“Well, even if you are a pushy know-it-all,” Oliver said, “you’re our pushy know-it-all.”
“Oh, Oliver.” Matilda blushed. “That’s very sweet of you to say. Now go to bed. You look tired, and lack of sleep can hinder development in adolescent males.”
Oliver looked at the yearbook on his desk. He doubted his mom would come looking for it but decided it might be best to hide it under his bed. However, when he picked it up off the desk, something fell out of the back.
It was a stick, like the kind used to hold a Popsicle or an ice-cream bar. Printed along the side it said:
FAROUK’S FAMOUS FUDGSICLES
Oliver opened the yearbook and found where the stick had been taped to the inside of the back cover. The tape was old and yellow and had no adhesiveness left. He returned his attention to the stick, turning it over to see if there was anything written on the other side.
There was. On the back, someone, most likely his mom, had carefully written:
Matilda missed school for the next day, texting both the boys with a message that read simply: Shadow protocols. Radio silence. 36 hours.
“What the heck does that mean?” Frankie said.
“I think it means, ‘Don’t bother me, I should have something in a day and a half.’ ”
Frankie reread the text. “Huh, okay,” he said.
Sure enough, a day and a half later, in gym class, Matilda plopped down next to Oliver on the bleachers. It was dodgeball day, and Oliver was an early out as usual.
“That was some hunch you had,” she said. “Can’t wait to hear a little more about it.”
Oliver started to speak, but Matilda stopped him. “Not here,” she said, looking around furtively. “After school. Frankie’s house.”
“Paranoid much?” Oliver joked.
“Yes,” Matilda said without a trace of humor.
Down on the gym floor, Oliver saw Frankie duck just before a dodgeball took his head off.
“Hey! No headhunting!” Frankie cried. “Coach?!”
Oliver turned back to Matilda, but she was already gone.
Matilda shut Frankie’s bedroom door behind them.
“My mom says we have to keep that open on account of you’re a girl,” Frankie protested.
“I know, and we will,” Matilda said, dropping a thick stack of papers onto Frankie’s desk. “In a minute.” She looked at Oliver. “So, about that hunch of yours? Why Preston Oglethorpe?”
“Preston Oglethorpe?” Frankie said, confused. “You mean the guy they renamed the school after?”
“Yep,” Oliver said.
“The one they showed us the video about?” Frankie said. “The genius scientist who disappeared and now no one knows where he’s at?”
“Yes!” Matilda barked in frustration. “And are you purposely trying to end all your sentences in prepositions?”
Frankie thought for a moment. “Maybe,” he said.
“All right,” Oliver said, taking his mom’s yearbook out of his backpack. He opened it to the page with his mom and the two boys. “That’s Preston Oglethorpe,” he said. “And that’s my mom.”
Matilda took the yearbook and looked closely at the picture. For a long time, she just stared at it quietly.
“Well,” she said finally, “the good news is that your instincts were correct. I think I know what George Kaplan is up to.”
“Now who’s ending their sentences in prepositions?” Frankie quipped.
Matilda took a cleansing breath.
“What’s the bad news?” Oliver asked, getting them back on track.
“Pretty much everything else,” Matilda said. “At the time of Preston Oglethorpe’s disappearance, he was working for a top secret government think tank.”
“Okay,” Frankie said, his voice cracking a little. “Um, you just used ‘government,’ ‘top secret,’ and ‘disappearance’ all in the same sentence. That cannot be good.”
“You didn’t happen to get any information on this think tank, did you?” Oliver said.
“No such luck.” Matilda scowled. “But Preston Oglethorpe’s research was about controlling probability scenarios. He was developing mathematical formulas that could manipulate—” She stopped when she saw how hard the boys were trying to look like they were following her. “Okay,” she said, slowing it down. “Either of you two familiar with chaos theory?”
“I loved their last album,” Frankie wisecracked.
“This is where it all started to get away from me,” Oliver confessed.
“Okay. According to a scientific principle called chaos theory,” Matilda explained, “a tiny, seemingly insignificant event in one place can start a chain reaction that causes cataclysmic changes someplace else.”
“The butterfly effect,” Oliver ventured.
“Exactly,” said Matilda.
“Is that like if you go back to prehistoric times and step on a butterfly, it could change the entire course of the earth’s history?” Frankie said.
“That’s one example,” Matilda said. “Another is that the tiny flap of a butterfly’s wings on one side of the world could start a series of events that causes a hurricane on the other side.”
“Okay …”
“Now, imagine if you could create a mathematical equation that told you where to place that butterfly to make the hurricane happen, wherever and whenever you wanted.”
“So this Oglethorpe guy was studying chaos theory to control the weather?”
“Not just the weather,” Matilda said. “Anything.”
“Whoa, hold on,” Frankie interjected after double-checking the hallway and closing the door again. “Sorry, but I’m still back on a butterfly causing a hurricane. How does that happen?”
“Well, I guess if it flapped its wings at the right time in the right way, it could push a weather pattern just enough to change it.”
“How?”
“I don’t know how, Frankie. I’m a cyber pirate, not a meteorologist.”
“Is it at least a really big butterfly?”
Matilda stared at Frankie like she was trying to work out whether he was messing with her or not.
“Okay, let’s try this,” she said after some thought. “Frankie, say one day your mom is taking the twins out in the stroller so they’ll fall asleep for an afternoon nap.”
“Okay. With you so far.”
“And as they stroll past a flower bed, a butterfly flaps its wings, stirring up a tiny whiff of pollen that finds its way into one of your brother’s nostrils, causing him to sneeze, which then wakes up your other brother, who starts crying. Now both of them are up and they won’t go back to sleep. So your mom brings them home and leaves them with you because she has errands to run and your dad’s busy in the kitchen. Still with me?”
“It’s like a page out of my life. Keep going.”
“Okay, now you have to spend the afternoon watching the twins. But you had planned on using that time to study for your math test, because you have a low C in that class and you really need to pull up your grade.”
“For the record, I actually have a mid-to-high C in math.”
“Since you don’t get to study, you wind up bombing the test, lowering your grade to a D, the grade at which all parents freak out. Your mom and dad hire a tutor, but they make you split the cost to teach you a lesson about responsibility for letting things get so bad in the first place.”
“Wow, are you just making this up as we go?”
“Hush. You get a job mowing lawns to help pay for the tutor. Then one day you’re mowing a lawn in your old sneakers, the ones with no tread, and you slip while pushing the mower up a small hill. The mower rolls back down and cuts off half your foot.”
“Whoa. Dark.”
“Obviously, spring Little League is now out. Your parents feel terrible about your injury and bring home a cello for you to play while you recuperate.”
“Why a cello?” Oliver chimed in.
“Yeah, why a cello?”
&nb
sp; “Really? You guys are hung up on the cello?”
Oliver and Frankie shrugged.
“Okay, then. One of your dad’s friends bought it for his daughter, but she never plays it, so he sold it to your dad real cheap. Good enough?”
“Sure,” Frankie said, satisfied.
“Wonderful. Where were we? Oh, right. You learn the cello, unlocking a hidden gift for music, and you get good, really good. You practice hours and hours every day, at first to fight off the boredom and to distract yourself from your disfigured foot, but over time you discover a deep love of music. You go to Juilliard and then become a rich and famous classical musician. All because …”
“A butterfly flapped its wings,” Oliver said in a soft voice.
“That’s right.”
There were a few moments of quiet while the boys processed all of this.
“And this Oglethorpe dude,” Frankie said finally, “he was using math and science and stuff to figure out where to put the butterfly?”
“Metaphorically speaking, yes.”
“Is it just me, or is this really scary?”
“It’s not you. A person who could manipulate chaos theory like that would be invincible. They could do just about anything they wanted. And the most frightening part of all: You wouldn’t even know they did it.”
“I’m beginning to see why Oglethorpe disappeared.”
“And here’s the really scary part,” Matilda said, taking a photograph from her stack of papers and putting it flat on the desk for the boys to see. “My guess is that all this time he’s been hiding from George Kaplan.”
The boys looked at the photograph. It was a grainy, black-and-white shot of a group of scientists standing in a room packed wall-to-wall with supercomputers.
“The young guy front and center is Preston Oglethorpe, all grown up,” Matilda said, pointing him out in the picture. He looked to be in his mid-twenties when it was taken, and at least ten to twenty years younger than the rest of the scientists.
“Now look at the guy on the far left.”
The boys did. “Holy smokes!” Frankie exclaimed. “It’s him! It’s George Kaplan!”
Oliver felt his blood turn to ice.
“I don’t suppose this photo had a caption anywhere telling us who Kaplan really is?” Frankie tried.
“Unfortunately, no.”
Oliver looked at Matilda. “You think Mr. Kaplan is in town because he thinks Oglethorpe is here, too?”
“Yes,” Matilda said quietly. “I do.”
Frankie caught on as well. “And he’s getting chummy with Oliver’s mom because she was childhood friends with Oglethorpe. He’s—” Frankie stopped, not wanting to finish the thought.
“He’s using my mom as bait,” Oliver said, his voice little more than a trembling whisper. “Isn’t he?”
“Oliver, we’re going to—”
“What?” Oliver said, panicked. “What are we going to do, Matilda? Tell me. Because I have no idea. What are we going to do?”
No one said anything for a while. Then Frankie slammed his palm on the desk.
“I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do,” Frankie said. “We’re going to get ahead of this thing. We’re going to find Oglethorpe first, before that creep Kaplan can.”
“Frankie,” Oliver said skeptically.
“He’s right,” Matilda said firmly. “It’s the smart play. We can do this, Oliver. I know we can.”
Oliver looked at his friends, trying to feed off their optimism. “Sure,” he said. “Three kids trying to track down the smartest man in the world. Should be a piece of cake.”
Frankie returned to the yearbook. “Hey, guys,” he said. “Any idea who this other boy is in the picture? The one with the busy shirt. Jimmy—”
Matilda snatched the book away from him. “He’s probably a dead end,” she said a bit abruptly. “But I’ll keep this and look into it. Just to be safe.”
When Shady Glades Is Rocking, Don’t Bother Knocking * Matilda Sandoval Acts Her Age * Imagine the Odds (Part 2) * The Reluctant Babysitter * Bad Becky Says Please * Frankie Survives His Brothers * The Telltale T-Shirt
Like any retirement community, Shady Glades had seen its share of heated battles. Cribbage versus gin rummy, Diagnosis Murder versus Murder, She Wrote, tapioca pudding versus Jell-O—these were the kind of hot-button issues that turn geriatric brother against geriatric brother.
But one thing that nearly everyone at Shady Glades agreed upon was that the rec room was the place to be every Wednesday at five. That was because Shady Glades now had its very own house band, the Dangerous Jams.
Though Bad Becky would never admit it, Mrs. Gonzales was right to make them invite Mr. Abernale to join the band. Not only was he an excellent piano player, but he was the only one who could stand up to Bad Becky when needed. And it was needed a lot. Bad Becky was an amazing teacher—Billy was learning so much and improving so quickly—but she wasn’t always the easiest person to get along with.
Mr. Lindo became a new man once they dug his old drum set out of storage. Billy would watch how, over the course of a rehearsal, Mr. Lindo would grow increasingly more alert, more aware. He still got confused easily, but he knew Billy’s name now, and whenever they talked music, the old man was always sharp as a tack.
Billy was familiar with the expression “win-win,” but he’d never believed such situations actually existed. Yet here it was. Billy was happy. Mr. Lindo and Mr. Abernale were happy. Even Bad Becky was relatively happy. Which meant she wasn’t making the Shady Glades staff constantly unhappy, so they all had to be happy, too.
And all because Billy had gotten caught swiping lunches.
Imagine the odds?
“Matilda, where in the world is this coming from?” her mother asked. Her tone fell somewhere between incredulous and very perturbed.
The truth of it was, Matilda didn’t know herself. Not an hour earlier she had been picking songs for them to listen to on Spotify while her mom was cooking dinner. Everything was fine. Better than fine, even. Then her dad called to say he’d have to miss dinner, to go ahead and eat without him.
No big deal.
Her mom hung up the phone and said, like she’d done dozens of times before over the years, “Just us tonight, sport. Your dad’s stuck at the office again.”
Matilda suddenly felt a burning behind her eyes, like when her dad surprised them with pizza. Except now she felt angry instead of sad. They were patronizing her. Mocking her. Treating her like a child.
She’d show them just how childish she could be.
“Really? Is he?” Matilda said.
“Pardon?”
“At the office?” Matilda said, making sure to dump an extra helping of sarcasm onto the question.
“That’s what I said.” Her mother drew the words out, trying to gauge just what was happening.
“I know you and Dad are keeping secrets from me,” Matilda blurted out defiantly. “Don’t bother denying it,” she added, feeding off the adrenaline rush one gets from an impulsively bad decision.
“All right,” her mother said in a “let’s do this, then” tone of voice. “Yes, your father and I do keep things from you. You know why? Because we’re parents. You’re a child, Matilda. You’re our child, and I’m sorry to say that there will always be things that we don’t tell you. Things that, frankly, aren’t any of your business.”
“That’s not fair,” Matilda said, deflating a bit the way all kids do when they realize that they’ve just fallen back on the three most useless words in any argument. “I am part of this family, aren’t I?” she said, regrouping.
“Yes, Matilda. You are,” her mother said. “The most special part of this family. But not an equal one.” Then, to soften the blow, her mom added: “Not yet.”
“So we just all keep pretending everything’s okay?”
“You want to go down that road?” her mom said. “Fine, let’s talk about pretending. Let’s talk about that Moonglow poster you have up in
your room. You’ve never seen any of those movies. You think they’re insipid. So why put the poster on your wall? Who are you trying to fool? Me? Yourself?” Matilda’s mother looked at her, searching her eyes. “Maybe it’s your way of pretending that everything’s okay, too.”
Matilda looked away.
“But maybe they’re not okay,” her mom said. “Maybe things are hard. Which is why last month you poured chicken noodle soup into the toilet so you could skip school?”
For a brief moment, Matilda considered opening up to her mom about how hard moving all the time was. Always being the new girl. Never really fitting in. Because she was really smart and didn’t hide it. Because she was a little odd and couldn’t hide it. But Matilda knew she couldn’t say these things. Because if she did, she wouldn’t stop, and then she’d tell her mom everything. About Oliver and the black Lincoln Town Cars and the mystery man courting Oliver’s mom. If that all turned out to be nothing, her parents would think she was a total freak.
And if it wasn’t nothing, then her dad might get hurt. Again.
Matilda didn’t say anything. She went back to making the smart choice. She asked if she could take her dinner into the family room, ate it in front of the TV, then went upstairs to her room and fell asleep in her clothes.
“Hey, guess what?” Frankie said, dropping his lunch on the table and plopping down next to Oliver. “My dad just got this big catering gig in the city.”
“No way,” Oliver said.
“That’s great,” Matilda said.
“Yeah, it’s a funny story, actually,” Frankie said, unwrapping his sandwich. “Turns out my mom set Steve up with my aunt Josie.”
“Wow,” Oliver said. “Your mom works fast.”
“I know, right? Anyway, Steve takes her to this swank party in the city where Aunt Josie starts talking to this rich lady whose caterer had just canceled on her. She mentions Dad and—bam!”
“That’s incredible.”
“So incredible!” Matilda said. “I mean, imagine the odds.”
Frankie stopped eating his sandwich mid-bite. “Wait a minute,” he said. “What did you just say?”
Connect the Dots Page 9
