Bridget Wilder #3

by Jonathan Bernstein

  “The Bridget cold.” I nod. “I get it.” It’s sort of a compliment, I suppose.

  “And so will someone else,” Joanna goes on.

  Will they, though? Now that D——— T————’s out of the picture, I wonder if I’ll ever have scratchy, sore, sweaty feelings for anyone ever again. I’ve learned you can’t trust spies, and all you have to offer non-spies are lies. That’s a pretty bleak future.

  Joanna’s voice turns quiet. “I’m a harder disease to catch. I need help to become contagious.”

  How can I say no to that?

  I get off the bed and approach her. “Okay,” I say, my voice low. “I’m not going to help you exploit tragic family deaths or weird religious beliefs, but I’ll do a little digging.”

  “Bridget,” she whispers, her face aglow with something I think might be gratitude. Is NJ going to hug me? I think she’s going to hug me! We’ve never hugged.

  Joanna moves toward me.

  A loud, piercing shriek from my little sister’s room causes me to spring to alert. I shove NJ out of my way and go flying out the door.

  “Keep that hug for me,” I yell. “I’ll be back for it another time.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Say Hello to the Face of Say Hello

  My first panicked jumble of thoughts are: Someone is retaliating for something I did. Or it’s a preemptive attack. Or it’s someone coming back from the dead. When you’re a spy you make a lot of enemies, and the people who hate you most tend to get revenge by hurting those closest to you.

  I kick open Natalie’s door and raise my ring finger, ready to launch Red.

  Natalie is sitting on her bed, eyes wet with tears, struggling to catch her breath and trying to form words. I rush over to her.

  “Oh my God” is all she can say.

  “What happened?”

  “The principal.” She gulps. “The first lady. The school. The campaign about phones. Me.”

  She’s making no sense, or she’s making as much sense as I do when I talk about L4E.

  Ryan ambles into Natalie’s room. “I hear screaming. I see crying.” He rubs his hands together. “You found the dead pigeon I hid in your room. Classic prank.”

  “No,” sniffs Natalie. “Jocelyn Brennan, our first lady . . .”

  “She found the pigeon?” asks Ryan.

  “Shut up!” snaps Natalie. She focuses on me. “You know her big cause? Her Say Hello campaign?”

  “Um, I think I do,” I lie.

  Natalie shakes her head at me. “What galaxy do you live in? You know we’re electing a new president next month?” She looks over at Ryan. He’s pretending to clean his ears with one of Natalie’s cheer choreography awards.

  “I knew about the president,” he brags. “You might be making the other thing up, though.”

  Natalie narrows her eyes at us both. “You’re so stupid. It’s an important nationwide campaign aimed at getting kids to stop isolating themselves by staring at their phones all day and interact with the people around them.”

  “Couldn’t she have done something more controversial, like remember which is your left hand and which is your right?” snorts Ryan.

  “Jocelyn Brennan is my role model,” responds Natalie. “She’s a strong, smart, kind, caring, concerned woman who’s spent the last three months spreading her message to schools across America. And in two days she’s coming to Reindeer Crescent, and the face of her campaign is going to be me!”

  I know enough to say, “Natalie, that’s amazing.”

  “I know, right?” She beams. “What they told me is, Mrs. Brennan and her daughter, Jamie . . .”

  “The clumsy one?” Ryan smiles. “She’s hilarious.”

  “. . . will talk to the school in the assembly hall. Mrs. Brennan will tell Jamie how important it is that we all engage with one another in a face-to-face way, and then she’ll say, ‘I asked a student right here in Reindeer Crescent to see if she could spend a day without using her phone.’ And then I’ll come out. I’m that student! The White House people showed her a bunch of pictures of kids from our school, and she picked me!”

  “Natalie, that’s amazing!” I say again. It isn’t, really. This is just another example of how luck-filled Natalie’s life has always been and will always continue to be. She’ll probably grow up to be president. (I only hope I’m not the spy who has to uncover the dirty secrets that bring her down.)

  It’s a half hour later, and the Natalie news has gone viral throughout the Wilder household. In our crowded living room, Mom is FaceTiming with members of the family she hasn’t spoken to in years. She’s singled out the parents with overachieving children to let them know that Natalie has just reached a height that their offspring, however gifted, will never equal. The Say Hello girl herself, ironically, has not looked up from her phone in the past thirty minutes. Her fingers are a blur as she texts everyone in her wide circle.

  Joanna and Ryan, who developed a weird, unexpected friendship when he sort of chaperoned my visit to New York, are trading amused barbs about the campaign. My father leans back in his leather chair and delivers a lecture about the presidential race. “Chester Brennan is a doofus, but he’s not the worst president we’ve ever had,” Dad tells me. “He’s doing his best, even if his best is only adequate.”

  I perch on the arm of his chair and pretend to take notes on my phone.

  “This is great stuff, Mr. Wilder,” I tell him. “Tell me more.”

  “His weakness is foreign policy,” Dad goes on. “This whole mess with Trezekhastan. We shouldn’t get caught up in this stupid fight between them and Sabopapo.”

  “Savlostavia,” I say. “And it’s not Trezekhastan’s fault . . .”

  I stop myself midsentence. I have no idea who is actually to blame for the long-running war between the two Eastern European nations. But I do know when I was in New York, I saved the son of the Trezekhastan secretary of state from being assassinated by the evil, vile, heartless, malicious Vanessa Dominion. (She is completely irrelevant to me. I don’t dwell on her, and I never wake up screaming from nightmares in which she calls me “peanut.”) The secretary’s son reached out to the Forties to thank me, and we follow each other on Trezekh.chat, his country’s heavily censored version of social media. We’re sort of friends.

  Dad, meanwhile, continues his current affairs commentary.

  “It’s this independent candidate, Morgan Font, I don’t trust. He’s a billionaire who thinks he can run the country like he runs his internet retail corporation. He might tell you he works for us, but deep down he thinks we work for him. If a guy like that rises to a position of power, we’re all in trouble. You think there’s too much snooping into our personal business now? If this Morgan Font has his way, we’ll be under surveillance every second of every day. We won’t know who to trust. Someone under our own roof could be a spy!”

  I jump off the arm of Dad’s chair, grab Joanna, and yank her out of the living room.

  CHAPTER NINE

  OK Cupid

  Later that night, while T-shirt (aka Marlon Moats) sleeps, I remotely access his laptop. I poke around his private files to find something useful so Joanna can weasel her way into his life. It’s a scarily easy process. D——— T———— showed me how to do it. (If I wanted, I could access and control his computer and find out personal details about Ur5ula. Except he’s probably set up all sorts of locks and tripwires and trapdoors to prevent a rookie like me from sneaking in. Not that I’ve ever tried, so I wouldn’t know.)

  Do I feel guilty about invading Marlon Moats’s privacy? Extremely. I would hate to have someone do this to me. But I saw the way Joanna’s face lit up when I agreed to do this illegal act for her. I didn’t know her face was capable of lighting up like that, and I want to see it again. So I’m looking through pictures of T-shirt’s black lab, Ambrose; the soccer websites he’s bookmarked; his iTunes playlists—nothing by Ruth Etting or L4E, so of no interest to me—and the list of foreign countries he wants t
o visit.

  That last item is good intel; that’s something Joanna can slip into a conversation with T-shirt.

  I go through his calendar for the coming month. He seems to have a lot of afternoon appointments with a Dr. Klee, including one after school tomorrow. I do a quick search and discover that Dr. Klee is a local dentist. T-shirt has gleamingly white, immaculately healthy teeth. I wonder why he needs to see the dentist so often. Another topic he and Joanna have in common; she’s always pulling and twisting at her last remaining baby tooth. This is starting to look like a match made in heaven.

  Encouraged, I start to hunt through T-shirt’s download files and come across a hidden bunch of pictures. Uh-oh. On the one hand, I know I shouldn’t do this. On the other, NJ’s face lighting up. I double-click and find myself gazing at two young people in love. T-shirt and . . . my old non-friend, Nola Milligan. My classmates Casey Breakbush and Kelly Beach, who are Nola’s two slim, pretty, popular best friends, don’t particularly like me, but they also don’t out and out detest me. Nola, for some reason, does. I did not know she and T-shirt were a thing. It must have happened when Joanna was in New York, so she wouldn’t have known, either. Problem teeth and an interest in traveling abroad might not be enough to increase Joanna’s chances of finding a soul mate in T-shirt. Feeling let down and little embarrassed about how snoopy I’ve just been, I log out of T-shirt’s computer and crawl into bed, where I mentally rehearse what I’m going to tell Joanna when she starts pummeling me with questions tomorrow.

  “I’m making progress” and “I’m definitely on the right track,” were what I told her this morning on our way to school. Now, though, it looks like the odds of making a love connection might be a little more in Joanna’s favor than I previously thought.

  But let me back up a bit.

  The lunch bell rang, and I walked out of class behind Casey, Kelly, and Nola, who were conversing breathlessly in high-pitched yippy-yappy voices about the first lady’s impending visit and how unfair it was that one of them hadn’t been selected to be the face of the Say Hello campaign. They trotted into the hallway and bumped into a group of lean, tan, rowdy guys from the soccer team, including T-shirt. Casey and Kelly immediately got all giggly and hair-tossy around the soccer dudes. Nola Milligan did not. T-shirt smiled at her, displaying those gleaming white, seemingly perfect teeth, and she barely gave him the time of day. The sides of her mouth twitched, and at no point did her eyes meet his. Nola greets me with more warmth than that. I also noticed she made a point of hanging a few feet back from her two best friends in the world, with whom she is normally unable to function without constantly touching. But not today. Today, Nola hung back and she looked uncomfortable.

  Hmm.

  With no motive other than wanting to see my friend’s face light up, I approach a slim, pretty, popular girl who openly dislikes me.

  “Hi, Nola,” I say, falling into step with her.

  “And now my day’s complete,” sighs Nola without looking at me. “I just stepped in a steaming pile of Bridget Wilder.”

  “You keep getting funnier,” I respond. “But seriously, can I talk to you for a minute?”

  “Do you need me to give you a list of all the things that are awful about you?” she asks. “’Cause that’s going to need a lot more than a minute.”

  “Another time, perhaps,” I say. Notice how I’m not letting her rattle me? Rest assured, I’m rattled inside. She’s a skilled rattler. “I need some advice. It’s about Marlon Moats.”

  That cool, we don’t breathe the same air manner Nola wears like expensive perfume evaporates. She turns to face me. Her eyes dart to Casey, Kelly, and the soccer dudes, and then back to me.

  “What?” she demands, her voice low and tense. “Why ask me?”

  “Someone I know likes him . . . ,” I begin.

  A mocking smile appears on Nola’s pretty face. “You? Seriously?” She lets out a harsh laugh. “I wouldn’t wish him on my worst enemy. So you have my blessing.”

  “It’s not me,” I retort. “It’s a friend of mine. You don’t know her; she goes to another school. She likes him, or thinks she does, but if there’s something you know about him, something you think she should know . . .”

  Nola sucks her lower lip into her mouth. She looks torn. I can see she does not enjoy my company. But I can also see she’s bursting to talk to someone. Nola grabs my elbow. “All right,” she mutters. “Two minutes. No more.”

  She hustles me along the corridor and pushes me into the girls’ toilet.

  “She’s having a bout of explosive diarrhea!” Nola shouts at the other inhabitants. “Get out now or you’ll wear her stink all day.” A handful of grossed-out girls flee the toilet. I give her an admiring look. That was a spy-worthy lie, even though it will no doubt end in my class-clown nemesis Brendan Chew labeling me Poopy Wilder, or worse.

  Nola regards herself in the mirror. She concentrates on retouching her makeup and doesn’t look at me.

  “I liked him,” Nola suddenly says. “I liked how he was all into me. I liked how we looked so good together it would make people jealous.”

  “That’s a lovely sentiment,” I say.

  “But . . .” She pauses while applying lip liner. “He was like two different people. There was this one time, we were at the Yogurt Hut? A fly was buzzing around our table. I kept swatting it away and it kept flying back, and I did this . . .”

  Still focused on the bathroom mirror, Nola snatches out her finger and thumb.

  “. . . and I caught it!” she exclaims. “I have amazing reflexes. And before I knew what I was doing, I squished it.”

  In the mirror, Nola rubs her thumb and finger together. She then screws up her face in distaste.

  “Gross, I know. It just happened. I ran to the toilet to wash my hands and when I got back Marlon was gone. He didn’t answer my calls or my texts. I saw him at school the next day, and he walked right past me like I was invisible. You know what that’s like.”

  Even when she’s opening up to me, Nola still finds ways to jab at my weak spots.

  “Then that night, he’s waiting outside my house, and before I can say anything, he’s like ‘I am so disappointed in you. Don’t you know all life is precious?’ I’m like whaaat? You walked out on me because I killed a fly? Um, bye?”

  Nola goes back to her reflection. She applies an extra coating of smudge-proof eyeliner.

  “So then . . . ?” I prompt.

  “So then, obviously, the calls and texts start flooding in. Please. I’m so sorry. I think about you all the time. I figure he’s paid his penance. One last chance. And then he starts in on me about seeing his dentist.”

  “Dr. Klee?” I blurt out.

  Nola shoots me a sharp look. “Stalkerish,” she mutters.

  “My friend wanted me to check him out, so . . .” I trail off. Nola’s not buying it, but she wants to talk. So I shut up.

  “Dr. Klee.” She nods. “Dr. Klee this, Dr. Klee that. Dr. Klee’s a genius. He’ll fix your smile, outside and inside. What does that even mean? First, I don’t need my smile fixed.”

  “It’s good as new,” I agree. “Like it’s never been used.” (Come on. I’m allowed to get one jab in.)

  “So I tell him it sounds like you’re into Dr. Klee a lot more than you’re into me. And he doesn’t argue. I started to talk to Casey and Kelly about it, but they love hanging out with the soccer guys, and if they have my back over how weird Marlon is, then no more soccer guys.”

  Just for a minute, I see the hurt in Nola’s face. She realized what she was worth to her friends, and it wasn’t as much as she hoped.

  “Thanks for opening up to me,” I say. “Anytime you want to talk.”

  Nola grimaces. “You’ll be the first person I think of. If everyone else on earth is dead.”

  With that one last jab, she walks out of the bathroom, leaving me alone to put together the pieces of what she just told me.

  I start to think about flies and dentists.
Then I hear Brendan Chew’s voice from out in the hallway. “Bridget Wilder’s got diarrhea. Landslide!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Open Wide

  “Amassing data,” I tell Joanna after school. But I don’t tell her anything else because I have an urgent appointment with T-shirt’s dentist. Dr. Klee’s office is about six blocks away, situated on the second floor of Reindeer Crescent Medical Center. The big white building has a huge poster hanging outside as a greeting that features a happy, smiling doctor and an equally inviting nurse. The words We’ll Take Great Care of You hang over their heads. Those words and the smiling medical faces do not seem to be encouraging the crimson-faced, trembling eight-year-old girl in the plaid kilt who has frozen to the spot outside the entrance to the medical center and refuses to budge another inch.

  “Please,” hisses the girl’s flustered mother. “We talked about this. You have to go in.”

  The girl digs her heels into the ground, folds her arms around herself, and shakes her head. I feel you, boo. This was me a few years ago. This is me now. I fear the dentist and his tools of torture, especially that Waterpik. I feel like I’m drowning when liquid starts blasting into my mouth. But I’m not going to tell her that. Instead, I approach the unhappy girl and her exasperated mother.

  “Hi.” I smile sympathetically. “I know it’s none of my business, but, honestly, you don’t have to be scared. This will be over faster than you think, and it doesn’t hurt at all.”

  The girl looks up at me, her eyes shining with tears. “R-really?”

  The mother looks relieved and also annoyed that I got through to her daughter in seconds.

  I touch the girl’s arm. “I’m early for my appointment, I’ll sit with you if you want.”

  The girl nods.

  And that’s how I get to spy on T-shirt and Dr. Klee without anyone asking why I’m hanging out in a dentist’s office where I don’t have an appointment.

  By an incredible stroke of luck, T-shirt is disappearing into the dentist’s exam room just as I walk into the reception area with my new best friend. I sit with the scared-stiff girl and focus all my attention on the wall just above the receptionist’s head. I touch the left arm of my glasses and feel the slightest of vibrations. Soon, I’ll be able to see straight through the wall and into Dr. Klee’s exam room.