by Sarah Kapit
“Maybe I will,” Caroline said. But she did not seem very enthusiastic about the idea.
Lara straightened her back and picked up her pen again. No matter what Caroline thought, she was going to figure this out. She considered the options. Maybe she could find top secret information on his computer? Hacking into other people’s computers was one of Georgia’s favorite tactics.
The problem was, Lara had no hacking skills whatsoever. Well, okay. Lara wouldn’t need to hack anything. She could just sneak into Dad’s office and borrow his laptop for a bit.
That led to another problem: How could Lara get into Dad’s office without him noticing?
She considered sneaking in under cover of night, then dismissed the idea as too risky. Her parents’ bedroom was right next to Dad’s office, and Ima was a notoriously light sleeper. Lara did not relish the idea of having to explain what she was doing in the office at midnight. So, she’d have to sneak in during the daytime. She just needed the right distraction. Fortunately, she could recruit an accomplice.
Lara barged into Benny and Noah’s room. She kept her eyes alert to avoid tripping on the many thingamabobs spread out over Benny’s half of the floor. Lara had long since stopped bothering to track exactly what objects Benny had claimed for his projects. So long as he wasn’t trying to use any of her things, she didn’t care.
And there was Benny, tinkering with paper clips on his bed.
“If you’re here to help me with my machine, then you can’t,” Benny informed her. “The contest rules say that only the inventor can build it.”
“I am not here to help with your machine.” Lara, diplomatic as always, did not point out her lack of interest in such a thing. “I have something else for you to do.”
Benny didn’t look up from his contraption. “Why should I? You’re not the boss of me.”
Fortunately, Lara had anticipated this very response. “Because if you do me a tiny little favor, I’ll give you two of my hairclips for . . . for whatever you’re doing.”
“Deal,” he said instantly, bouncing off the bed with a flourish.
Lara fidgeted with the edge of her shirt. “I’m so glad we could come to an agreement. So, here’s the plan. I need you to create a distraction downstairs while I . . . do something important.”
There was no need to tell Benny exactly what she planned to do. That would just invite more questions.
Her brother’s grin appeared positively devilish. “If you’d told me that’s what it was, I would have done it for free.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. So do you have any ideas?”
“Yeah! Maybe a smoke grenade! I was reading on the Internet about how to make one, and—”
“No! No explosions or smoke or anything else that puts the house at risk of total destruction.”
For goodness’ sake, Lara added silently. Maybe Lara wasn’t exactly being the most responsible big sister at the moment, but she could at least set a few commonsense rules.
“But you said you wanted a distraction.”
“And I do. Just something a little less dangerous. Please. Come on,” Lara prodded. “You have to have some ideas.”
After Lara vetoed a few of Benny’s more outrageous suggestions, the plan was finalized. Lara headed for the hallway bathroom—her designated waiting spot for the mission. As she squatted by the sink, she tried to ignore the ache in her knees and the heartbeat hammering through her chest.
Right on cue, a loud crash sounded from downstairs. Benny’s loudest voice followed a moment later. “Da-aad!” he cried. The panic in his voice sounded very real even to Lara.
“Coming,” Dad said. Heavy footsteps thumped down the hall, past Lara’s hiding spot.
Lara slipped out of the bathroom. Dad was nowhere to be found, and he’d left the office door wide open.
Before she could talk herself out of it, Lara made straight for the laptop. Guessing his password was easy—nlcb777. Really, using the first initials of Lara and her siblings was quite uncreative.
Unfortunately, Dad’s desktop was a mess, with approximately a jillion icons crammed together. There was little order to any of it. A recipe for apple turnovers. The handbook for Pinecone Arts Academy parents. A whole lot of files with useless names like “doc3.”
“Come on,” Lara whispered. Surely there had to be something relevant in all of this.
Ah. There it was, right next to Spider Solitaire: a file called “termination letter.”
Lara emailed the document to herself quickly, then raced out of the office. Mission complete.
She let herself into Benny and Noah’s bedroom. She’d promised Benny hair clips in exchange for his help, and she intended to deliver. The clips sat in her pocket—a necessary sacrifice for Benny’s assistance.
The loud voices coming from downstairs told Lara that Benny’s distraction had not yet ended.
Lara sat on Noah’s desk chair and examined the room. Her older brother’s half of it was not particularly neat, but neither was it messy. A pennant for his high school was mounted on the wall surrounded by pictures of Noah and his friends. His physics textbook sat open on the desk, right next to a manual on auto repairs. Lara frowned. How horrifically dull! She couldn’t imagine why her brother would want to actually read that thing. Well, that wasn’t her concern.
Next, she considered Benny’s part of the room. Now that really was a total disaster. Lara marveled that he was even able to make it to his bed, what with the sprawling morass of his latest invention taking up most of the floor. She remembered him saying that it was a Rube Goldberg machine. Which apparently meant going to a whole lot of trouble to do something really easy like zipping a zipper. It all seemed kind of pointless, though she knew better than to say so.
Lara surveyed the hodgepodge of materials he’d gathered: a month’s worth of empty cereal boxes, shiny black marbles, several rolls of twine. He’d also borrowed—or just taken—buttons from Aunt Miriam’s sewing kit, Caroline’s empty acrylic tubes, and . . . wait. What was that silver oval on the far side of the floor?
She moved closer and her mouth dropped. Although the turquoise engravings had become blackened and gunky, she felt reasonably certain that this was Ima’s missing brooch. Somehow, Benny had found it. Now he was using it as part of his weird machine thing.
“You’re not supposed to see the machine until it’s done.”
Lara jumped at the sound of Benny’s voice. She’d been so distracted by this newest revelation that she hadn’t noticed him come in.
Her brother looked perfectly oblivious as always. Maybe he didn’t even realize that he was using Ima’s treasured heirloom like it was just another piece of junk. She should probably tell him. Or Ima.
Later, she decided. Right now there were other priorities. She smiled at him and handed over the hair clips. “Thanks for the help.”
“No problemo. If you ever need me to crash my car around again, tell me!”
It was silly, perhaps, but Lara didn’t fully release her breath until she returned to her room. Caroline wasn’t there. Good. If the stuff about Dad was really bad, then she wouldn’t have to tell her sister.
As her foot tapped out a nervous dance, Lara pulled up her email. Clicked on the message she’d sent from Dad’s computer. And started to read.
“Dear Mr. Finkel . . .” the letter began. Blah blah blah. That wasn’t important.
Then, about halfway down the page, she found it. A section called “reason for termination.” Lara read.
“Despite the high quality of your work, your consistent inability to meet deadlines and complete administrative tasks have caused problems . . .”
Lara stared. She couldn’t say she was surprised. Paperwork and deadlines definitely weren’t Dad-things. It all made sense now—Ima’s irritation, Dad’s embarrassment, all the secret-keeping. Even so, Lara couldn’t help bu
t feel as though she’d been kicked.
She had solved the mystery. But she had absolutely no idea how she—or anyone else—could fix it.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:
A CRIME MOST BLOODY
Caroline wanted the rest of the world to go away forever. Unfortunately, the world wasn’t inclined to go away just because she wished it so. And she did not quite have the energy to yell at Lara for her continued meddling into everyone else’s business, no matter how much the idea appealed to her.
As the next-best option, Caroline threw herself into research. She had promised Micah that she would help figure out how to get back at Marissa and she intended to do just that. If her stomach still clenched a bit at the thought, well, that was easy enough to ignore.
After all, she told herself, she and Micah were just going to do a harmless prank. It wasn’t as if they were going to do something really mean. Like calling Marissa useless.
Caroline gulped. She did not want to think about Dad and Ima, she did not.
Legs bouncing, Caroline stared intently at her phone. Like always, she was texting with Micah. However, their current topic of conversation was not one of Caroline’s favorites.
So, what should we do to Marissa? We have to get back at her.
Although Caroline had hoped that Micah would eventually drop his plan for revenge, he had not. It definitely didn’t help that Marissa had loudly referred to them as “losers” in the cafeteria today. When Micah snapped back at her, she’d shrugged and said that she didn’t realize Caroline understood the word loser. At which point Caroline barely managed to restrain her friend from punching Marissa in the face.
So she was pretty sure there was no talking Micah out of anything. Caroline bounce-walked over to her computer and entered “pranks for school” into Google. Maybe it was better if she, not Micah, decided on the prank. Surely she could find something that wasn’t too mean. They’d still give Marissa a small fright, of course, but they wouldn’t do any lasting damage in the process.
After watching three different videos on YouTube, Caroline had an idea. She reached for the phone again.
Let’s mess with her pens.
Like take a black pen and make it purple.
I found out how to do it on YouTube.
Micah wrote back almost immediately.
Cool idea.
Caroline beamed. She’d done it. Micah liked her idea, he was still her friend, and they weren’t going to do anything too mean to Marissa. Caroline thought she’d like it if someone made a boring black pen turn purple. Marissa probably wouldn’t, but even she couldn’t possibly get particularly angry at such a minor nuisance. Right?
Still, Caroline couldn’t entirely shake the lump that had taken up residence in her chest—the one that had nothing to do with Micah or Marissa or any of this. No, this particular lump had formed while she stood outside her parents’ bedroom, listening as everything fell apart in the worst way possible.
It was a blank-canvas-brain moment if ever there was one.
Don’t think about it, Caroline!
Her favorite therapist always said that whenever things got to be too much, she ought to find something relaxing to do. Something that would make her forget about her worries, if only for a brief moment. But what?
A ping from her phone tore Caroline away from her spiraling thoughts. Micah, it seemed, had a lot to say about the plan to avenge Helena the zebra. Okay, so not exactly the distraction she’d been looking for, but still a distraction.
I like it.
But I think I can make it even better.
Three dots popped up on the screen, signaling that Micah was still typing something. Caroline had begun to think of them as the dreaded dots of uncertainty. She leaped up from her desk chair. While she waited for the rest of Micah’s plan, she paced. Caroline counted six steps when a new message popped up.
Do you think Marissa is afraid of blood?
She frowned deeply. Although she’d started to get used to Micah’s more unusual ideas, she couldn’t begin to guess how blood connected to her pen-color-switching scheme. She quickly tapped out a response:
??
Truly, Caroline could have typed more than two question marks. She certainly had more than two questions. Did Micah’s plan involve hurting Marissa? How did he plan to do such a thing without getting caught? And, most importantly, was it at all possible to talk him out of it now? Or at least to back out of it?
A stream of new messages appeared soon enough.
Don’t worry
It’s not real blood
I saw some videos about pranks that use pens
One of them showed how to make a pen drip fake blood
Like the stuff for Halloween
My dad’s taking me to the Halloween store this weekend
Marissa’s going to get it all over her drawings
Bet she doesn’t know the difference between real blood and fake
Caroline allowed herself a tiny sigh. Knowing that they were not, in fact, scheming to physically injure Marissa came as a relief. Still, was it really fair to sabotage Marissa’s artwork like that?
Sure it is, came a voice from Caroline’s head. It’s exactly what she did to you.
Even so, Caroline’s hands shook a bit as she wrote out her response to Micah.
Okay.
She already knew she wasn’t going to sleep well tonight.
* * *
* * *
LOCATION: Breakfast table, 7:00 a.m.
EVENT: C. checked her phone a bajillion times (approximately speaking). Did not respond when I very nicely asked her to pass the milk.
QUESTION FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION: Why is my sister keeping secrets from me?
Lara had so wanted a distraction from her discoveries about Dad. For better or worse, she now had one. Caroline was most definitely up to something. The first clue was the way Caroline kept checking her phone over breakfast. Not that this was unusual. Ever since school had started, Caroline’s phone had practically been glued to her hand. Normally, she wore a bright grin as she tapped away at it, talking to this mysterious friend of hers. Today she still stared at the screen, but her responses were brief. The corner of her mouth twitched every time the phone pinged.
Very suspicious indeed.
The second clue was the way Caroline reacted to Dad and Ima—or rather, her total lack of reaction. Barely a dozen words passed between the parents throughout the entire morning, and six of them were Ima’s very cool announcement: “I’ll take the kids to school.”
Dad nodded. He didn’t even bother glancing up from his phone.
By instinct, Lara glanced over to Caroline so that they could have one of their wordless conversations. But she too kept her eyes fixed on her phone, seemingly unaware of everything else.
It all just irritated Lara. Was she the only one who cared about Dad and Ima and the catastrophe that was unfolding between them? What could possibly be so important to Caroline that she would just ignore the rest of them in favor of her phone?
She didn’t like it even a little bit.
When Ima finally dropped them off at school, Caroline didn’t bother saying goodbye to any of them before heading off who knows where. It was then that Lara made a decision. She was going to follow Caroline and figure out what, exactly, had so captured her sister’s attention.
Today, Lara’s first class was orchestra. The teacher didn’t seem to notice Lara much, thanks to her complete lack of musical talent. So she probably wouldn’t notice Lara slipping in late. That left plenty of time for her mission.
The real trick, she knew, would be to observe Caroline without Caroline observing her. Lara tried to imagine what Georgia Ketteridge would do, but the books were sadly lacking in detailed instructions on how to spy on your sis
ter.
She did her very best to look normal as she walked over to the main sixth-grade hallway. It teemed with kids laughing, talking, and in one case, practicing an energetic dance routine. On the plus side, all the people made it easy to avoid being spotted by Caroline. On the minus side, the people made it difficult to actually see Caroline.
Lara took in a deep breath as she wove through the masses. She narrowly avoided being kicked in the chest by a dancer who clearly had no manners. Lara clenched her jaw and scanned the sea of people. Where was Caroline?
Ah! There she was—standing at the corner of a corridor talking to a boy with thick glasses and an X-Men T-shirt. So this must be her new friend.
Lara narrowed her eyes at him. They were talking about something—or rather, the boy was talking excitedly, hands flying about. Maybe it wasn’t fair, but Lara couldn’t help but feel suspicious of the mysterious boy who had started sucking up all of her sister’s time and attention.
She had to get closer to them.
It was risky, she knew, but Lara pushed through more people. Soon, Caroline and her friend were only five feet away, then four. Caroline’s back faced Lara, so Caroline did not notice anything amiss. Probably.
Lara leaned up against a locker and tried her best to look like she wasn’t eavesdropping.
“. . . so I got a whole bunch of fake blood,” the boy was saying. “This is gonna be great.”
Lara’s first instinct was to shudder at the mention of blood—even fake blood. Her second was to frown. What did her sister need with fake blood? It was almost two months until Halloween! Exactly what kind of an influence did this boy have on Caroline?
She could not make out Caroline’s response. Annoying! Luckily, the boy had a habit of talking at a rather loud volume. Lara didn’t know how her sister could possibly stand it.
“We’ll do it during class today!” he said.
