“Which program?”
“Bewitched,” she said. “Do you know it? Little Tabitha, she is my favorite.”
I’d been expecting Oprah or maybe a telenovela, not that those would have made immediate sense, either. But back when everyone thought T.K. was dead, Carolina had known she was alive, and while she hadn’t been able to pinpoint T.K.'s location on a map, her description exactly matched the part of Chile where she’d turned up. So now I’d do anything Carolina wanted, even if it meant watching a TV show that practically predated TV. “I’ve seen it a couple of times, I think.”
“It is on all day. Cómo se dice, a marathon. And this morning, I see the advertisement, and you go pop in my head, and also the Sagittarius. I do not know why this is, but it is possible I will know better if we are viewing together.”
A couple of weeks earlier, Carolina had called to warn me about a Sagittarius. Not that she could identify which specific Sagittarius posed the threat, but she was convinced one was out there and filled with evil intent.
We still hadn’t gotten to the bottom of this, though when I’d told Natalie, who had issues with psychics, she’d helpfully pointed out that she herself was a Sagittarius, as were one-twelfth of the other seven billion people on the planet. She also suggested that if I wanted to narrow things down I should be on the lookout for fire-breathing, topaz-wearing archery enthusiasts, since those were all Sagittarius traits.
That Natalie wasn’t a big believer in Carolina’s gifts was a given — her entire worldview was predicated on empirical data and the scientific method. The strange part was that Charley wasn’t a believer, either.
Actually, that wasn’t strictly true. As a general rule, Charley was probably more open-minded than the average incredibly open-minded person. The problem was that I’d done some things that were sort of dangerous based on information from Carolina, and because Carolina had told me not to tell Charley, saying it would only prolong the time before I saw T.K. again, I hadn’t.
Of course, when Charley found out, she’d gone ballistic. Her current feelings about Dieter paled in comparison to how she’d reacted when she learned Carolina had warned me about life-threatening dangers on the one hand and cautioned me not to mention them to Charley on the other. So Carolina wasn’t Charley’s favorite person these days, which was why I’d thought it best to see her on my own.
The after-work rush hour hadn’t started yet, and the train downtown was much less crowded than the uptown one had been that morning. We found seats between a family of chattering French tourists and a guy singing along to the Black Eyed Peas on his iPod. It wasn’t the most peaceful setting, but we didn’t have to worry about any of them eavesdropping.
I hadn’t seen Carolina in a while, so I started by updating her on everything that had happened since we last spoke. This ended up being a complete waste of time since she was, after all, psychic and already knew just about everything I told her. But she did agree that whoever was organizing things within EAROFO was the same person as her Sagittarius. “This group that is greedy for oil, they are very bad people, and the Sagittarius is the most bad. We need to find the Sagittarius.”
Then I asked what she thought about Thad as a suspect. But the main thing I learned from this was the Spanish word for weasel, and apparently it had different connotations than the English version.
“La comadreja?“ she asked, puzzled. “Why do you call him this? This is a good animal. It kills the ratones. Are the ratones pleasing to you? No, with this Thad, I see only the math. He is like the calculator with the business of your mama, no? Plus and minus this, multiply and divide that.”
“Are you saying he’s not involved with what’s happening in Antarctica?”
“I tell you what I see. And this Thad, I see something not right with him, but he is not part of the big group.”
I was reluctant to bring up our other suspect — I was nervous about what Carolina might tell me — but I knew I had to. “Could Hunter Riley be the Sagittarius?”
“Como?”
“Hunter Riley. Quinn’s father.”
“Oh — the Romeo, sí? Why are you asking about his papa?”
I told her about how Hunter talked to Trip Young a lot on the phone, and how he’d been making enormous bets on the price of oil going way down, and his trip to Argentina. I also told her about one of the many unwelcome realizations I’d had recently, which was that an archer was a type of hunter.
Carolina shook her head. “No, this Hunter, he is not the Sagittarius. I am certain of it.” She thought a little more. “I believe he is a Libra. Yes, he is certainly a Libra. And I do not see a Libra in the group with the Sagittarius.”
I felt a flicker of relief. It wasn’t like Carolina had absolved Hunter completely, but at least she didn’t seem to think he was in cahoots with the others. Though now I was going to have to figure out if his being a Libra was significant in any way — I could only guess what Natalie would say about that. And none of this put my other concerns about Quinn to rest.
“But why are you not asking what you really want to be asking?” said Carolina, interrupting my thoughts.
“I was,” I said.
“No, you are asking about la comadreja and the Libra, when you want to ask about the Quinn. But you think you should not ask because you should be playing the sport. Why do you think this? You do not like the sport.”
So now I had to explain about keeping my eye on the ball, though it translated better than the weasel thing.
“That is very sensible,” said Carolina. “Your mama, she is smart to tell you this. But you still worry about the Quinn?”
“It’s sort of complicated. First I thought maybe he was beginning to lose interest in me, and then I found out he might be in trouble, and if he is, then I don’t know if I should still like him, because if he’s in trouble the way I think he’s in trouble, then it means he’s not the person I thought he was, which is also a problem, but I can’t just stop liking him, can I?”
Carolina made an impatient noise. “In Ecuador, you would not bother about these things. You would be tired from the banana plantation. It is very hard work, you know, picking the bananas. Only in rich countries do the girls have the time to bother about what the novio does or does not do.”
It was like she’d been talking to Charley. “But —”
She made the impatient noise again. “It is as you say. You should be with the ball. Quinn, he is confused. But he is not confused for the reasons you think.”
“What’s he confused about, then?”
“I do not know. He will be like the diamond soon, from the pressure, but it is not to do with you.”
That wasn’t reassuring. “But —”
“Do not bother yourself,” she said with an air of finality. “That is all I know about this.” Then it was like she really had been talking to Charley, because she used food to change the subject. “Now, what snacks does your auntie have in her house? I like snacks with the televisión.”
But when we emerged from the subway I checked my phone, and there was still no text back from Quinn.
Ten
We stopped at a deli to pick up snacks — strawberry Yoo-hoo and salt-and-vinegar potato chips for Carolina and chocolate chocolate chip Häagen-Dazs for me — and then headed for the loft. But as we rounded the corner at Hudson Street, we came face-to-face with one of the few problems I’d actually managed to forget about, at least temporarily.
Somebody was putting up condos a few blocks from Charley’s, and they’d surrounded the building site with a high wall of scaffolding to protect pedestrians from construction debris. Eight and a half hours earlier, when Charley and I had passed by on our way to the subway, the plywood had been covered with peeling blue paint, graffiti, and flyers for guitar lessons and movers and dog-walkers. It had all been completely harmless.
It turned out a lot could change in eight and a half hours.
Now every available inch of the scaffolding had been transfor
med by Dieter harnessing the power of visual media, or whatever it was he thought he was doing. He’d used the same image, and though this version was smaller — poster-sized instead of billboard-sized — he’d made up for the decrease in size with an increase in volume. Charley and I filled the entire wall, plastered in endless rows and columns for no discernible purpose.
I was speechless all over again. Carolina’s reaction, on the other hand, was a lot more upbeat than Charley’s and mine had been. We’d had our backs to the platform on the train downtown, so we’d missed seeing the billboards at the 51st Street station, and apparently this was her first encounter with Dieter’s handiwork. “But it is spectacular,” she said. “Muy linda. This will be yellow for you, no?”
“Why yellow?” I asked. Her tone was enthusiastic, and linda sounded okay, but she’d once said I felt red to her, and shortly after that someone tried to run me over.
“Yellow is good,” she assured me. “Much better than red. Red is only for the Sagittarius.”
Just as Carolina had promised, Charley wasn’t home when we got to the loft, and she’d sent another text saying she’d be even later than she initially thought. Dieter was nowhere to be found, which was probably wise of him, and she was busy trying to figure out if there was any way to have the pictures removed from the subway. This suggested she was unaware he’d branched out from public transportation to construction, and I hoped I wouldn’t be with her when she found out. In the meantime, Carolina and I didn’t have to worry about her showing up in the middle of our Bewitched marathon.
Not that it mattered. We spent the rest of the afternoon and well into the early evening in front of the TV, curled up on opposite ends of the sofa and watching episode after episode. And while my ice cream was wholly enjoyable and the show wasn’t entirely without entertainment value, the only productive thing that came out of it all was Carolina teaching herself how to twitch her nose like Samantha.
She broke it down for me — it was more of an upper lip twitch with the nose following along than an isolated nose twitch — but I still couldn’t quite master it.
“Do not be envious,” said Carolina. “One day you also will learn and then we will be the witches together, sí?” She was a lot more excited about this than I was, but for her sake I pretended I’d keep practicing until I got it right.
Otherwise, she left me nearly as directionless as I’d been before. “Your friend Rafe, he will take care of your mama,” she said as she was leaving. “And the Quinn, he will be okay. You should watch the ball and think about the Sagittarius. Also, the examen.”
“Examen?” I asked blankly.
She gave me her most severe look. “It will be happening soon, and you make the promise to your auntie that you will pass. You do not want to violate this promise.”
Of course, in typical Carolina fashion, just because she knew about the physics quiz looming in my future didn’t mean she could tell me the answers or even what questions would be on it. So after she’d gone home, I called Natalie. I’d started taking notes in class, but I needed help decoding them. And untangling scientific mysteries was usually Natalie’s idea of a good time — I didn’t have to worry about imposing.
But if I’d thought it was shocking to turn a corner and see my own image repeated hundreds of times on a wall of scaffolding, I was totally unprepared for Natalie having no interest in talking about physics. It was like Mr. Dudley having no interest in talking about the Muse, or Charley having no interest in accessories.
Tonight, however, Natalie had only one thing on her mind, and that was Edward, the guy from the science fair.
They’d met up after school for coffee, and while Carolina and I were watching Bewitched, the two of them were sipping lattes and discovering they were soul mates. And Natalie on the subject of Edward made me on the subject of Quinn sound like Gwyneth on any subject whatsoever. It probably didn’t help that she was also completely wired from the lattes.
“Did I tell you that Edward wants to go to MIT, too?” she said. “He spent his summer at Caltech doing neuromorphic systems engineering, but he spent the summer before at MIT, and he liked it better. He’s considering a joint degree in nanoscience and bioengineering, but I told him about the work I’ve been doing in optics and now he’s thinking he’ll do a triple major. I can’t wait for you to meet him, Delia. I invited him to the Homecoming Dance. Are you and Quinn going to go? Because if you do, we can all hang out, Edward and me and you and Quinn.”
It was hard to believe this was the same person who’d scoffed at the Homecoming Dance yesterday, much less the same person who’d been suggesting that Quinn was a criminal mastermind today. But her happiness was contagious, even over the phone, and since she agreed to meet up before school the next morning to help me prep for the physics quiz (she’d already guessed on her own we were due for one, and it wasn’t like Dr. Penske had sworn Charley to secrecy or anything), I wasn’t going to hold any of the other stuff against her.
The only problem was that all of Natalie’s romantic giddiness just kept bringing my thoughts back to Quinn, who, according to Carolina, was confused and under pressure but not for the reasons I thought and not because of anything that had to do with me. That was promising, though I had no idea what the alternatives were to having lost interest in me or having been involved in something moronic. And either way, he still hadn’t returned my text.
So after I’d paced around the loft a bit, sent a contrite belated birthday e-mail to Erin, fanned the pages of my physics notebook, done a run-through of Lady Macbeth, eaten some leftover Wiener schnitzel, organized Charley’s collection of classic ’80s teen movies by star (Lowe, McCarthy, Ringwald, Spader), and otherwise pretended I was being restrained and not giving way to obsessive, stalker-like behavior, I called Quinn.
I was sort of relieved when his number went straight to voice mail. It suggested maybe his battery was dead or he’d lost his phone or for some other reason hadn’t even seen my text, which was infinitely better than his having seen it and ignored it. And this thought gave me the courage to do what I did next, which was to call his home phone.
It rang four times, and I was about to give up when Bea answered.
“Riley residence,” she said carefully. “Beatrice Riley speaking.”
“Hi, Bea. It’s Delia. Is Quinn around?”
“Delia!” she cried. “Did Quinn tell you about —”
There was a fumbling noise, and she gave a muted screech as someone wrested the phone away from her. Then Oliver came on.
“This is Oliver Riley —” he started to say. But then there was another fumbling noise and an “ow!” as somebody else pulled the phone away from him.
“Both of you. Bed. Now.” Fiona had her hand over the mouth of the receiver, but I could still hear her, and she sounded scary.
I’d only met Fiona a couple of times, and she hadn’t seemed scary then — mostly just well-groomed — so this side of her was new. It occurred to me I should probably hang up while I still could, but before that thought could fully register, she was speaking into the phone. “Hello?”
“Hi, Fi — I mean, Mrs. Riley. Is Quinn there?”
“Who’s calling, please?” she asked.
“It’s Delia,” I said. And then, when she didn’t respond right away, I added, “Delia Truesdale.” And when she still didn’t respond, I added, “Quinn’s friend from Prescott?”
“Yes, Delia, I know who you are,” she said, and there was a bite to her tone.
“Uh, may I speak to Quinn?” I managed to get out. At this point, I was completely flummoxed.
“Quinn is unavailable at this time.”
“Oh,” I said. And then, since she didn’t offer to take a message, I said, “Should I call back later?”
There was another long pause, and when she spoke next, her tone was so acid it practically dissolved the phone. “No, you should not.”
And with that she hung up.
Eleven
I didn�
�t sleep well that night, so I wasn’t in a very good mood the next morning. Neither was Charley, though for different reasons.
It turned out that I shouldn’t have worried about her seeing the scaffolding near the loft, because Dieter had been busy plastering all of the scaffolding in the city with the same posters, and she’d encountered several equally striking examples of his work on her way home. And the man himself was still missing in action, which meant we didn’t know where our pictures might show up next.
I was already too upset to get more upset about this, but I was starting to wonder if I should be concerned about Charley’s mental health. On the subway to school, she kept muttering under her breath about what she was going to do to Dieter if she ever found him. Of course, I was busy replaying Fiona’s words over and over again in my head, and it was possible I was doing some muttering as well. The entire population of New York could have been staring and pointing at us, and a substantial chunk of it probably was, but we were both too caught up in our inner tirades to pay much attention.
So I wasn’t exactly the most cheerful version of myself when I arrived at Prescott. Natalie, on the other hand, was so happy she was nearly levitating. I could almost feel my aura and hers staring at each other in confusion from opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. And though she hadn’t slept well, either, in her case it was due to being too thrilled and overcaffeinated, and not because her love interest’s stepmother had been overwhelmingly, crushingly mean to her.
The good news, though, at least for me, was that Natalie had used some of her excess energy to go above and beyond the call of friendship by creating a mock physics quiz I could use as a study guide. “Dr. Penske’s so predictable,” she said. “I guarantee whatever he hands out tomorrow will look exactly like this, just with his own inputs for the calculations.”
Of course, all of Natalie’s inputs seemed to involve references to Edward (“If Edward drives a car at a velocity of x and accelerates by a factor of y”), but it was so incredibly nice of her I wasn’t going to tease her about it. And while I still didn’t really understand why I was supposed to take the steps she said to take to solve the problems, they weren’t any harder to memorize than “out damned spot.”
And Then I Found Out the Truth Page 6
