by Zanib Mian
“Yes, but—”
“No buts!”
“And what did you see, Omar?” said Dad, who wanted to hear the rest.
The whole scene reminded me of the good cop–bad cop thing that they talk about in movies.
“We saw that her mail, from many days, was in a massive pile on the doormat, so she’s definitely missing.”
“That doesn’t mean she’s missing. It just means she hasn’t been home for a while,” said Mom.
Dad nodded in agreement.
“Yes, but she would have said if she was going away, so it’s really I said. “Plus, we also saw some really weird stuff . . . which made me think it might be . . .”
“What? What might it be?” asked Dad.
“Well, I just think this, and it could be true . . .”
“Go on, spit it out.”
Mom and Dad looked at each other really fast. I knew they must have made faces I couldn’t see. They must have had their “oh dear” eyebrows on.
“It’s not an alien abduction, sweetie,” Mom said gently. “Because there’s no such thing as aliens . . . OK?”
“Well, it depends how you define aliens,” said Dad.
I perked up and looked at him. He was
Mom gave him a playful whack and said, “Stop encouraging him!” Then she said to me, “I’m sure Mrs. Hutchinson is perfectly fine, so please drop this nonsense. And as for you going outside the perimeter, I am very disappointed.”
I let my head drop to show them I was sorry.
“I should really say that you can’t go out on your bike unsupervised again,” said Mom.
“But then your fitness would suffer.” Dad finished her thoughts like he always does.
If they took away my bike rides, we wouldn’t be able to continue our mission! I held my breath.
“Perhaps taking away screen time might be better,” said Dad.
I screamed in my head.
Out loud I said, “You could take away vegetables from my meals for two weeks?”
said Dad. “Do you think you have the right to be a wise guy right now?” And he tickled me without mercy until I said I might wet myself.
Then he said, “OK, then, Captain Wise Guy. I’m proud of you for choosing to tell us all this. But even though you had a heroic reason for doing it, I hope you understand that it’s a very serious thing you’ve done. We put the perimeter in place to keep you safe, because we love you. Now you will have to face the consequences of breaking the rules.
“OK . . .” I said. I knew it would be at least that, anyway.
“As for the alien abduction, I’m afraid Mom’s right. Aliens have not taken Mrs. H. Just try to forget about it and wait and see what we hear.”
“OK . . .” I said again. I climbed off Mom and Dad’s bed and went to mope around in my own.
Of course they wouldn’t believe us about the kidnapping, or alien abduction, or whatever was happening with Mrs. H. They were and they were boring most of the time. I wondered if my parents would have believed us if they were detectives instead of scientists. Detectives have to consider all the options, and they might even consider out-of-this-world ones, like my friends and I were.
* * *
When I told Charlie and Daniel how my parents reacted, we decided that it wasn’t worth telling any more grown-ups. The school or the police wouldn’t believe three elementary school kids any more than our own parents. And anyway, what if the school was covering something up, and telling the police would put Mrs. H in more danger when they started asking questions?
No. We had to get to the bottom of this ourselves.
We decided we’d go out to investigate more on Saturday.
CHAPTER 10
Friday-night dinner was chicken and mushroom pie. Mrs. Rogers was over, as she sometimes is for dinner, but she was disappointed the food was English.
“English food is boring,” she said, flicking off a stray flake of pastry from her purple cardigan. “I want chili and spice and all things nice.”
Esa giggled at the rhyming words and attempted to shovel some pie onto his fork.
“Well, Mrs. Rogers, we’re taking a family trip to Pakistan. There’s lots of spicy food there—maybe you should come?” Dad joked.
“Oh, I’m past my days of getting on a long flight!” said Mrs. Rogers. “But you’re welcome to bring some back for me!”
It was the first I’d heard of it.
“When?” asked Maryam. “And why?”
“Yeah, we’ve never been there!” I said.
“Exactly why we need to go,” said Mom.
Dad just chuckled at our confusion before explaining that a close cousin was getting married, so we had to go for the wedding.
Mom and Dad usually daydreamed about taking us on vacations to places that other people talk about. Like Rome to see the Colosseum, or Turkey to see the turquoise waters, or China to see the Great Wall. But Pakistan? For a wedding?!
“Nobody in my class ever talks about vacations in Pakistan,” I moaned.
“That’s because nobody in your class is from Pakistan, silly!” said Maryam.
“I’m not from Pakistan, either,” I said. “I’m from England.”
“But your grandparents are from Pakistan,” said Dad.
“You know you’re of Pakistani heritage, darling, as well as being British. It’ll be nice for you to learn more about Pakistan,” Mom added.
“I’m sure it will be very interesting, Omar,” Mrs. Rogers reassured me.
“But what about school?”
“We’ve asked your schools for some time off because it’s a big family event.”
Just then, Esa let off the most stinky fart in the universe right at the dinner table.
Maryam, who was sitting next to him, suffered the most. “Oh, Esa!!”
The hilarious thing about Maryam is that if she smells something really stinky, she starts to gag. And that definitely happens for super sure if she is eating when she smells it. I knew it was coming . . .
Poor Maryam paused and tried to recover herself. She held her hand to her chest and closed her eyes.
She stood up, put her hand over her mouth and said, “This is what cabbages would
smell like
if they were
evil.”
Mom stood up and rubbed her back, which I didn’t think would help at all, so I shouted out, “Imagine peanut butter cups!” Those are Maryam’s favorite.
Don’t talk about food!” Maryam said, running out of the room.
Esa was giggling uncontrollably. Probably feeling pleased that he was able to make such a show of his bossy big sister.
Mrs. Rogers looked stunned. I guess she still wasn’t used to all the funny things that happen in our house.
I liked them, and for a few minutes, it made me forget about Mrs. H.
CHAPTER 11
My friends came over on Saturday afternoon after I came back from the mosque with my family. Our first task was to make the missing posters. They were fun to make. We had a photo of Mrs. Hutchinson, which Daniel had snapped from the wall near the office the day before.
It had been extremely hard, because of Mrs. Crankshaw making Daniel so nervous.
“What if she’s put cameras all over the school?” Daniel had whispered as we made our way into the classroom. “Then she can see us from every angle!”
I imagined her as a fruit fly, with lots of eyes all over the place, looking at all the desks at once.
“Don’t worry—teachers aren’t allowed to record kids, remember?” I had reassured him.
He had his phone in his bag, which is the ONLY place phones are supposed to be if they have to come to school with a kid. Under no circumstances are kids allowed to turn them on or have them in their pocket. While the lesson was happening, I kept glancing at Daniel to
see when he was going to put our plan into action. I had never seen him sweat so much as he attempted to fish the phone out of his bag and into his pocket without Mrs. Crankshaw seeing.
What happened next was the exact opposite of how we wanted it to go. It was as if Daniel was trying so hard not to be seen and heard that he accidentally tripled how much he was being seen and heard.
When he was leaning under his desk to take his phone out, he managed to topple his chair all the way forward and go nose-first into the floor, causing a
all around him.
I watched from between my fingers as Mrs. Crankshaw walked menacingly toward him. Yikes! What if he’d had the phone in his hand before he fell? She’d see it!
I looked at my poor friend lying in a tangled heap on the floor. My head was spinning. Charlie was freaking out across from me. He was frozen in his chair,
Everything went into slow motion as I desperately tried to think of what to do . . .
Mrs. Crankshaw’s noisy pointy heels were the loudest sound in the room. She was taking long, determined strides toward Daniel. Probably plotting the most severe punishment she could as she went.
What would make her stop? What was an even louder sound?
Yes! I had it. I looked at the huge tin pencil cup sitting on my desk, and quick as lightning, I knocked it to the floor, making the metal-shattering sound on Earth.
The class winced and put their hands over their ears. Mrs. Crankshaw stopped walking toward Daniel and spun around to walk toward the atrocity in the opposite direction. In the meantime, about a hundred pencils and markers rolled in all directions on the floor. Some of them must have rolled right under Mrs. Crankshaw’s pointy shoe, because suddenly, she stopped walking and flapping her arms in the air for support, like some sort of chicken dance. The chicken dance didn’t help, though— right on her back, just like they do in cartoons.
I think not so much because they felt bad for her, but more out of fear of what she would do next.
Luckily, she was OK, and managed to sit up, with an embarrassed and extremely angry expression on her face.
I felt really guilty, but I had only meant to create a distraction. Not to make anyone fall over. I went to help her up, giving her my arm to hold on to, like I do with Mrs. Rogers sometimes.
Of course, Daniel quickly took the chance to grab his phone.
“Mrs. Crankshaw, can I go to the bathroom, please?” he said very carefully.
“Yes, yes,” she said, waving him away.
The rest was easy, because the wall with the pictures was around the corner from the office door, so nobody saw Daniel strolling up and taking a picture.
Mrs. Crankshaw made the whole class stay in for break and sharpen every pencil in the room. My hand hurt by the end, and Ellie said she wasn’t going to talk to me for a week, but at least we had our picture.
* * *
We decided to put Mrs. H’s photo into a Word document. We wanted to type everything out so the posters would be all professional-looking and people would take them seriously.
But it wasn’t easy deciding what to put on them.
“Should we write, ‘Have you seen any UFOs or strange alien activity?’” suggested Charlie.
“No, that will make us look bonkers!” said Daniel.
“But other people might have seen that weird alien in disguise doing things around the house,” I said.
“You mean the cat,” said Daniel. “Maybe Mrs. H shaved it because it had fleas or something.”
I decided there was no point in getting upset about Daniel not believing me. There was bound to be some more evidence soon, and then he’d come around.
We had to think about each word because we couldn’t put too many words on it—otherwise the text wouldn’t be big enough to read from far away. And, well, have you ever tried to say something complicated in just a few words?
After a lot of deleting and rewriting and hair pulling,* we finally decided what the poster would say.
“How can people contact us? Should we put a phone number on there, or is that too dangerous?” I asked.
“Too dangerous!” said Charlie and Daniel at the same time.
“Email address, then.”
We made up an email address specially for the mission: [email protected]. Pretty cool, right?
Anyway, this is what our poster looked like:
Next, we borrowed Mom’s phone and called Lancelot Macintosh. We had to give Mom a gazillion reasons for being allowed to do that, and make a trillion promises about what we would or would not say.
“Don’t ask him if you can have a ride in his Ferrari. And DON’T ask him if he has a butler, and don’t tell him aliens took his niece!” she said before she finally asked Siri to call him and stood watching over us.
“Put him on speaker!” said Charlie.
I did.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Lancelot Macintosh!” all three of us said.
“Ah, well, if it isn’t the full-name brigade! How are you?” He chuckled.
“Good, thank you,” I said.
Mom was whispering to me to ask how he was. She’s always teaching me how to be polite.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Ah, fantastic. thanks for asking!”
Mom looked proud.
“We were wondering . . . if you knew anything about, er . . . Mrs. Hutchinson. She’s not our teacher anymore and we don’t know where she is.”
“Oh dear . . . right . . . well. I, ahem . . .” Lancelot Macintosh cleared his throat. “I’m afraid I’m not quite sure I’m at liberty to say . . . erm . . . haha . . .” He laughed awkwardly. “Yes, I don’t think I’m supposed to say, actually. Sorry.”
“Oh . . .” I said, thinking about how strangely he was behaving.
Then, as an afterthought, and almost as if he had decided this was what he should have said to us right from the beginning, which made it sound even more secretive, he said, “I haven’t heard from that young madam in a while, anyway, ahem.”
“Oh . . .”
“I’ll try giving her a call and let you know if I hear anything. I’m sure she’s fine, though, not to worry!”
I imagined him twiddling his long mustache as he said this, the way he always does.
I hung up the phone.
“Well, that was weird, wasn’t it?!” said Daniel.
“Super weird!” I said.
“Soooo weird!” Charlie said.
“It’s not weird. It sounded like he just couldn’t say. And you know he doesn’t have to tell you personal things about Mrs. Hutchinson, don’t you?” Mom interrupted.
I sighed and gave the phone back to her, saying, “Yessss, Mom.” And then I saw her frowning and quickly added, “Thanks for letting us call him.”
Mom said, “You should start practicing some words in Urdu for our trip to Pakistan. Do you know how to say ‘thank you’ in Urdu? Try to remember. You used to say it when you were little. You were so good at repeating the phrases we taught you.”
“Erm, no, I don’t remember . . .”
she said. Then she repeated it more slowly. “Shook-ree-yah.”
“Shukriya,” I said. But as soon as she walked out of the room, we went back to wondering what Lancelot Macintosh wasn’t allowed to say.
“What do you think he’s not telling us?” I asked my friends.
Charlie clapped his face in his hands and gasped with shocked eyebrows. “Do you think he knows who took her?”
“No way!” I said immediately. “That would make him a bad guy, and he’s not a bad guy.”
“Yeah,” Daniel agreed. “It’s not that. But maybe he’s not telling us about some surprise she’s planning for us?”
“Yeah, he’s not a bad guy. Sorry. I’m just so worried,” said Charlie.
He didn’t need to tell me that, because his eyebrows were telling me. Look!
“Don’t worry, Charlie. We’ll keep trying,” I said.
I hoped we’d find her before I went to Pakistan.
CHAPTER 12
After calling Lancelot Macintosh, we went out on our bikes again. I’d had to plead with Mom and Dad to be allowed to do this. After I had admitted going beyond the perimeter, they were feeling
about me going out again.
I thought about promising that I wouldn’t do that anymore, but I knew that we needed to, to keep investigating. I couldn’t lie to them. I shouldn’t. I wouldn’t. Even though it was really tempting.
Then I remembered that the perimeter rules were only for when I wasn’t with Maryam or an adult. So even though it was super annoying and the worst change of plans in the history of the universe, I managed to let out these words in the smallest voice possible, half hoping nobody would hear them:
“Yes, that would work!” said Mom.
They summoned Maryam to come out of her room, and like some mystical Rumpelstiltskin kind of creature, she emerged on the third callout of her name, still staring at her phone as she walked down the stairs.
“What? No! No way!” she said when Mom explained that she had to babysit my bike ride so we wouldn’t be stuck inside for the afternoon.
“Sweetie, we are giving you a big responsibility. You will be in charge. We need you to help us,” said Mom, while Dad’s eyebrows were telling me he was getting ready to have to use harsher tones.
Anyway, I don’t know if it was the thought of being in charge (probably, knowing Maryam), or if it was the sweet way Mom had asked, but Maryam switched her attitude super fast and agreed to go.