Minerva Clark Gets a Clue Read online

  I felt a sudden, unmistakable chill on my bare buns. I reached back and felt skin, up to my armpits, I swear. I could not believe I was able to walk. I could not believe Hannah and Julia had not completely cut me in half. The campfire was roaring in my cheeks. I thought of my white butt, with its birthmark that looks like Cuba, out there for everyone to see. I didn’t dare turn around to see if Kevin was watching. I prayed to the guardian angel of seventh-grade girls that he was still talking to that kid. What could I do but try to put things right the best I could? I reached back with the pointer fingers of each hand and pulled the leg holes of my bathing suit back to where they should be.

  Hannah and Julia had scampered madly back to the table. They were screeching and sobbing, grabbing their stomachs and making a big stupid show of practically falling out of their chairs.

  “It was a joke!” said Julia when I reached the table.

  Hannah opened her mouth, but before she could tell me not to get mad, or whatever she was about to say to convince me that she was just a nice, fun girl who liked a good laugh, her cell phone rang from inside her Sponge Bob backpack.

  I recognized the ring. It was the same ring Jordan’s phone had, the same ring I’d been anxious to stop the day I answered it while she was outside being arrested.

  Hannah answered it and her face went through a few expressions in about two seconds: dimply happy to eyebrows raised in surprise to frowny mad. She thrust the phone at me.

  “It’s for you.”

  I sat back down. “Hello?”

  “You need new friends.” The voice was familiar. I looked over at the equipment booth and saw Kevin on his cell phone. He pointed at me and grinned.

  “He’s right,” I said to no one in particular.

  Then I did something that cheered me right up: I snapped Hannah’s phone shut, drew my arm back. As I said, I have brothers. I can throw farther than any girl I know. I lobbed her metallic-pink phone high over the heads of all the screaming kids and parents splashing around. It briefly caught the light streaming in through the windows before plunging into the deep end of the lap pool.

  By the time Hannah’s mom picked us up a few hours later, it was pouring. She was the quietest mom of all the moms I knew, since she didn’t speak the best English. It was raining so hard that Hannah’s mom had to have the wipers on extra high. Thwap! Thwap! Thwap! It was so irritating. The whole day had turned out irritating, except for how nice Kevin was to me.

  Hannah and Julia were not my best friends. Usually, when we were driven somewhere we all smooshed together in the backseat and made the same old jokes about being chauffeured around. Today Hannah and Julia got in the backseat and made me sit in the front. I probably had it coming for throwing Hannah’s cell phone in the pool. I was surprised how not in trouble I got. Hannah merely shrieked, “That is so uncool.” She even had to dive down to the bottom and get it herself. Ha!

  Thwap, thwap, thwap. The wipers were loud enough to hide their whispers. It didn’t bother me much. They could whisper all they wanted, but nothing would take away that perfect moment when Kevin called Hannah’s number and asked for me.

  Still, something bothered me about Kevin’s phone call. There was a silver of time after he spoke and before I recognized his voice when I had gotten a fizz of fear. Fear of what? Then, suddenly, a few things occurred to me all at once, like the way you can’t find your favorite jeans, hoodies, and toe socks, and it turns out they’ve all been together in the clothes dryer.

  I cracked my knuckles madly, which I knew was not good for the health of my joints, as Mark Clark told me whenever he caught me doing it. The call reminded me of answering the phone in Jordan’s car. It reminded me of talking to Quills’s friend Toc. I remembered how angry he sounded. And Toc was a sneaky guy. Look at the scam he showed Reggie and me at Tilt, how you could trick the change machine into thinking a Xeroxed five-dollar bill was a real five-dollar bill. That was sort of like identity theft. The same person who’d think of tricking a change machine might also think of tricking a cop by giving him someone else’s name. But what did Dwight have to do with it? Maybe he found out that Toc had given the cops Jordan’s name? But was that worth killing somebody over? Maybe Dwight was going to turn Toc in, and Toc was just going to talk to him and didn’t mean to kill him.

  There were too many questions.

  Then I thought of Kevin and his nice blue eyes and shiny swimmer’s hair and I thought maybe Toc thought Jordan was hot. Maybe he wanted to hook up with her. Maybe he knew that if he got her in trouble with the law, she’d lose the Hightower and she’d be forced to stay in Portland. Maybe he didn’t want her to leave.

  My poor joints. I did another round of mad knuckle cracking. I remembered that it was Saturday evening, the night the Humongous Bag of Cashews liked to practice, and they were practicing in our basement. Toc was probably already at Casa Clark, plugging in his guitar and testing his amp. Little did he know he had some explaining to do.

  - 9 -

  HANNAH’S MOM PULLED UP TO CASA Clark and I got out and thanked her for the ride. Hannah and Julia waved from the backseat and said, “See you at school,” just as if nothing had happened. Maybe they were afraid if they complained about the phone, I’d bust them about giving me a massive wedgie.

  Inside, I went straight to the living room and scooped Jupiter up from his hammock inside his cage. I could hear the TV on upstairs. I took the steps two at a time up to the TV room, where Morgan and Mark Clark were sitting on the Cat Pee Couch. Before we got Jupiter we had a fat tabby named Elroy who’d stroll past your legs and spray them, so that you’d leap up, disgusted, and he could steal the warm spot where you’d been sitting.

  Morgan and Mark Clark were watching The Matrix and drinking Mountain Dew. When no one can think of anything else to do in this house, they watch The Matrix and drink Mountain Dew. A cookie sheet piled high with nachos sat on the coffee table. They would never be able to get away with eating nachos off a cookie sheet if Mom were still around.

  Mark Clark asked me how the water park was. He really was a pretty good older brother/parent substitute. I said it was okay, because I didn’t feel like telling him about Hannah and Julia, the wedgie, the flying cell phone, and how a hot boy that Hannah wanted to hook up with had been nice to me instead. I really didn’t want to tell that part about Kevin, because Mark Clark liked to make jokes about my first boyfriend and how the dude was going to have to get past my three big brothers first.

  For some reason, I also didn’t want to mention what Julia had heard about Jordan losing the Hightower Scholarship on account of her identity theft.

  “Are the Cashews practicing tonight?” I asked.

  “Yup,” said Morgan, without looking away from the TV. Even though he’d seen The Matrix eight million times, he hated to be interrupted.

  It was the part in the movie where the Morpheus character offers Keanu Reeves the red pill or the blue pill. The red pill will lead Keanu to the truth, and the blue pill will allow him to go back into his life in the Matrix as if nothing had ever happened.

  From two floors down I heard the complaining twang of a guitar, then the beginning of scales. Toc, Quills, and the two other guys whose names I always forgot were already in the basement warming up.

  Suddenly, I felt all jittery anxious. I pressed my fingers against my eyes to calm myself. They smelled like chlorine. I knew how Keanu felt. I could either take the blue pill and go upstairs and turn on my music loud but not too loud and IM with Reggie about nothing and work on my rebuses, or I could take the red pill and go downstairs and face Toc. I tried not to think that Toc might also have killed Dwight. I didn’t like thinking we had another teen killer around, this one my brother’s best friend.

  After another loud twang or two, I started for the basement.

  Does anyone ever really choose the blue pill?

  On the way downstairs I stopped in the kitchen and snuck a piece of Top Ramen. When it’s uncooked it’s like a big fat king-sized crac
ker. I get in trouble for eating raw Ramen, mostly because no one knows what to do with the little packet of seasoning that’s always left over. Sometimes, I throw it away, even though it’s wasteful. I ate a slab of Ramen and drank milk straight from the carton. I was going to need my strength.

  I was also going to need to look at Toc the same way I’d looked at S Cubed that day at the playground, when I saw, for the first time, that when I stopped obsessing about how people were looking at me, I could really look at them. I really saw S Cubed then. I saw how she tried too hard. I saw how she was eager to impress Reggie and me. I saw that she cared too much what we thought about her.

  I wiped my hands on my pants and took a deep breath. I felt sure if I could just get a good long look at Toc’s face, I would know if he was guilty.

  Going into the basement to listen to Humongous Bag of Cashews practice is not something I would normally do. Our basement was big, but not big enough to hold a whole rock band and their equipment comfortably. If you wanted to listen, you had to sit on the washing machine.

  I could feel my pulse in my ears as I tiptoed downstairs. Why was I tiptoeing? I tried to walk normal. Toc and Quills were going over some chords when I appeared. They barely looked up. The drummer looked over at me, then went back to playing his air drums.

  I realized I couldn’t just stop practice and say, “Hey, Toc, did you steal my favorite cousin’s identity, then murder Dwight at the bookstore for reasons I have yet to figure out?”

  I went and sat on the washing machine. Unfortunately, someone was doing a load, and the spin cycle jiggled my bum. I stared hard at the back of Toc’s head as he bent over his guitar, his long white fingers crawling up and down the neck. He’d changed his one-on-top-of-the-other double ponytail for two pigtails on top of his head. He wore jean cutoffs and a blue sweatshirt that said LIFE IS GOOD on the back.

  Toc went back to his spot in front of the drums, struck his lead guitarist rock star pose, with his feet apart and his head tossed back, and started yelling/singing something about how his girl was so expensive it was time she was made to pay. Humongous Bag of Cashews covered a lot of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but they were always working on their own songs, and this was one of them.

  And then he looked right at me and said, in the same voice he’d used on the phone that day, “You robbed my heart blind. Don’t think I won’t make you pay. I will nickel you. I will dime you. Nickel and dime you. To death.”

  I stared right back at him, even though I was jiggling along with the dryer. He was just practicing that bad dude rock ’n’ roll look on me. I’d never noticed Toc had a unibrow.

  I waited until they took a break. The other guitar player collected money from Quills and Toc and went to make a Burger King run.

  On TV it looked so easy when investigators cornered possible suspects. What was I going to say?

  “So what was your motivation for writing that song?”

  “Which song would that be, Minnie Mouse?” Did he have to call me that? He drained his can of Red Bull and started rolling a cigarette on top of one of the amplifiers.

  “‘Nickel and Dime You,’” said Quills.

  Toc laughed. “That would be the difficulty dealing with your gender.”

  “Anyone I might know? Like my cousin Jordan?”

  Quills went Woot! And the drummer hit his cymbals with his sticks.

  Toc stopped rolling his cigarette and stared at me. This was not his bad dude rocker look, but something else. His eyes flicked down just for a second. Then he put on a phony grin and grabbed his chest. “Ah! Jordan Parrish! Be still my heart! You are far far too good for the likes of this poor musician!”

  I said, “You’re not supposed to smoke in here.”

  “Really? What’re you going to do about it, Minnie Mouse?” He licked the paper, dabbing at it with his pointy pink snake tongue.

  I had no clue what I was going to do about it. What was I going to do about any of this? I was in seventh grade. I wasn’t Detective Peech. I couldn’t just flash my badge. I was his friend’s little sister. The best I could do would be to back talk a little and see what happened.

  “I don’t know, maybe steal your identity. Like what happened to Jordan.”

  “Steal my identity? Whooooooo.” He made the haunted house sound and pretended to be all scared.

  “Did you hear about the guy at Under the Covers? Dwight? He was murdered.”

  “That guy,” said Toc. He sat down on the little blue chair that used to be my desk chair and crossed his legs high up on his thigh. He jiggled his foot, slapped his flip-flop against the sole. Nervous. “That dude was into some seriously nefarious stuff.”

  “Like Xeroxing five-dollar bills and fooling change machines?”

  Toc laughed and blew smoke up at the ceiling. He jiggled his foot some more, slapped his flip-flops. “Who do you think taught me that trick?”

  “Dwight?” I said stupidly.

  “Nah, my older brother. But ol’ Dwighty taught it to him. They were in the same Boy Scout troop back in the day.”

  “And Dwight taught your brother the trick with the five-dollar bill and the change machines, and your brother taught you,” I said. I understood exactly what he meant, but I was trying to figure out what to say next. I could just say, “Oh, cool,” and hie myself back upstairs, but then I flashed on the sight of Dwight playing with Jupiter and telling me about the origins of the word “ferret.” No, I was sure I was on to something, I just didn’t know what.

  “Why are you so curious? Don’t you have some Hilary Duff movie to go watch or something?”

  “I knew Dwight,” I said. “He was a friend.”

  “Then you certainly know he was up to some seriously nefarious stuff at that dumb bookstore.”

  “Yeah, so,” I said. I had to be careful. I had no clue what Toc was talking about. The washing machine’s spin cycle had stopped. I drummed my heels against the side of the machine. I liked the dull metal bong.

  “So? So? Man, you are one harsh chick, Minnie Mouse. How would you like to be one of those poor old grannies?”

  Huh? Poor old grannies? Which poor old grannies were we talking about here?

  “I wouldn’t,” I said.

  “I mean there you are, like, about ninety years old, and you go to the same little bookstore you’ve gone to since forever, and you’re not hip to the debit card thing—you don’t even know what it is—and nice ol’ Dwighty happily takes your check—so many places don’t even take checks these days—and the minute you leave the shop with your book about knitting or cats or whatever, nice ol’ Dwighty copies your checking account number and goes to one of those check-printing places and gives them your checking account number and whatever name he wants. The checks are printed in a matter of days and he’s got a couple of weeks to write as many checks as he wants before the POG gets her bank statement.”

  “What’s a POG?” I asked.

  Toc shrieked and clapped his hands. “I knew you were BSing me! You had no idea your buddy Dwight was such a crook. POG! POG! Poor old granny!”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. It wasn’t a question. I had tone in my voice. I was the tone queen all of a sudden. Was he saying Dwight was some kind of an identity thief himself? That he would basically steal the checking account numbers of his customers and write checks on their accounts until they ran out of money or got their monthly statement? We’d done a section of social studies on personal finance, and we’d had to go to the bank to open our own checking accounts.

  “I’m only telling you what my brother told me,” said Toc. “You could buy the biggest flat-panel plasma HDTV on the planet and be long gone before the POG even had a clue.” He was waggling his eyebrows and smashing out his cigarette on the concrete floor. He picked up his guitar, stuck it next to his amp, and delivered that thick loud reverb that Mark Clark is always saying ruins your hearing.

  I hopped off the washer and ran upstairs. Jupiter twisted and turned inside my pocket, as
anxious as I was to get out of there.

  - 10 -

  I PULLED JUPITER OUT OF MY pocket and held him to my chest. He wriggled around and tried to bite me in the thin spot between my thumb and pointer finger. He didn’t like it when I took the stairs two at a time. I didn’t like to jostle Jupiter, but this was totally urgent.

  Mark Clark and Morgan were still flopped on Cat Pee Couch, watching The Matrix. The only way you could tell time had passed was that most of the nachos were gone, and Morgan had crushed the middle of his empty Mountain Dew can and snapped it onto the bottom of his shoe.

  “I need to call Jordan,” I said.

  “Okay,” said Mark Clark.

  “I mean, I need her number.”

  They sat there as if I hadn’t said a word. I then did something for which I would get yelled at: I stood in front of the TV and put my hands on my hips, so they couldn’t see around me.

  “Hey! This is the good part,” said Morgan.

  “You can always rewind it,” I said. “It’s not like The Matrix is going to suddenly cease to exist—”

  “Watch the tone,” said Mark Clark.

  Morgan dug in his pocket for his cell phone. He flipped it open and tapped around with his thumb.

  “Not in here. Sorry.”

  He was hardly even looking. What was it with these guys? It’s so true what Ms. Dayton-Bunnsted said, that girls are the superior gender.

  “Why do you need to talk to Jordan?” asked Mark Clark.

  I was so not going to go into it. I bet they didn’t even know that Jordan was on the verge of losing the Hightower Scholarship and probably wasn’t even going to get to go to college. Her entire future was probably ruined. And the guy responsible was in our basement at that very moment, singing a song about how he was going to get back at her.

  I stomped back downstairs and returned Jupiter to his cage behind the grand piano. He looked at me with his little white face. Why aren’t we going to play now? Sorry, Jupiter. Suddenly my life had gotten more complicated.