by N. Griffin
Oh no! Would people think she was trying too hard? Was she trying too hard? She was! Why was she trying too hard? Was that a Plus?
Hester interrupted her thoughts.
“You really like those shorts, don’t you, Bett?” she said as Bett climbed down the rope ladder, hideously aware that her butt was preceding her, jiggling as she climbed.
“You’re a fine one to talk, Hester,” said Anna as Bett jumped to the ground and looked at her, surprised. “How many times have we seen you in that embroidered cardigan?”
“I embroidered it myself,” Hester protested.
“Well, I make my shorts myself,” said Bett now, surprising herself.
“All right, then. So!” Now Anna addressed the clump of fifteen or twenty kids gathered in the center of the hole. Ugh. Bett had been right. Twinklers as far as the eye could see. “We’re here to plan counter–Art Attacks.”
“Oh,” said Paul, his green seersucker suit dirtied by the climb down but not a hair out of place. “I just got that that’s supposed to be like ‘Heart Attacks.’ ”
“Yes,” said Anna, staring at him. “That’s what I was going for. Duh.”
Bett looked across the basement hole and saw Mutt. Huh. She wouldn’t have thought that an Art League or Art Attack or whatever this was would be his thing. But there he was, with a small girl by the hand, blond and tall for her age, with, as Bett’s mother would have noted, wide-set eyes like Mutt. Well, at least that made two more Stays.
Something about that little girl was slightly familiar. But what? Bett didn’t know. She seemed sweet enough, carrying a stuffed animal in one hand and something else Bett couldn’t make out in the other.
“I had to bring her,” Mutt explained roughly, noticing Bett looking. “Babysitting.”
“No problem,” said Anna. “Can’t hurt for kids to see how counteraction works. You’re Meredith, right? What’s your stuffy, sweetie?” she asked Mutt’s sister.
The girl nodded. “A dog,” she said softly, then half buried her face in Mutt’s stomach. “Only his ears got torn off. My—”
Mutt pressed her shoulder and she stopped. Then she continued: “I like art, too. This is the goblet I made for school. It’s going to be a present for my dad.” She glanced up into Mutt’s face as she spoke, but this time he didn’t stop her talking. Bett wondered if Meredith’s was the same goblet she had admired in art class just before Doug found that devil-tufty-mountain-lion drawing in his pocket.
“We should start this meeting,” Paul said, and Anna nodded and turned back toward the group.
“So! We all know we have something seriously sick going on in our school,” Anna began. “And we can’t just keep letting it happen, even if we don’t know who the asshole is.”
Then they don’t know Ranger is the devil-drawer. Yet. Bett breathed a sigh of relief and exchanged glances with Dan, but Dan still looked tense.
“And we think the way to fight destruction is with creativity—” Paul was continuing.
“So we have an idea,” Anna broke in. “A two-part one.”
“First, we want to do a graffiti mural,” said Paul. “Not assholic graffiti like the destroyer did, but one about positive things.”
“Then we’ll sneak into the school at night and hang it up so people can see something good when they walk into the school!” Anna practically sang out.
“Why sneak in?” asked Mutt. “Why not just hang it at lunch?”
Paul held up a hand. “Because a) Anna has gotten detention twice for ‘using evidence’ to make new projects to replace the art that was destroyed,” he said, “and b) kids need to be cheered up when they come into the school first thing. If we’re freaked by all this, imagine what the elementary kids are hearing over on their side of the building—the kindergartners, for God’s sake!”
It was true. Already parents of some of the younger kids were driving them to school or keeping them home.
Dan was nodding. Then he paused. “But what if we’re, like, watched? By security cameras or something?”
“Here? In Salt River?” Paul exhaled. “If there were security cameras or alarms, the asshole would have been caught already,” he said.
True enough.
“But I’ll tell you what,” Paul continued. “I sure as hell already feel watched—by whoever’s doing this BS.”
“Me too,” said Anna. “Okay. Who’s in?”
“Me!”
“Me!”
Everyone, apparently, wanted to work on the mural. Paul and Anna helped Hester and Lily spread out a gigantic piece of canvas on top of the tarp, other kids weighting down the curled corners with stones. Others set out markers and tempera paint pots with brushes, pencils and charcoal and all kinds of art supplies they’d brought with them. And soon hands were flying everywhere, all over that canvas, spray-painting and paint-painting and fast-drawing with markers and pens.
The mural began to take shape. In the middle of the canvas, Anna quickly sketched out the cherub. Paul and half a dozen others dove in along the sides, re-creating the pictures of the people who had been drawn with such care on the walls from the summer program, some in a cartoonish style and some mimicking the style in which they’d originally been drawn. Eli and the rest were spray-painting big, blocky, 3-D easy-looking letters saying ART ATTACK and CREATION and CREATIVITY WINS.
Bett stood back. Even though she believed in it, it was a tiny bit much for her. Pairs of worlds were colliding all over the place. School world with guys-at-lunch world, and bigger school world with Twinklers and Stays. Girls and normal people. The mix was not comfortable.
But the mixing of groups brought a torrent of thoughts rushing into Bett’s mind, and she shook her head, hard, to rid herself of them. No, she told herself in the din of the noise from the group. Don’t think about her now. Stop.
But Bett’s left ear went out and the STOP was already worn off her sneaker sole and she couldn’t not.
42
TWO YEARS AGO . . . “Why do you write words on your sneaker soles?” Stephanie had asked once. Bett hadn’t thought Stephanie would notice. Or anyone.
She shrugged.
“What?” Stephanie persisted. “Aren’t I your bestie? Can’t you tell even me?”
Bett shrugged again. “It’s dumb,” she said. “And aren’t we late to Paul’s house?” Paul’s family was having a party, and she and Stephanie had just spent forty-five minutes getting ready.
“Paul can wait,” said Stephanie. “Tell me about your sneakers.”
“I just write words on them,” said Bett.
“Let me see,” said Stephanie, and before Bett knew it, Stephanie had grabbed her foot and held it up to look at the sole.
“ ‘Toughness,’ ” Stephanie read. “What does that even mean?” But she wasn’t being snotty. Stephanie never was, only curious.
“It means . . . being tough. Like, when it’s hard to run, and I’m exhausted and want to stop, it makes me keep going.”
“So, like, you put traits on your shoe soles?”
“I guess,” Bett admitted, feeling naked and dumb. “Yeah.”
“That is so cool,” said Stephanie warmly. “Bett, you are like Wonder Woman.”
Bett said nothing, but she smiled and looked down.
If she wrote things on her sneaker soles, when the words had finally worn away, that should be it. The trait should be in her. It worked, you know. It really did.
43
Thursday, Sixth Day of Eleventh Grade, Nighttime at this Weird Art Meeting
“THIS IS ALL WELL AND good, but we have to make another plan now.” Dan stood over by the finished but still-wet mural. “To find out who did it all in the first place and turn them in.”
“But what if that person turns out to be seriously mental? What if they come after us before we get them?” asked Eli. “Oh man, I want some wine. Or a beer.” He laid his head on Paul’s shoulder.
Paul put his arm around him, even as he whispered furiously, “I
xnay on the ineway and the eerbay,” swinging his eyes over to Mutt’s little sister.
“You guys drink?” Meredith’s eyes were wide.
“No,” chorused everybody, while Hester moved strategically in front of a cooler.
“I just meant ‘whine,’ like I want to ‘whine’ about the situation,” Eli told Meredith.
“I was told this meeting would be part party,” another boy interrupted.
“You were told wrong,” said Anna with another eyeswing at Meredith.
Dan sighed. “Let’s get back to business.”
But before she could help herself, Bett blurted out, “I think I have a clue.” The heat of the fire baked her right side. “There was dirt around the transom this morning,” she said. “It went all the way to the window in the second-floor front stairwell.”
“So what?” asked Hester.
“You don’t get it—” Bett began.
“Oh,” said Dan. “You mean you think that the person must have broken into the school at night, like we’re planning to, and they went in through that second-floor window. Smashed the cherub thing, then left the same way.”
“Exactly,” said Bett, relieved.
“But how would the perp get up there?” asked Hester.
“Perpcakes,” muttered Bett without thinking. Then: “Kind of easy,” she said, louder. “Just swing up over the porch roof thing above the front entrance and then open the window and you’re in. If the perp—”
“—if the perp unlocked the window in the day, then they could get in at night, easycakes.” Anna finished Bett’s sentence and grinned at her. Was she making fun of her?
“By the way, I think we need just a few people to break in to hang this mural,” said Dan. “Not too many of us or it’s too risky. We have to bust in quietly, hang our mural, and then get the hell out of there.”
“But if we bust in, won’t we make a whole lot of noise?” asked Eli.
“YES!” said Dan. “That’s why I keep saying just a few of us and not the whole group! Like, five kids. We need the strongest and quickest of us who can also keep their mouths shut.”
“Like . . . ?” Paul prompted.
“You,” said Dan. “For one. But our leader, I think, should be Bett.”
Every head swiveled toward Bett. It was awful. “No,” she said.
“Yes,” Dan insisted. “You’re fast. You’re strong. And you love this shit.”
“I do not love this shit,” Bett argued. But already her heart was racing because she did love this shit. “Besides, it would be stupid to try your luck climbing up to the front window again,” she added. “If I saw that dirt, so did an adult.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Eli. “We have some pretty out-of-it teachers in our school.”
Bett nodded. True that. “Well, anyway, I bet the first-floor windows will be locked so you’ll need one person to scale up the wall to the back second-floor window,” said Bett. “The window in the middle. And then that person needs to let everybody else in through the side gym door after they get in.”
“Sounds like a plan,” said Anna.
“Who do you all think the psycho is?” asked Hester abruptly.
“My money’s on Doug,” said Paul, even though Mutt was right there and Doug was one of Mutt’s main meat minions. “He’s such a dick. I can see him doing shit like this without even thinking. And planting a picture on himself, thinking he’s throwing off suspicion. That’s a real television crime drama move right there.”
“And also, remember that time he chainsawed the furniture when Kelley had that party when her parents were out of town? He is a psycho,” claimed Eli.
They all remembered that time. Kelley had been grounded for months.
“It’s not Doug,” said Mutt unexpectedly. “You may think he’s a dick, but he’s not the kind of dick who plans.”
Nobody had a response to that.
Meredith looked scared.
“Don’t worry,” Mutt told her. “And don’t you tell anyone about any of this, either.”
“I won’t,” Meredith promised, clutching her goblet and earless dog.
“The question now is, who’s going to scale the school?” Paul asked. “That’s going to be tricky. No porch on the back side to get a boost from.”
There was a silence. Then: “Bett,” said Dan. “You remember that video? Bett on the bike?”
Hester clicked her tongue.
They remember the video? Bett thought wildly.
“I loved that video,” Anna said.
“Shit, y’all, I still HAVE that video,” said Eli, and he pulled out his phone. “I’ll send Anna the link and we can all watch it on both phones.”
“No!” protested Bett, but it was too late.
Bett on the bike, coasting off the rock and flying. Sliding into the water. Bill’s hand pulling her up. Replay. Replay. Replay.
44
Thursday, Night of the Sixth Eleventh Grade Day, Later, Basement Hole
“COME ON, BETT!”
“Do it!”
“Please! You’re the only one who can!”
“NO!” Bett said, stepping back. Why had she even brought up the idea in the first place?
“But we need you,” said Anna pleadingly. “Anyone who can do that can scale one stupid story of a stupid stone school.”
“Lots of handholds in stone,” Dan added.
“Then you do it,” Bett snapped. “I can’t do it. I can’t.” In no way was she going to do another Fizzicle Feet, especially not one as Plus as this one. She had vowed, and the vow made sense because she wasn’t going to do one and enjoy it and then come down and nearly kill someone and get their eyes out of their head and—
“Please?” Dan said. “For me? And”—he lowered his voice—“for Ranger?”
Bett thought about Ranger with his eyes filled with tears because he was afraid he’d be hung for the psycho.
She was still.
The Art League waited.
“Okay,” Bett said finally. “I’ll do it. But I want Dan . . . Paul . . . Anna, and . . . one more with me.”
“Jesus, not me, please,” said Eli.
“No, honey,” said Paul. “Not you. What about you, Mutt? You’re strong.”
“No,” said Mutt and Bett simultaneously.
Mutt glared at her. “I have to be home for Meredith,” he said.
“Who, then?” Paul asked.
“I’ll go,” said Hester. “I’ve done gymnastics since I was three. I’ve got good reflexes.”
Oh, great, thought Bett. But “Fine” was all she said. “Now let’s figure this out. We have to wait for this mural to dry and then we can make our move.”
Paul nodded. “Tomorrow night we take back the school.”
* * *
Bett made it home by ten, but only just. The phone was ringing, but the house was empty—her mother must still be at Aunt Jeanette’s. Bett saw the number on the phone. Her father. She picked the phone up and breathed into it.
“Bett?” asked her father. “Is that you?”
Bett didn’t answer. “Honey, we can’t keep going on like this. You have to forgive me at some point.”
“For being a cheater?” asked Bett. “For not caring about anyone but yourself?”
“Bett, don’t be rude.”
“Don’t you pretend you’re an actual parent who can tell me what to do,” said Bett, and hung up the phone.
* * *
Bett’s mom finally came home an hour later. “How was your evening?” she asked Bett.
“Fine,” said Bett, and was surprised that this was true. Her stomach began to churn.
“Great!” said her mother. “I’m glad, honey. Who else was at your meeting?”
“Oh, just Dan and Paul and that assholic Mutt and people. Mutt had to bring his little sister.”
“Those poor kids.” Her mom sighed. “They didn’t exactly win the parent lottery. Thank God that little girl has Mutt to look out for her, even
if he is, as you say, assholic.” She paused. “Anyone else there?” she asked lightly.
Bett hesitated. “Anna Reed. Hester O’Reilly. Some other Twinklers.”
Her mother was trying not to smile, and Bett knew it wasn’t about her Twinkler comment, but because Bett had been with girls as well as boys—hell, with people, period.
Stop staring at me.
She turned and went up the four stairs to her room and, twisting her hair into its topknot, got into bed, covers over her head, clothes still on. She knew she’d be making a midnight snack run. Her heart was pounding.
45
Thursday, Extra Late, So Late It’s Friday, Really
BETT’S CHEST ROILED AND THE familiar anxiety built and built until, around one, when she knew her mother was finally asleep, she climbed out of her bedroom window and landed on the damp, soft dirt below. It was so easy to escape her room in this tiny house. Her mother hadn’t factored that into her planning when she’d built it, Bett bet. She had just been so glad to get out of the old house. As, of course, had Bett, even if she couldn’t let herself think about that too hard.
Bett picked her way to the river slope where she’d found a little rock cave, no bigger than a bread box, the entrance of which she’d covered with a stone. She shoved that rock aside now and there, in her hiding place, were the four cupcakes she’d bought last weekend from the supermarket. She sat beside the little cavern, river rushing, night all over, dark like a cloak and the deep smell of water and the woods and her cupcakes.
Everything was too much. One by one, she ate all four of the cupcakes, breaking them in half across the cake part and putting the bottom half over the frosting to make cupcake sandwiches out of them.
She should go back to the house. But she didn’t want to. What had she gotten herself into with this cross-country team and now Ranger and this Fizzicle Feet and people like Dan kept talking to her and Dan’s hair was the good kind of red?
Across the oxbow—an almost circular bend of the river—a house stood, one light on like a beacon under an old, old tree. Then the waders man is a neighbor, thought Bett, and wondered why he’d built his house on an oxbow. But maybe the oxbow was new. There had been that big hurricane four years ago or so; maybe the river had overflowed and pinched off the man’s land. Maybe he felt he had a choice—either live in his house or abandon it—and he picked the oxbow. At least there was a small bridge of land still connecting the O of his property to the mainland.
