who always has a mechanical pencil (but not a pocket protector). He wrote:
S
B
A
R
G
“That would be ‘Stand up for sbarg,’” I said.
“Ha ha,” said Kevin. “Too easy, huh?”
“Up for grabs,” I said. “I think I already did that one.”
“I just made it up,” he said.
“You probably stole it from me,” I said. I reached over and poked him in his side. He waggled his eyebrows at me. A smooch was most definitely incoming. At the same time, I heard a car door slam outside in the driveway, beneath my window.
It was Mark Clark! It was Mrs. Dagnitz! It was some authority figure capable of getting me GOT—Grounded Off Technology—which meant no television, DVD player, computer, or cell phone. It was the equivalent of being flung back into the Stone Age, and should have been illegal, like selling children into slavery.
I hopped off the bed, trying to be casual instead of hysterical. I could still see Mark Clark saying, “Never ever EVER!” This must be evidence that I’m not boy crazy, because I would much rather pass up a smooch from Kevin than get grounded for the rest of the summer.
“Heyyyy. Come back here,” Kevin said.
“Incoming ferret,” I said. I reached down and scooped up Jupiter from where he was ha
uling one of my Chuck Taylors around by the shoestring. I tossed him into Kevin’s lap.
“Today some dude called me about solving an arson,” I said.
“I thought we were chillaxing here,” said Kevin. More eyebrow waggling. He patted the place on my bed where I had just been sitting. Kevin had very dark eyebrows compared with his hair. He said it was because his family was Black Irish. I don’t know what that is. Note to self: Google “Black Irish.”
Pat pat pat. “Come here, babe.”
“Someone burned down his family’s grocery store,” I said.
Kevin sighed. I could tell he realized there was going to be no rolling around on my bed today. “They say arson is the toughest crime to solve. I saw a show on it on the Discovery Channel.”
“Tougher than murder?” I asked. I had already solved a murder.
“The evidence is usually destroyed by the fire. What started the fire gets burned up in it. Wicked sketchy, huh?” he said.
“You mean—”
“Let’s say you use a rag drenched in gasoline to start a fire. What’s the first thing that gets burned to a crisp? The rag. So the cops come in, have a look around, can’t find any physical evidence, and close the case. Now come back over here.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to be up here,” I said. “My brother might come after you with his dojo.”
Kevin laughed. “Isn’t there where you go to take karate lessons?”
I didn’t know. Mojo? Hojo? I thought a dojo was one of those weapons boys always think are so cool.
From downstairs I could hear voices and cupboard doors slamming.
“Uh-oh. The groceries.”
I dashed out of my room, tore to the end of hallway, hopped onto the fireman’s pole, and slid down into the kitchen. Luckily I’d put lotion on my legs that morning. The fireman’s pole was here when we moved in—don’t ask me why the family who lived in this house before us thought they needed one. The advantage of the fireman’s pole was that you dropped into the kitchen like a ninja. I hardly ever used it, but once in a while it was one hundred percent handy.