The Name of This Book Is Secret

by Pseudonymous Bosch

  Cass told them she knew there was toxic waste because the grass on the soccer field had turned yellow. And because all the dogs in the neighborhood acted nervous and pricked up their ears when they came near the school.

  But all Amber said was, “Wow, you’re really smart, Cass.” And she left with Veronica, never bothering to answer Cass’s plea for help.

  When they thought Cass was out of earshot, Veronica started giggling. “That’s why she has those ears. To pick up danger sounds. Like a dog.”

  “Don’t be so mean, V,” Cass heard Amber say.

  But she heard Amber giggling, too.

  Covering her mouth with her shirt collar, and her hands with her cuffs, Cass started digging with renewed vigor. She wasn’t going to let Mrs. Johnson or Amber or anyone else stop her. And, later, when they all thanked her for saving their lives and begged her forgiveness—well, she’d decide what to do then.

  Suddenly, she heard a voice behind her head.

  “Hi, you’re Cassandra. I’m Max-Ernest. We don’t know each other. But I know who you are and you probably know who I am. Well, you definitely do now. But I mean you probably knew before because everybody here knows who everybody is. Even if they’ve never met. Isn’t that weird how you can know somebody and not know somebody at the same time? How ’bout that?”

  Cass looked up to see a short—a mean person might say “puny”—kid looking down at her. It was true, she did know his name was Max-Ernest—but only because she’d heard other kids complaining about him. She could already see why he irritated them so much.

  “So, you wanna hear a joke?” Max-Ernest asked.

  Cass put her hat back on her head. “If it’s about my ears, I’ve heard them all before,” she said in a not very encouraging tone.

  Max-Ernest swallowed nervously. “Actually, I think your ears are cool. They make you look like an elf. I mean, in a good way. Well, I think it’s good because elves are my favorite fictional humanoids. Well, favorite after orcs. Not that I would want to meet an orc. Besides, you don’t look anything like an orc. Or maybe I should quit while I’m ahead, right?”

  He paused for a quick breath. When she didn’t take the opportunity to yell at him, he continued,

  “Hey, do you think I talk too much? Everybody does. I don’t mean everybody talks too much, I mean everybody thinks I talk too much. Even my parents. They think I have a condition. My parents are psychologists. That means they’re doctors who cure people by talking. But my problem is talking and they don’t know how to cure me! How ’bout that?”

  Cass didn’t know what to say, so she asked, “What was your joke?”

  “Oh, I almost forgot! What is not enough for one, just right for two, and too much for three?”

  “What?”

  “A secret.”

  She didn’t laugh any more than anyone else had.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Well,” Max-Ernest explained patiently, “you can’t have a secret between yourself and yourself. You need someone else to have a secret with. That’s two people. But it’s not really a secret anymore if three people know it.”

  Cass thought about this. “But that doesn’t make any sense. One person can have a secret. Three people can have a secret. It doesn’t matter how many people have a secret, as long as they don’t tell anybody else.”

  Max-Ernest stared at her in surprise.

  He was used to being ridiculed and teased and spat at and having his lunch stolen. But never before had anyone told him he didn’t make sense. He prided himself on his logical mind.

  “No, no, you’re wrong!” he sputtered. “If you have a secret from somebody, they’re still two people!”

  Cass shrugged. “Well, anyways, it doesn’t matter, because it’s not funny if you have to explain it.”

  “What do you mean? Why?”

  “I don’t know, because you just have to get a joke. It’s not like a logical thing.”

  “So then how do you know if a joke is funny?” Max-Ernest asked, extremely confused.

  “You just do. Maybe you just don’t have a very good sense of humor,” Cass said helpfully.

  “Oh.”

  For the first time since she’d met him, Max-Ernest seemed at a loss for words. He looked so sad and defeated that Cass took pity on him.

  “Or maybe you just haven’t found the right joke yet,” she added.

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  She didn’t know he had been trying out a new joke every day for months.

  He was silent for another second. But only a second. Then he pointed to the hole in the ground. “So, what are you looking for? Buried treasure? Because buried treasure isn’t just in books, you know. There’s real buried treasure. Like in shipwrecks. Did you know the Titanic was—”

  “I’m looking for toxic waste,” Cass said, cutting him off before he could go off on a tangent about the Titanic.

  Max-Ernest nodded knowingly. “Yeah, I heard they always put schools over toxic waste dumps. Because the land is really cheap. And then they don’t tell anyone. And then everyone gets sick. You want help? Hey, they have rubber gloves in the science lab. Maybe we should get some. Exposure to toxic waste might give us a skin rash.”

  Cass smiled. Maybe Max-Ernest wasn’t so bad after all.

  After her experience with Amber and Veronica, Cass had vowed never to discuss her predictions with anyone again. But she made an exception for Max-Ernest because he seemed so knowledgeable about toxic waste. By the time they returned to the soccer field with the laboratory gloves, Cass had told him all about the dead magician, the dead mouse, and the mysterious sulfur smell.

  Max-Ernest scrunched his nose. “It doesn’t smell like rotten eggs to me. Are you sure it’s the same smell?”

  He suggested they take out the vial from the Symphony of Smells and compare it to the scent of the soccer field. Cass was slightly annoyed that she hadn’t thought of this herself. Nonetheless, she pulled the wooden box out of her backpack to show him.*

  When she opened the small dusty vial and took a whiff she had to agree it didn’t smell much like the soccer field. Perhaps she had jumped to conclusions too quickly.

  Max-Ernest put his face to the ground and sniffed. “I think the grass smells more like you-know-what—”

  “No, what?”

  “You know, number two!” said Max-Ernest, turning red.

  Cass rolled her eyes. But when she sniffed the ground herself, she had to agree he was right.

  Then she noticed something she hadn’t seen earlier: only three feet from the mouse, there was a pile of fertilizer. What they were smelling was manure!

  And there was something else: a box with a picture of a rat inside a red circle with a slash through it. Rat poison. That’s what had killed the mouse. She decided it wasn’t necessary to point this out to Max-Ernest. If he noticed it himself, fine. If he didn’t, well, he didn’t. No sense making him cocky.

  Anyway, it didn’t mean there wasn’t toxic waste. Not necessarily.

  Meanwhile, Max-Ernest had begun inspecting the Symphony of Smells more closely. “Did you see that the back comes off?” he asked.

  Cass hadn’t noticed, but she didn’t say so. She wasn’t sure how many more of Max-Ernest’s discoveries she could take.

  Max-Ernest pulled a velvet panel away from the inside of the box’s lid and a bunch of papers slid out onto the ground.

  Cass started looking through them. “Beethoven... Mozart... Franz Liszt...Who’s that?”

  “Beethoven and Mozart are classical music composers, like from a long time ago,” said Max-Ernest. “Maybe Franz Liszt is, too.”

  “I know who Beethoven and Mozart are! I just didn’t know who Liszt was,” said Cass. “Anyway, these look like recipes... See? Symphony Number 9—juniper, chocolate, allspice... Sonata Number 12—mint, rosemary, lavender...I guess they’re like smell versions of the music? Like scratch and sniff?”

  “I seriously doubt that. How could there be a smell version of
music?” asked Max-Ernest, who, as you know, was always very logical. “Music is made of sound.”

  “I know! I don’t mean it’s really music. It’s just a cool idea, like, I don’t know...elves and orcs. Here, look—”

  She held up a hand-drawn chart, and started reading aloud. “First violin: ginger. Viola: maple. Cello: vanilla.”

  “It’s an orchestra?”

  “Right—the Symphony of Smells. Here’s oboe. That’s what I play. It’s licorice.”

  “Huh,” said Max-Ernest, turning over the oboelicorice connection in his head. “Why do you think it’s licorice? Do you like licorice?”

  “Not the black kind. But I don’t really like oboe either.”

  “I still don’t see how a smell is supposed to be music,” said Max-Ernest.

  “Maybe we should play one,” said Cass, pointing to the sheet music. “Or smell it, I mean.”

  Using the chart to locate their “musical instruments,” they tried smelling Beethoven, then Mozart, then a symphony by Franz Liszt. All the music smelled good, except for the Liszt, but eventually even Cass had to admit she couldn’t tell what was especially musical about it.

  As they put the music back in the case, a tattered piece of paper fell out and started blowing around in the breeze. Cass caught the paper just before it landed in the manure. It was smudged and wrinkled and singed around the edges, but she could still make out the words written on it.

  “A message for the winds,” she read aloud. “In order to spell it, you must first smell it.” Below this note, the names of four instruments had been written, one beneath the other:

  “You think it’s some kind of coded message?” Cass asked.

  Max-Ernest nodded. “Definitely! You can tell by the instructions. I’ll bet all we have to do is turn the instruments into smells.”

  Using the chart, they wrote the name of the matching scent next to each instrument name. And this is what they came up with:

  Excited, they took the appropriate vials out of the case and smelled them in order. Then they looked at each other expectantly, as if they’d just cast a spell and they were waiting for a ghost or vision to appear.

  Nothing happened.

  They tried smelling all the scents at once, but that only served to confuse their noses further.

  “I guess our noses aren’t strong enough,” said Max-Ernest.

  “Or maybe it wasn’t really a coded message after all,” Cass said, putting the paper back into the box.

  Max-Ernest pulled the paper back out, staring at it. “You know how it says, ‘first smell it’?” he asked.

  “Uh huh...?”

  “Well, look at all the first letters: Heliotrope. Echinacea. Licorice. Peanut butter. H—E—L—P. It spells ‘help’!”

  “You’re right!” said Cass, impressed despite herself. “But you got one thing wrong.”

  “What?”

  “It doesn’t spell ‘help,’ it smells ‘help’!”

  Max-Ernest laughed. Then it was his turn to be annoyed. Why was it funny when she made a joke?

  “Hey, Max-Ernest,” said Cass suddenly.

  “Yeah?”

  “What if it’s real?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The message. You think it’s from the magician? Look at the edge of the paper—it looks like it was in a fire. What if he really wanted help?”

  Their eyes locked, the very same chill tingling both their spines.

  “Well, it wouldn’t be the best way to get help, would it?” asked Max-Ernest, a little more slowly than usual. “I mean, he could have just called someone—like the police. Or the fire department. But I guess maybe if he didn’t want everyone to know. Like if it was only for a certain person—”

  “Whoever it was for, we’re the ones who read it,” Cass pointed out. “That means we have to help him.”

  “But he’s dead!”

  “Not for sure...”

  “That’s true,” said Max-Ernest, considering. “And, even if he is, I guess it might be good to find out—”

  “Shh!” Cass put her finger to her lips, stopping him mid-sentence. “Look at Benjamin Blake—”

  A pale boy with big staring eyes—Benjamin Blake—stood downwind of them, nose in the air, concentrating hard.

  “You think he’s smelling the licorice or the peanut butter?” whispered Cass.

  “How could you tell?” Max-Ernest whispered back.

  “I don’t know—how could you tell anything about Benjamin Blake?”

  Benjamin Blake was a continual source of confusion to Cass, indeed to all his classmates. If they’d included him in their ratings, they might have rated him spaciest or weirdest. But what was weirdest of all was how grown-ups fawned on him.

  Benjamin had recently won a big art prize. None of the other students could believe it; judging by the artwork hanging in the school hallway, he couldn’t even draw a straight line. Nonetheless, there was a picture of him in the newspaper, and Mrs. Johnson had made an announcement over the PA as if the prize were some huge historical event. Benjamin got to paint a mural in their town’s City Hall, and he even got to go to Washington, DC, for an awards ceremony. After that, all his teachers treated him like he was a movie star or he’d been elected president.

  When Benjamin realized Cass and Max-Ernest were looking at him, he blushed and mumbled something under his breath.

  “What did he say?” asked Cass. “Something about a herd of buffalo?”

  “I think he said he heard an oboe,” said Max-Ernest.

  “You’re joking, right?”

  Max-Ernest shook his head “no.”

  “That’s weird. He must have been spying when we read the list. I can’t believe someone so spacey could be so nosy.”

  For a second, it looked like Benjamin wanted to say something more. But when Cass slammed shut the Symphony of Smells case, he turned and walked away.

  As much as they differed from each other, Cass and Max-Ernest had one thing in common: neither was a liar. This was unfortunate. As I’m sure you know from experience, lying is an important skill to have.

  It is extremely important, for example, when you want to visit the site of a mysterious disappearance and possible murder, and you don’t think your parents will let you go if they know what you’re up to.

  Cass decided to practice by lying about something little.

  On Friday nights, her mom always brought home takeout from Thai Village, their neighborhood Thai restaurant. Thai food was Cass’s favorite; she especially liked pad thai noodles (except for the egg part) and beef satay with peanut sauce. That Friday night, as she carefully nibbled on her beef satay, Cass said, “So, I learned in Ms. Stohl’s class today why satay comes on a stick.”

  “Cass, I thought we had an agreement about your backpack,” said Cass’s mother, who either hadn’t heard what Cass had said or was ignoring it. “You notice I haven’t said anything about that new hole in the left knee of your jean.”

  The agreement was that if Cass stopped wearing her backpack inside the house, Cass’s mother would stop bugging her about the condition of her clothing. Normally, Cass would have pointed out that by saying she wasn’t saying anything about the hole her mother was saying something about it anyway. However, tonight Cass had a lie to tell, so she didn’t argue.

  Instead, Cass put her backpack on the floor and tried again. “So you know why satay comes on a stick?”

  “No, I don’t,” said her mother. “Why?”

  “Because they don’t have plates in Thailand,” said Cass.

  This wasn’t true. In fact, they do have plates in Thailand. Moreover, Ms. Stohl hadn’t even discussed Thailand that day.

  Although insignificant, it was the first lie Cass had ever told her mother and she could feel her heart pounding in her chest—and her blood rushing to her ears.

  Her mother didn’t seem to notice. “Really? They must have some plates,” she said. “What about pad thai?”

  “W
ell, they have bowls. And big plates for serving things,” Cass added, in case her lie was too extreme. “But no regular plates.”

  “Well, I guess we better take your plate away then,” her mother joked. “And you can eat off the table. You might like that.”

  “Ha-ha. Very funny, Mel,” said Cass, relieved that her mother seemed ready to believe her without asking any more questions. (Cass’s mother was named Melanie, but everybody called her Mel—even Cass when she wanted to make a point or just wanted to sound adult.)

  Since her practice lie had gone so well, Cass decided to go ahead and try the real one. She started by telling her mother the truth, because she figured if half of what she said was true then she was only half lying.*

  “I have to go over to Max-Ernest’s house tomorrow,” she said. “He’s this guy from school. You never heard me talk about him before because he’s in Mr. Golding’s, not Ms. Stohl’s. Also he’s kind of hyper.”

  That much was true. Then came the lying part. “We have to do this science project,” she said quickly. “It’s like one of those make your own volcano experiments, but you have to build the mountain part first. Everybody is matched up with somebody from the other class and we’re supposed to collaborate on it.”

  Cass could tell her mother was only half listening. “Tomorrow?” she asked.

  “It’s due on Monday.”

  “Oh, well, if you’re going to be gone, maybe I’ll go to yoga. I can take you on the way.”

  “He lives really close. I can walk.”

  “You don’t have to. I can take you.”

  The conversation wasn’t going the way it was supposed to go. If her mother took her, her mother would want to meet Max-Ernest’s parents and discuss what their kids were going to do for the day. Cass’s plan would be foiled.

  “Cass, your ears are turning red—are you upset about something?”

  “No, well, I don’t know—”

  It was time to take out what are called “the big guns”—those special arguments you hold in reserve for emergencies. Cass screwed up her nerve and began: