by Susan Vaught
Lavender froze on my bed, staring at me.
I stared back at her and lifted my hand to my chest, pressing my fingers into the bone and feeling the fast thud-thud-thud that had started after I talked about fire and ruin and messy things that could hurt a whole town.
“Do you think this hacker is going to hurt people?” Lavender asked in a too-quiet voice. “Like, really, truly hurt people?”
“I”—thud—thud—thud—“I hope not.”
Hargrove Thornwood was just a story, a legend. Except, he wasn’t. Thornwood had been a real man. He ruined actual lives. He . . . hurt people. Really, truly. His own family. Workers on his property. The folks who lived in Blue Creek way back then. Maybe his revenge was just a fable, but if some jerk with a grudge against my grandfather and Mayor Chandler decided to make it real, then it would be real.
“I don’t like this,” Lavender said. She got up, went to my desk, and fished through the colored cards, coming back with a stack of red ones and a black marker. She wrote Fire on one, and $$$ on another, and tacked them up above our suspect list.
“Epidemic was one I read about before,” she said. “You know, some big sickness that kills half the town, like cholera or yellow fever or . . .” She swallowed hard, and I could tell she was trying to get past being scared. “Pink-purple-turkey-dinosaur-flu.” She smiled at her own joke. “Yeah, something like that.”
“Use Disease for that one,” I suggested, lowering my hand and trying to relax so my heart would quit pounding. “Let’s see. There’s Natural Disaster to cover floods and tornados and stuff, and Killing Spree to handle all the mass shooting, poisoning, and multiple murder theories.”
“Poisoning?”
“Well, yeah, since that’s how Hargrove Thornwood died and stuff. Makes a sick sort of sense, if Thornwood’s Revenge turned out to be some kind of toxic gas cloud or contaminated water or something.”
“That’s just wrong,” she said, but she added Killing Spree to the board.
We stared at our choices for a while, not talking, trying to live with the idea that all of this might end up with way more than just annoying computer hacks.
“I guess,” Lavender said, “we could take off Natural Disaster, since even the best computer skills can’t make a tornado or a flood, not if we don’t live below a dam or something.”
“Okay.” I motored over and took down that card. “We can probably take down Disease, too, since I don’t think we’re dealing with an international terrorist or somebody who can break into disease labs and steal brain pox and start the zombie apocalypse.”
“Fire and Financial and Killing Spree left,” she said. “That’s just wonderful.”
“A hacker could do weird stuff at the banks, or at businesses. Could make a real mess.” I stared at the red card with the $$$ symbols and thought about what Riley and Ellis said about the poverty club. “Maybe the hacker plans to steal a lot of money from everybody’s bank accounts. I don’t think very many people in Blue Creek would be ready for that.”
“Banks have okay security,” Lavender said. “But yeah. And really, that would be awful but not as bad as killing spree.”
“I bet the electric company doesn’t have good security, or the water company. The hacker could probably bust into their computers and turn stuff off. Or steal account information from those places, because they’re probably less secure than banks.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Lavender’s laugh sounded a little nervous. “Ms. Jemison runs Blue Creek’s water utility district right out of her basement using paper files and an old clunky computer that’s not even hooked up to the Internet. It’s like computer security, reverse-engineered.”
“No way to hack what hasn’t ever been online, unless the hacker’s right at the computer.” I sat back in my chair. “But other businesses in town are online.”
“Yeah. Maybe we should tell Mayor Chandler to put out some sort of alert to people who actually do use online stuff.”
I shifted around and leaned on my armrest. “I don’t think there’s much we can do about fires or killing sprees.”
Lavender pursed her lips. “Maybe we’re just scaring ourselves. We don’t even know if this guy is really going to do anything.”
“We don’t even know if this guy is a girl,” I said.
“Point.” She sighed. “But that shoe print is from a guy’s shoe, so for now, we’ll go with ‘he’ instead of ‘she.’ And that means we should take down your mom. If she doesn’t have the money to get a new place to live that doesn’t have stairs, she doesn’t have the money to hire somebody to come here and do all this mess.”
“Leave her,” I grumbled.
“Max.”
“Fiiine. Take her down.” I didn’t really know how much money Mom made from her art. I didn’t know if she couldn’t afford a new place, or she just didn’t want one. Not having an accessible apartment meant she had extra excuses to leave me here with Toppy. But that didn’t make her a poison-pen hacker, or a potential arsonist or crazed murderer or whatever this freak might turn into.
Lavender took Mom down, leaving Toppy and Junior Thornwood and ???.
“That’s not much in the way of suspects,” she said.
“Wonder if Toppy’s board has more,” I said.
Lavender kept staring at the ideas on our cards. “How can we get a look at the suspects he’s collected?”
“No ideas at the moment.” I rubbed my eyes. “So, we know that somebody might do something worse than writing nasty stuff on the Internet, because he keeps threatening Thornwood’s Revenge. We know he’s probably local or visits here a lot, due to him raiding the Blue Creek Library archives and breaking into Thornwood. We know he wears tennis shoes, size ten or eleven, and he has computer skills, hacker level.”
“You think we can eliminate old guys because of the hacker stuff?” Lavender asked.
“Not every old guy is Toppy.”
“True.”
Somebody knocked on my bedroom door, making the cards on the corkboard jiggle. Three raps, fast and hard. Toppy. And he was annoyed by something.
I rolled backward as Lavender went to the door and opened it.
Toppy and Ms. Springfield were standing outside. Both of them were frowning. Ms. Springfield had her arms folded.
“You know, Max,” Toppy said, his voice that deadly quiet I usually associated with the moment before a big storm hits with screaming winds and exploding thunder and giant claws of white lightning, “I don’t have a personal e-mail address, so I can’t read messages from your school.”
I swallowed hard but my throat was dry, so I started to cough as a sense of absolute doom dropped over me.
Lavender backed into my chair so hard she stumbled and sat right down in my lap.
Her mother said, “But I have e-mail. I might not read them every day, but I do read them. Detention? And you didn’t tell us?”
Lavender and I both just sat there, looking hugely guilty, probably because we were totally, completely, hugely guilty.
Ms. Springfield jerked her thumb toward the door. “Let’s go, young lady. Right now.”
“You stay, Max,” Toppy told me, and I heard the sound of a month full of puppy movies in his angry voice.
11
DECEMBER 8
If I really could morph into a superhero, I’d want to be grounding-proof. For that, I’d just need some tiny but cool ability, like being able to erase bits of memory, so when I really screwed up, I could delete the little stretch marked “Bad Decision.”
But knowing my luck, Toppy would then grow a superpower that would allow him to retrieve the erased time, along with vital stats on every ridiculous thing I’d ever done ever in ridiculous history. For now, he wouldn’t even discuss how long my grounding would last, he was so mad about me not telling him about the detention.
I’m not mad, Max, his somber voice intoned in my mind. I’m disappointed.
I sat in the library at Blue Creek Middle School se
rving the first fifteen minutes of detention and using a gold glitter marker to write BREATHE on my armrests in different fonts.
I was already miserable, but not half as miserable as I was going to be, grounded all through Christmas, if that’s what Toppy decided.
I was just trying to help, my pathetic whine-voice argued back.
Toppy wasn’t much for talking back, even imaginary-in-my-head Toppy.
BREATHE. BREATHE. BREATHE. BREATHE.
Real-life Toppy was disappointed. And a little ticked off when he saw the corkboard Lavender and I made. And a little more ticked off when he found Mom’s and Mayor Chandler’s names in the discarded stack of cards on my desk, and his own name still tacked to the corkboard.
I’m going to tell you again, Max. This is police business. I’m not joking.
I knew he wasn’t kidding, but how could I stay out of something that was happening right in my own life, to my own grandfather? Plus, no matter how much I tried to ignore them, the hacker’s words kept playing like a text loop through my head, the part where he said I was a pawned-off disabled kid. I don’t know why I took on caring for a handicapped kid. #parentingfail.
I was pretty sure my grandfather hadn’t written any of that. I mean, I hoped he hadn’t written it. But I couldn’t shake the worry that he might feel that way, even if it was only every now and then, or when I did ridiculous stuff. Which seemed to be often, lately.
Breathe!!! my armrests reminded me. For good measure, I sketched a few on my left arm, then a wobbly Breathe on my right, too. My watch alarm beeped, and I weight-shifted in my chair, moving more onto my right hip. Frost etched the library window as I capped the glitter pen and stared out across the field bordering the school on one side, hating that it would be dark when I got to leave. Blue Creek Middle School was actually an ancient elementary school repurposed to hold just sixth, seventh, and eighth grade until the new building, which was a lot closer to my house, got finished.
I’d probably be all the way in high school before that ever happened.
The old cinderblock school sat on the edge of town, out past the closed tobacco factory. It was surrounded by playgrounds, the field I was looking at, and a small section of Blue Creek that liked to swell up to nearly a river during the rainy season. This time of year, it wasn’t much more than a few icy puddles trapped between a lot of rocks.
I got bored counting the puddles after a few minutes.
Because it was so close to the holidays, everybody was in a good mood and trying to behave, so there were only six students in the library. The four eighth-grade boys only had half-hour sentences. They sat quietly, pretending they were working but messing with their phones while the detention monitor, Ms. Kendrick, scored her English papers. She didn’t separate Lavender and me, so we sat close enough to slide notes to each other, even though we both had books about the Industrial Revolution opened to sections that looked like we were working on the super-boring Social Studies paper. Lavender had note cards poked into various sections of her book, but she pulled one out, wrote on it, and slid it across the table to me.
“This is sooooo tedious.”
I wrote, “Totally tedious. And it’s cold in here,” and slid the card back.
When it returned to me, my comment was lined out, and the new one said, “Totally, truly tedious. And I smell peppermint.”
“Totally, truly, tremendously tedious. Ms. Kendrick’s got a whole bag of green and red peppermints in her desk drawer.”
“Totally, truly, tremendously, terribly tedious. Can’t you get detention for eating in the library?”
I almost laughed out loud, then thought better of it. I lined through Lavender’s last comment and scribbled, “Totally, truly, tremendously, terribly, terrifically tedious. I’ve been thinking. One of the hacker’s tweets said the corruption in Blue Creek had to be ‘purged.’ So, maybe FIRE is the thing we should worry about most?”
I slid the card to Lavender, and after she read it, she tapped her pencil against her cheek. I watched as she started scribbling, and when I got the card back, she had dropped the T-word game and said, “Maybe. Good thinking. But it could also mean getting rid of people, like Toppy getting Mayor Chandler recalled—even though I still don’t think he should be a suspect. Or maybe the hacker getting Toppy fired or getting other people to do a recall vote on Mayor Chandler. Somebody’s already written a letter to the paper about convening a special election for that.”
“But who hates them that much? Maybe we should break into the police station Saturday and read Toppy’s board.”
I stopped writing because the smell of peppermint blasted into my nose.
Lavender closed her eyes, then bent over her book and scribbled like she was taking serious notes. I quickly sat forward in my chair and moved my hand on the page of my book, just enough to cover the last message Lavender had written. My heart thumped, and I imagined getting another detention, maybe one that would make me come to school on the holiday or some awful thing.
“I know you girls are working on your Social Studies project,” Ms. Kendrick said from right behind me.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said in a shaky, lying voice.
• • •
The boys were long gone, and Ms. Kendrick was finished with her test grading. She alternated between reading Pride and Prejudice with Zombies and giving us the work-on-your-project stare, and I didn’t want to look at the bloody skeleton face on her book cover, so I actually did make a few notes on my Urbanization and Immigration paper. Unfortunately, what I was reviewing talked about Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and how mean and nasty meat-packing plants were in the early 1900s, and that just made me think about zombies even more. Zombies eating rotten meat and chasing evil plant owners who exploited workers.
“Mom’s here,” Lavender said.
I popped out of my disgusting zombie fantasy and looked at the clock. Two hours, done! Yes!
But Ms. Springfield hadn’t come in the van, and Toppy wasn’t right behind her, and he hadn’t asked her to give me a message.
“Sorry, Max,” Ms. Springfield said as she took Lavender’s hand at the library door. “I’m sure he’s on the way.”
I didn’t even bother to sigh. Toppy being late to pick me up somewhere—that was normal. It just stunk worse than usual today.
Ms. Kendrick did my sighing for me, and she grumbled, “I’ll call him.”
I thought about crying as Lavender and Ms. Springfield left, then got irritated when Toppy didn’t answer Ms. Kendrick’s call.
“Texting him,” she informed me, and then I wanted to scream, because I didn’t think Toppy knew how to read a text.
My fists doubled, but I took a deep breath, listed the DC D-named superheroes, stopping with Doomsday, and got myself together before saying, “I’m going to go to the bathroom, okay?”
“That’s fine.” Ms. Kendrick worked her thumbs, no doubt unaware she was sending my grandfather a message he’d never find.
I motored out of the library before she could change her mind, but the restroom I could use was, like, halfway to another state. Really, it was all the way on the other side of the building from the eighth-grade wing, just off the sixth-grade wing and near the main office. I was used to having to travel to pee, so I plunged into the deserted hallways. Amazing that the whole place could still smell like sweat and stinky sneakers when absolutely nobody was around.
Golden light spilled through windows onto the cream-colored floor tile, with little streaks of red from the sinking sun. My chair’s whirring motor seemed to echo off the empty walls and closed lockers. I rolled down the main hall of the eighth-grade wing, and yeah. Absolutely. No one. Around.
Disturbing.
I never realized how much sounds echoed in the school building, because I hadn’t really been in them when nobody else was there. My eyes darted left and right, checking out each side hall I passed, until I turned in to the seventh-grade wing. My chair revved along, but I couldn’t go very fast, sinc
e I still hadn’t gotten to work on my speed options. My chair had a really slow maximum propulsion for safety, but I wanted to tinker with that, if Toppy didn’t reground me from the workshop over not telling him about my detention. I didn’t know if I could remove the governor that controlled the chair’s acceleration without destroying my entire control box, but if I could get more speed for times like this, that would be awesome, and maybe a little like having superpowers, only for real. I wouldn’t use the increased velocity and force to flatten thick-heads who refused to move out of my chair’s way. No. I totally would never do anything like that.
By the time I got to the bathroom and did my business and washed my hands, the sun had finished its slow dive. When I rolled back into the hallway, the world outside had turned gray with dark edges, and the halls had gone dark. I felt really grateful for the lights at the corners of the corridors. My hand pressed against the joystick, I took a deep breath, and—
Whoa.
I took my hand off the joystick and the chair hummed to a stop.
For a second I looked around, then sniffed the air.
Wow. That did not smell like sweat and stinky sneakers. Strong. Acrid. I coughed. Why did the main hall of my school stink like spray paint and Toppy’s lawnmower gas?
My fingers curled against my armrests as my mind supplied the image of an evil-looking owl flying slowly through dark school hallways, gripping a bramble.
Thornwood’s Revenge.
No way.
But I did smell gas. Was somebody in the school trying to make trouble? Or maybe a huge fire, like Lavender and I had passed notes about earlier?
“Somebody needs to purge the corruption in Blue Creek,” I whispered to myself as sweat formed on my forehead.
The dark silence around me seemed to come to life, like it could move on its own, like it was flowing around my chair and opening a giant mouth to swallow me whole. Then a light bounced across the corridor I was facing, way at the end where it T-boned into the sixth-grade wing.
