by Karen Karbo
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he said. “But if you do, don’t let Mom find out.”
“Can you believe she changed her name to Dagnitz?” I said. “Deedee Dagnitz.”
“Yeah, well,” he said.
“She’s driving me totally insane,” I said. “Was she always this perky-weird, or is it all the yoga?”
“The yoga’s actually made her better,” said Quills. He’d put his case down and tore a spotty banana from the bunch on top of the fridge. “Where is she, anyway?”
“They went to a movie, then back to their hotel. But she will see me bright and early in the morning, so she can get in a full day of making me want to pluck out my own eyes.” I picked up the sponge from the window ledge and squeezed it again with all my might. If it had been a live sponge, I would have killed it.
Quills left for band practice without saying when he would be back. Normally, he would have said when he was coming home—he would have left the time on a scrap of paper and stuck it under one of the plastic bug magnets on the fridge. Now that Mrs. Dagnitz was back, he acted as if he could do as he pleased, as if we didn’t need to know where he was going and when he would be back.
From the computer room across the hall I could hear cartoon swords clashing, Mark Clark on his video game killing his pretend monsters.
I snagged two Otter Pops from the big box in the freezer and pretend ice-skated into the backyard, where Kevin sat on the picnic bench picking at a scab on his knee. It was twilight, the Purpley Time, as I used to call it when I was little. I brought him a red Otter Pop, rested it on his bare thigh. Red was his favorite flavor. Red was everyone’s favorite flavor. I hated to say this about Kevin, but he pretty much liked everything every other boy I knew liked. World of Warcraft. X-Men movies. McDonald’s Big Macs. Skechers. He’d told me he was taking Japanese next year, which I thought made him a brainiac nerd like Reggie, but it turned out that it was just because the teacher was supereasy. Was this bad? Considering he had the most killer deep-mountain-lake-blue eyes?
Kevin tore the top of his Otter Pop open with his teeth. We started a debate about which Otter Pops were better, the red ones or the green ones. Otter Pops are just colored frozen sugar water in a plastic tube, but we compared flavors like we were world-famous creators of frozen confections.
“Green is far superior because it mingles the flavor of sugar, water, and green dye,” I said.
“Red is the Otter Pop flavor of Nickelback,” said Kevin. “It’s pure bombdiggity goodness.”
“Green is a cool color, and makes you feel cooler when you eat it.”
“Red is better because it just tastes better,” he said.
“That’s just your opinion,” I said. “You need evidence to back it up.” I sounded like my dad, Charlie, the lawyer.
Kevin sucked on his Otter Pop and shrugged. I got the feeling it was too much trouble for him to think up an answer. He had come over straight after his manny job. Smears of chocolate stained the thighs of his khaki shorts, and Harvey or Otis had drawn a two-headed snake on the back of his hand.
Even though Kevin had been my boyfriend for a while now, it still was strange having him show up at my house. When Kevin showed up, I had to stop whatever I was doing and have a conversation, and there was always the big question of whether we’d kiss. Chelsea de Guzman always had boyfriends, but mostly they just texted back and forth hundreds of times a day. They talked on the phone. They IMed. It was as if her boyfriends lived in Mozambique and this was the only way they could communicate. I knew for a fact that one of her boyfriends lived three blocks away. Still, this arrangement seemed a lot less stressful than having the boy turn up and sit on your picnic table and eat all your red Otter Pops.
Kevin was in the middle of a story about the twins and a praying mantis they had found on a shrub when who should blast up the driveway on his skateboard but my best friend, Reggie. He wore a backwards baseball cap and a baggy T-shirt that said, CALL ME GEEK TODAY, BOSS TOMORROW.
“S’up?” said Reg.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” said Kevin.
Then, silence. Kevin concentrated on slurping the last bit of melted red juice from the bottom of his Otter Pop, and Reg concentrated on flipping the end of his skateboard with his toe.
Can I just say—awkward!
The first time Kevin ever flew up our driveway on his little bike, Reg and I were sitting on the kitchen floor messing around with Ned, tying a red bandanna first around his neck, turning him into a gunslinger (Rootin’ Tootin’ One-Eyed Ned), and then around his chin, turning him into an old lady (Gramma Neddy). Reg was the king of impersonations. He has a great old-granny voice. Kevin has a great big high horse he sits on once in a while. Is it because he is tall, and a swimmer? He leaned against the sink and texted a friend, refusing to join in the fun. Later that very night, Kevin IMed me that Reg was a dweeb and Reg IMed me that Kevin was a tool.
I couldn’t think of anything to do but tell Reg what was s’up. He asked, didn’t he? Kevin knew about Angus Paine, but Reggie didn’t. I told him how Angus had seen the article about me in the paper, and called to see if I could help him solve the mystery of who had burned down his family’s haunted grocery, which was already a mysterious place because it had its own ghost, who lived in the walk-in freezer. I told how Robotective with the voice from 2001 and the glass eye thought it was an accident, and how Angus was positive it wasn’t, and how the whole thing was getting weirder by the minute because just as I was thinking I agreed with Robotective, I ran across Paisley’s on 23rd, which had a sign in the window saying the business was taking over the same space as the grocery, when that was totally impossible.
“But it’s not impossible,” said Reg. He’d set his skateboard against the side of the house, had found the basketball in the woodpile by the garage, and had started shooting baskets. “Businesses move around all the time. There’s that gas station on Sandy across from the Jack in the Box that’s now a bank.”
“But if Paisley’s was moving there, that would mean that Angus’s family was selling the store, and the way he made it sound, they were totally never selling it. The reason it’s so important that it be ruled arson and not an accident is so they can get the insurance money to fix it and then reopen it. That grocery store is, like, their whole lives.”
“You still get insurance money if it’s an accident,” said Kevin. He watched Reg make a jump shot. Reg was a brain, not a jock, but his house also had its own hoop bolted over the garage, and shooting baskets was something he did when he was stuck on a computer coding problem.
“Not nearly as much,” I said.
“Who discovered the fire? ’Cause you know what they say about arson. The one who smelt it dealt it,” said Kevin.
Reg snorted, dribbled toward the basket, and performed a perfect jump shot, nothing but net. I kept waiting for Kevin to lope on over and steal the ball, but he just sat there, folding and unfolding the Otter Pop’s empty plastic sleeve. “No lie, dude,” said Kevin. “With arson, the one who reports it is usually the one who set it.”
“Are you a junior fireman or something?” said Reg. “Where’s your dalmatian?”
“Are you always such a freakin’ tool?” asked Kevin. “Min obviously needs our help here.”
Reg spun around and shot me the ball, which I caught without flinching. If you have three older brothers and a basketball hoop, you learn how to do this while you are still in diapers.
“Minerva doesn’t need our help, dude. She owns us when it comes to this stuff. But then, you wouldn’t know that, would you?” Reg glared at Kevin from under his wavy bangs.
What was he on about? I tuned out while they tossed low-grade insults at each other. Kevin said he didn’t know how I could stand Reg, who was a know-it-all jerk, and Reg said at least he knew something, which was more than he could say about Kevin.
It was almost dark. The security light came on over the garage. Reg challenged Kevin to a game of
horse. I could have joined in, but I needed to sort some things out. I took over Kevin’s spot on the picnic table and stared out at the tree-enshrouded yard.
I wrapped my elbows around my shins, rested my chin on my knees, and thought about Paisley’s on 23rd, how sleepy it had been in there, as if they hadn’t had a customer all day. I remember looking down into the glass case and noticing the neat rows of snickerdoodles. Freshly baked that morning and not one had been purchased. It had been head-sweaty hot, there was no doubt about it, but on our way home we’d driven past a shop that sold nothing but fancy cupcakes and it was packed. People had even been sitting outside on the spindly little metal chairs, licking off the frosting and sighing with delight. If it was too hot for cookies, it was too hot for cupcakes, right?
All I know about business is what I learned from having a lemonade stand with Reggie one summer when we were in fourth grade. We’d persuaded our moms to let us sell fresh squeezed. That would be our selling point. We wrote FRESH-SQUEEZED! in the corners of our sign in lemony-yellow letters outlined in red. When we hardly sold any, we got the idea that maybe we needed a new street corner. We moved the operation from Reggie’s corner to my corner, and business picked up a little. That was probably what Paisley was thinking, that if she moved to another corner, she’d sell more snickerdoodles. Maybe that’s why she was moving her business to 222 S.W. Corbett. I’d go back in the morning and talk to her. In the meantime, I wanted to call Angus Paine and grill him about what was going on. Were his parents selling the building or what? And why hadn’t he told me? Wasn’t that sort of major?
I was thinking so hard I hadn’t noticed it had gotten dark. The trees in our yard must have been a hundred feet tall. They’d been there before there were houses around here, and most of these houses were a hundred years old. They blocked out the streetlight. They blocked out all light. Just as I was thinking it was downright horror-movie creepy under our backyard canopy of leafy branches, I flashed on the image of Angus’s Grams, or whoever she was, burned to a crisp, glued to her chair by her polyester pants, and just as I was trying to shake that horrible image from my head, something hit my arm.
“Ow!” What the …!
I had to crane my neck around to find Reg and Kevin, over on the far side of the basket, about as far away from me as they could possibly be and still be able to make a shot. Something else hit me in the middle of my chest. The sharp, pyramid-shaped rock fell into my lap. I peered into the dark yard. Behind the trees ran a low white picket fence. There was a narrow break between two trees on the sidewalk side of the backyard, and I could just make out what looked like someone on a bike.
“Hey!” I yelled out. “When I tell my three older brothers that someone’s throwing rocks at me, it’s really going to suck to be you!”
With that the kids—it turned out to be three of them—tore past on their bikes.
“You suck, Minerva Clark, you big snitch!” Then they fell all over themselves giggling, and one of their bikes crashed over, and one of the kids swore at one of the other ones. Then suddenly Reg sped past me, running down the driveway shouting and waving his hands like some lunatic cowboy trying to get his cows to move. “Mwahaha-hahaha!” shouted Reg, chasing the kids down the street.
“What was up with that?” said Kevin.
“I’d say it was the fifth graders who TPed my friend Chelsea’s house a while back.”
“Why’d they call you a snitch?”
“They got the TP from the storage closet at school. I told Mrs. Grumble. She’s the recess monitor for the lower grades. She was in the army before she came to our school.”
“So you are a snitch,” said Kevin. I could tell he thought that was tragically uncool.
“Yeah, I am. There is never any toilet paper in the middle school girls’ bathroom, and I’m totally sick of it.”
We strolled down to the end of the drive. The streetlight showed two dripping patches of yellow on the side of my house. The fifth graders had tossed a few eggs before Reg chased them off.
“Looks like you made some enemies,” said Kevin.
“You can hardly call fifth graders enemies,” I said. “More like an infestation.”
I was grateful to hear Kevin laugh. A lot of times I cracked what I thought was a pretty good joke and he just stood there looking at me.
6
It was the dead middle of the night and the temperature in my room was at least a hundred. I was getting to an age where I understood the grown-up complaint—if it just weren’t so humid. It was global warming right there on the third floor of Casa Clark, Portland, Oregon, USA, Earth, Milky Way, Universe. The windows in my third-floor room were thrown open as wide as they could possibly go, but there was not the smallest sigh of breeze. I lay on my hot mattress in my pink SHE WANTS REVENGE T-shirt, my hair stuck on top of my head with a scrunchie, an orange Otter Pop bent around my throat. It was meant to cool the blood in the vein that ran up the side of my neck and into my head, tricking me into imagining I actually was cool, when in reality it was so hot I could probably hard-boil an egg beneath my armpit.
Before I had laid myself down to slow-roast in my stuffy room, I had moved Jupiter’s cage down to the basement, where it was at least twenty degrees cooler. Ferrets can’t take this kind of heat. I felt lonely, even though Jupiter usually kept me awake half the night playing with his red-and-green plastic ball. Or enjoying a midnight snack, which meant pushing his food bowl around with his nose until he ran into the side of the cage and tipped it over, sending pellets of the kitten food he loved cascading down through the wire bars. When the pellets hit the wood floor, they bounced around like the beads of a broken necklace. Then Ned appeared and Hoovered up all the kitty chow, which gave him the worst gas.
I flung myself around, then threw my arms over my head. Maybe if I got them as far away from me as possible, I’d stop sweating. This was lame. The Otter Pop bent around my neck was not making me cooler, just crabbier. I flung the thing across my room, got up, and went downstairs, thinking I’d crash on the living room sofa, but the second my bare legs came into contact with the scratchy upholstery, I realized I could never fall asleep there. Why did I have to be so hot? Why did Mrs. Dagnitz have to be so annoying? Why hadn’t Angus Paine told me his parents had sold their store to Paisley of Paisley’s on 23rd? I was figuring this out about people who wanted mysteries solved—they never told you the whole truth. I wandered into the kitchen and got a Mountain Dew, then went to the computer room, where I fired up Mark Clark’s PC and Googled “Paisley’s on 23rd.”
There weren’t many listings. She had a Web site under construction. One review on CitySearch.com said that the napoleons at Paisleys on 23rd were the best in Portland. There was an article in the paper about Paisley O’Toole catering a party for an organization that helped find jobs for people who’d been in car wrecks, and another one about the special green oatmeal cookies she baked in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. There was nothing about the bakery’s move to 222 S.W. Corbett, or really, anything of any interest at all.
On impulse, I texted Angus Paine: U didn’t say ur rents were selling the store.
Just as I was drinking the last of my Mountain Dew, my phone rang. Oooo-oooo-oooo-ahhnn! Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. Oooo-oooo-oooo-ahhnn! Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. I choked on the soda, practically spitting up on the keyboard. Who was calling me at one thirty in the morning?
Angus Paine, of course.
“What are you doing?” I asked, still coughing and gasping for breath.
“Got your text,” he said, as if it were one thirty in the afternoon. He lowered his voice, all flirt monster–like. “I was thinking about you.”
“You were?”
“About our mystery,” he said. “I really wish I could get you to see it was arson. What would I have to do to make that happen?”
“Giving me all the facts would be good, just for starters. Why didn’t you tell me your parents sold the building to the lady who owns Paisley’s on 23rd?”
“Hello?” I was irritated.
“Wait, I’m trying to understand this here.”
“Paisley O’Toole,” I said, “who’s moving her pastry shop from Northwest Twenty-third to 222 Southwest Corbett.”
“That’s our address,” said Angus.
“I know. That’s my point.” Was he playing dumb? I thought only girls played dumb.
“You’re not talking about the lady who’s opening the Artery Hardening Department?”
“Artery Hardening Department?” Suddenly I felt tired. My stomach gurgled and sighed like a haunted house. It was a result of Mountain Dew on an empty stomach in the middle of the night. It was the result of Angus Paine acting like a complete and utter tool.
He laughed. “It’s what my parents call the dessert section that’s going in by the deli. You know how now grocery stores have, like, a little shrunken Starbucks right inside the front door? That’s the concept. Nat and Nat thought it would help business to have some really smokin’ sweet stuff, gourmet like. Right now they only stock those vegan cookies that taste like dog biscuits. They thought they needed to offer something that was actually edible.”
I wanted to laugh, but I wasn’t going to give Angus Paine the satisfaction. “So Paisley O’Toole who owns Paisley’s on 23rd has not bought the grocery from your parents?”
“You’re one tough chick, Minerva.”
“Excuse me, but could you be more random?”
“That was one of my best jokes, about the cookies tasting like dog biscuits. Most girls crack up. But you’re not most girls, are you?”
What was I supposed to say to this? I muttered something about the sign in the window at Paisley’s shop.