by Susan Vaught
I could still hear it ringing in my head even after it stopped.
“Sit,” Springer told me. “Look innocent.”
Oh, no. If my smile looked like biting, my innocent would probably come off like axe murderer.
I looked at my hands. Then the ceiling.
Probably the best thing was to look anywhere but right at Mr. Chiba.
By the time he came back out, Springer and I were both sitting in the chairs where we had been before he mentioned—
Nope. Don’t think about Dad and court and hearings. You’ll look like a freaked-out axe murderer then and that won’t look innocent and don’t smile, don’t smile, don’t smile because you’ll look guilty—
Springer did innocent really, really well.
He nodded at Mr. Chiba, and Mr. Chiba nodded at him. When he turned his attention to me, I swallowed and held on to the chair so I wouldn’t start scratching my hands again. I strained so hard to keep from looking at the carpet squares that my eyes watered.
Then I got a nod, too.
Why did that feel like I won something? I mean not like, yay, I came in first in a trivia contest or a hard computer game—but at least like winning a hand of cards or a game of checkers.
I couldn’t take any more and glanced away, just in time to notice the sea of kids washing through the front doors, since it was nearly time for school to start. Jerkface was dead center in all the rampaging bodies, with Chris on one side and Trisha on the other. Jerkface and Chris gave me sneery looks. Trisha started to, but stopped. As they passed by the office, she turned her face away from me.
For some reason, that felt like a win, too.
At least until Mr. Chiba said, “Okay, you two. Head out, now. Time for class.”
Springer and I looked at each other, then out into the hall again, where Jerkface and the cockroaches were holding court. Chris and Ryker pretended to shoot baskets using crumpled paper, and people made rings with their arms. I could imagine Springer or me getting tossed in the air like those paper wads, so I didn’t move.
Springer didn’t move, either.
Mr. Chiba narrowed his eyes at us, then glanced into the hall over our heads. The corners of his mouth pulled down in a frown. “I see,” he said. “Well. How about I walk you to the library, and you can go to class from there, when you want to?”
“Thank you,” Springer said, but Mr. Chiba waved off his appreciation. He came out from behind the counter, then led us into the hall, locking the office door behind him.
“Let’s hurry,” he said. “I’ll have to sign in late students in about five minutes.”
“Yes, sir,” Springer said, and that got him a wink.
Mr. Chiba led the way to the library, and we hustled behind him, ignoring all the noise behind us. I was almost positive I heard some whistling and jeering, and maybe one Messy Jesse, but I didn’t look back.
We looped around the main hall, past the biggest set of bathrooms and the line of girls spilling out into the hallway, fixing hair and straightening clothes using mirrors in backpacks, reflections in the windows—whatever they could find. I figured guys did that sort of thing, too, only they could use the bathroom a lot faster, so they didn’t have lines too much of the time.
“We need bathroom parity,” I told Springer as we got to the library.
“What?” Mr. Chiba asked.
“The bathroom,” I said. “It doesn’t have enough stalls for all the girls who need to use it. We need more stalls because girls don’t pee as fast as boys. Since we have to sit down and all.”
Mr. Chiba stopped us at the first library table, an old round one with colored chairs. “Okay,” he said, and I noticed he was blushing. Springer was blushing, too. Neither of them looked at me, but seemed like they wanted to catalogue every book on the nearest shelf instead.
I looked at the shelf. The top line of books had twenty-three, but since books came in all sizes and shapes, there wouldn’t be twenty-three on the second line, and I probably shouldn’t start counting, because it would be hard to stop and I just couldn’t figure why talking about peeing made Springer and Mr. Chiba blush. What was wrong with talking about peeing and the fact girls took longer than boys, and needed more spaces to sit down?
Mr. Chiba patted Springer on the head. “Don’t let those hooligans bother you, you hear me? If they harass you at all, go straight to the nearest teacher. Those kids are on notice about their bullying, and so are their parents. One more episode from any of them, and they’ll face serious consequences.”
“Yes, sir,” Springer said. He had his phone out, fidgeting with it, but managed not to look at it, which was good, I guess, because sometimes older people reacted to phones like they did to me bringing up peeing.
I managed to keep my mouth shut until Mr. Chiba left, so he didn’t have to scratch behind his ear or anything. The second row of books on the shelf in front of us had thirty-two books. They were all yellow and nearly the same size, so it was hard to count them.
“What are you squinting at?” Springer asked.
“The yellow books.” I pointed, then put my hand down because I remembered Mom telling me once that pointing was rude. Jeez, people had a lot of rules that made no sense.
“Oh,” Springer said. “Yeah. It’s hard to count those because they all look alike. It’s the yellow, too.”
“Pee is yellow,” I told him.
This time, he didn’t blush. He just said, “It is.”
“Why was it wrong to talk about pee, back in the office?”
Springer looked down at his phone and started pushing buttons. “Body functions embarrass most people. Pee, and poop, and farting. All that stuff. They just don’t talk about it in front of older people like Mr. Chiba, or in . . . I don’t know, certain situations. It’s hard to explain.”
“So don’t mention body functions in conversation?” My eyes went back to the shelf, but I closed them so I wouldn’t count.
“It’s kinda like trespassing, only not illegal.” Springer sounded distracted. He used his fingers to resize something on his phone screen.
“You can trespass by talking about pee and poop?”
“Not really,” he mumbled, staring even harder at his phone screen. “It’s just kind of gross to talk about.”
“So don’t do it.” My brain started to itch.
“Unless we’re alone,” he said.
“How alone do we have to be?”
“It doesn’t matter, Jesse.” Springer sounded really, really worried about something. “Open your eyes and look at this.”
I opened my eyes.
He held out his phone, and I took it.
I found myself looking at a grid, or some kind of spreadsheet. It had names on it with black Xs beside them, all but two. Those two had red Xs.
Oh.
Oh, wow.
When I looked at Springer again, his eyes were wide. “You see it, right?”
“Yeah. This is way better than pee, anyway.” I went back to the phone, to the attendance record Springer had photographed. On the day the money went missing from my father’s classroom, two people had missed the staff meeting. The red Xs glowed like guilty brands right beside their names.
Out loud, I said, “Ms. Jorgensen and Coach Sedon. What does it mean? I mean, why were they—and if they were involved with the money going missing—”
I lowered the phone, feeling giddy and freaked out at the same time. “Ms. Jorgensen is supposed to be helping find the real thief, and Coach Sedon, too. All the teachers should be helping, right? Just like the police. Just like OBWIG. Us, I mean.”
I sort of had to pee all of a sudden, and wondered if I could say that, or if it would be trespassing right now, here in the library, where mostly only Springer could hear me. My cheeks got hot, partly because I was worried about Dad, and partly because the world had all these strange rules that didn’t make any sense to me, and I’d never get them all right.
“All the grown-ups should be helping, yeah,”
Springer said. “The fact that the head grown-up might be a problem—it’s bad, Jesse.”
I thought about Coach Sedon and Ms. Jorgensen arguing outside the senior high entrance the day before. Had they been fighting about the stolen money? Did one of them know the other was guilty? Were they in it together and they were just worried Springer and I were going to figure everything out and turn them in?
“My father’s in serious trouble, isn’t he?” I whispered, and not because I was trying to use a library voice.
“Maybe,” Springer whispered back. “But OBWIG can save him.”
“OBWIG,” I echoed.
“OBWIG forever,” Springer said, like it would be automatic now. “We have the initial people from the ledger to question. We have this information about the staff meeting, and I don’t need to jump to conclusions. We need a plan, Jesse.”
The bell for first period rang.
My stomach lurched, then clenched. I really did have to pee, trespassing or not.
Springer and I looked toward the librarian’s office at the same time.
Her door was shut.
I glanced at the clock above her door. In four minutes and twenty-six seconds, the final bell would ring, and Springer and I might be marked absent from social studies if our teacher noticed. Since we were supposed to study battles in the Revolutionary War and I hadn’t exactly done the weekend reading, that part didn’t bother me.
Springer motioned to me and pointed to a table in the back of the library, half hidden by a partition. It was the place people went to listen to audiobooks or watch stuff on the computer with sound, if they didn’t want to use headphones.
It was the perfect place to make a plan, at least until somebody told Mr. Chiba we weren’t in class and he called our parents and we both got locked in our rooms until we turned twenty.
I decided I could hold my pee, and trespass or go to the bathroom or whatever later.
We headed toward the table.
19
Friday, Three Days Earlier, Afternoon
I didn’t have to pee anymore, at least not at the moment, because I went when we left the library, before we stuffed our backpacks in our lockers. That was good because I kept coughing.
Springer and I stood in the dark spot under the junior high’s back stairs, neither of us moving. I wondered if people tromping up the concrete stairs could hear my heart thud-thud-thudding, or the way Springer’s throat sort of whistled when he breathed.
We had talked and sketched things and made lists for almost an hour, but in the end, the plan turned out simple enough: question the people on our list from the donation ledger, then question Coach Sedon and Ms. Jorgensen. Or, question as many of all of them as we could before we got yelled at or suspended or sent to alternative classes.
“Or killed,” I muttered, because if Coach Sedon and Ms. Jorgensen stole money and they were trying to blame Dad, they might kill us.
“People kill you if you find out about their crimes,” I told Springer when I realized he was staring at me.
As the crowd started to slow above our heads, he whispered, “I don’t think the library fund is enough money to kill for. And it smells like gym socks under here.”
“Worse,” I choked back. “Moldy old cheese. Covered with motor oil.”
He gagged.
“Shhhhh,” I told him.
He shhhhhed.
A few more kids went by. Jerkface and the cockroaches had probably already gone upstairs to the same math class we were about to miss, but I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t hear them in all the ruckus.
When no more footsteps echoed above our heads, I turned to Springer. “Do you have the paper?”
“It’s here.” He held up a bunch of papers, not just one.
We had gone to second-period computer science, and then I went to English while Springer went to health, and then we both went to lunch just to keep suspicion down.
Springer handed me one of the papers. “How does it look?” He held up a letter Ms. Jorgensen had sent out last week, something about not selling cookies to support Little League during school hours. It had her signature stamped on the bottom. The other paper was a plain, typed paragraph that read, Please excuse ____________ from class and have them report to the senior high office. It was signed, too, like Ms. Jorgensen had sent it.
Only . . .
“It kinda looks like a kid squiggled Ms. Jorgensen’s name,” I said.
Springer frowned. “Does it need to be more squiggly or less squiggly?”
“I don’t know. Maybe less shaky? And smaller?”
Springer crumpled up the first note and got down on his knees. He found a mostly not-disgusting spot on the grimy floor, a part where a little bit of light let us see the letters on the printed page, and he tried again with another copy.
Now I understood why he made so many, and I squinted at the result of his second try. “Better. Just, still smaller, or something.”
“You want to try?”
“No. It’d be awful if I did it.”
Springer handed me the rejected note and made another while I tore up the first one and crammed the pieces in my jeans pockets.
This time when Springer showed me the permission note, the signature looked passable. We printed in Josh Sharp in the blank, then made one each for Maleka Keston and Nancy Newsom.
“They aren’t perfect,” Springer admitted, staring at the three notes. “But maybe the teachers won’t look too close.”
He picked up the letters and handed them to me. Then he dusted off the knees of his jeans, but the black streaks from the floor stayed.
I folded the letters and put them in my pocket, feeling . . . weird, somehow. I wasn’t scared, because I knew I needed to do this for Dad. Really, that I had to do it, especially now that I knew that the principal and one of the other teachers might want him to look like a thief. I didn’t really even feel nervous. More worried, and—
Yeah. Guilty. That was new.
I blinked at Springer, who had stepped back into the stinky darkness under the steps to get his clothes and backpack straight. “You know, we’ll probably get detention, or maybe suspended just for going over there again. I can get to the senior high by myself. You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, I do,” Springer said, like it was no big deal.
I thought about asking him why, but before I could say anything, he added, “Of course I have to do this with you. You’d go with me if it were my dad in trouble, right?”
“Yes,” I said. Then, “Well, maybe if it were your mom. I don’t think your dad is very nice to you.”
“He—Dad’s okay. He’s just really stressed out about money, and he works too much.” Springer stayed in the shadows where I couldn’t totally see his expression, but his voice sounded normal-Springery, like that was all the truth.
“But he’s mean to you,” I said, “like Jerkface and the cockroaches are mean to me. To us.”
“They’re mean because they’re jerkfaces and cockroaches.” Springer eased out of the shadows, and I could see he was actually smiling. “Dad’s not really mean at all. Just sort of stern. He pushes me to get ahead in life so I never have the problems he’s had.”
I really didn’t see how stern and pushy didn’t add up to mean, but if Springer thought it was different, I was okay with that. Sort of. But I still didn’t want to get him in trouble. “I’ll feel bad if you get kicked out of school and murdered by your parents for trying to help me.”
“They won’t murder me.” He smiled even wider. “Maybe take my phone and holler a lot, but it’ll be okay.”
“Will you run away to the clubhouse if it gets too bad?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, then.” I glanced at the underside of the stairs. The part I could see had maybe a million wads of gum stuck on it. Ew. “Let’s go.”
We eased out from the cover of the stairs and hustled down the hall, then hurried straight out the back door we knew was one of the four des
ignated daytime exits that wouldn’t set off an alarm in the office.
“Slow,” Springer reminded me, and I eased my speed a little. We kept to the sidewalk, not trying to hide, since that would just make teachers notice us more, or at least that was Springer’s opinion during our big planning session in the library.
“Slow,” he repeated. “But with purpose.”
Slow, with purpose. Yeah.
“Slow-with-purpose,” I said out loud.
“That’s it. Kinda like a marching song.”
“Slow-with-pur-pose,” I said, like I was military-marching. “Slow-with-pur-pose.”
“Don’t really march, Jesse. That’ll make people look at us.”
“We’re almost to the back door, though.”
“Teachers would still notice somebody marching.”
“Fiiiine.”
It was last period at the senior high, since the older kids came to school earlier than we did and left earlier, too. Luckily, the teachers tended to leave the back doors propped open late in the day, especially this time of year when it was so hot in the afternoon. That worked in our favor just exactly like I thought it would when we planned at the library table, and as we got into one of the senior high halls, I had that “win” feeling again so strong I let out a little whoop.
“Shhhhhhh,” Springer said immediately. “No whooping. No marching. Nothing to make people look. OBWIG is cool. OBWIG is barely visible.”
“OBWIG forever,” I said, and then I hushed for a fraction of a second, and then I whispered, “Okay, here’s the tricky part.”
Springer nodded as I pulled a note out of my pocket. It turned out to be the one with Josh Sharp’s name on it. Sweat broke out in a line on Springer’s forehead, but when he looked up, his jaw had that tight, determined set I had learned meant he was ready to do something even if it was scary.
“I can go first,” I told him. “If I blow it, you could run back to the junior high and—”
He shook his head. Turned away from me and walked to the first classroom and knocked, just like we had planned. I hurried to the nearest locker and tried to look busy.
A teacher answered, a man I didn’t know.
